At each road intersection Billy’s group was joined by more Americans with their hands on top of their haloed heads. Billy had smiled for them all. They were moving like water, downhill all the time, and they flowed at last to a main highway on a valley’s floor. Through the valley flowed a Mississippi of humiliated Americans. Tens of thousands of Americans shuffled eastward, their hands clasped on top of their heads. They sighed and groaned.
Billy and his group joined the river of humiliation, and the late afternoon sun came out from the clouds. The Americans didn’t have the road to themselves. The west-bound lane boiled and boomed with vehicles which were rushing German reserves to the front. The reserves were violent, windburned, bristly men. They had teeth like piano keys.
They were festooned with machine-gun belts, smoked cigars, and guzzled booze. They took wolfish bites from sausages, patted their horny palms with potato-masher grenades.
One soldier in black was having a drunk herd’s picnic all by himself on top of a tank. He spit on the Americans. The spit hit Roland Weary’s shoulder, gave Weary a fourragi?re of snot and blutwurst and tobacco juice, and Schnapps.
Billy found the afternoon stingingly exciting. There was so much to see-dragon’s teeth, killing machine, corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory. So it goes.
Bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down, Billy beamed lovingly at a bright lavender farmhouse that had been spattered with machine-gun bullets. Standing in its cock-eyed doorway was a German colonel. With him was his unpainted whore.
Billy crashed into Weary’s shoulder, and Weary cried out sobbingly. ‘Walk right! Walk right!’
They were climbing a gentle rise now. When they reached the top, they weren’t in Luxembourg any more. They were in Germany.
A motion-picture camera was set up at the border-to record the fabulous victory. Two civilians in bearskin coats were leaning on the camera when Billy and Weary came by. They had run out of film hours ago.
One of them singled out Billy’s face for a moment, then focused at infinity again. There was a tiny plume of smoke at infinity. There was a battle there. People were dying there. So it goes.
And the sun went down, and Billy found himself bobbing in place in a railroad yard. There were rows and rows of boxcars waiting. They had brought reserves to the front. Now they were going to take prisoners into Germany’s interior.
Flashlight beams danced crazily.
The Germans sorted out the prisoners according to rank. They put sergeants with sergeants, majors with majors, and so on. A squad of full colonels was halted near Billy. One of them had double pneumonia. He had a high fever and vertigo. As the railroad yard dipped and swooped around the colonel, he tried to hold himself steady by staring into Billy’s eyes.
The colonel coughed and coughed, and then he said to Billy, ‘You one of my boys?’ This was a man who had lost an entire regiment, about forty-five hundred men-a lot of them children, actually. Billy didn’t reply. The question made no sense.
‘What was your outfit?’ said the colonel. He coughed and coughed. Every time he inhaled his lungs rattled like greasy paper bags.
Billy couldn’t remember the outfit he was from.
‘You from the Four-fifty-first?’
‘Four-fifty-first what?’ said Billy.
There was a silence. ‘Infantry regiment,’ said the colonel at last.
‘Oh,’ said Billy Pilgrim.
There was another long silence, with the colonel dying and dying, drowning where he stood. And then he cited out wetly, ‘It’s me, boys! It’s Wild Bob!’ That is what he had always wanted his troops to call him: ‘Wild Bob.’
None of the people who could hear him were actually from his regiment, except for Roland Weary, and Weary wasn’t listening. All Weary could think of was the agony in his own feet.
But the colonel imagined that he was addressing his beloved troops for the last time, and he told them that they had nothing to be ashamed of, that there were dead Germans all over the battlefield who wished to God that they had never heard of the Four-fifty-first. He said that after the war he was going to have a regimental reunion in his home town, which was Cody, Wyoming. He was going to barbecue whole steers.
He said all this while staring into Billy’s eyes. He made the inside of poor Bill’s skull echo with balderdash. ‘God be with you, boys!’ he said, and that echoed and echoed. And then he said. ‘If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!’ I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare.
Billy Pilgrim was packed into a boxcar with many other privates. He and Roland Weary were separated. Weary was packed into another car in the same train.
There were narrow ventilators at the comers of the car, under the eaves. Billy stood by one of these, and, as the crowd pressed against him, he climbed part way up a diagonal comer brace to make more room. ‘Ms placed his eyes on a level with the ventilator, so he could see another train about ten yards away.
Germans were writing on the cars with blue chalk-the number of persons in each car, their rank, their nationality, the date on which they had been put aboard. Other Germans were securing the hasps on the car doors with wire and spikes and other trackside trash. Billy could hear somebody writing on his car, too, but he couldn’t see who was doing it.
Most of the privates on Billy’s car were very young-at the end of childhood. But crammed into the comer with Billy was a former hobo who was forty years old.
‘I been hungrier than this,’ the hobo told Billy. ‘I been m worse places than this. This ain’t so bad.’
A man in a boxcar across the way called out through the ventilator that a man. had just died in there. So it goes. There were four guards who heard him. They weren’t excited by the news.
‘Yo, yo,’ said one, nodding dreamily. ‘Yo, yo.’
And the guards didn’t open the car with the dead man in it. They opened the next car instead, and Billy Pilgrim was enchanted by what was in there. It was like heaven. There was candlelight, and there were bunks with quilts and blankets heaped on them. There was a cannonball stove with a steaming coffeepot on top. There was a table with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and a sausage on it. There were four bowls of soup.
There were pictures of castles and lakes and pretty girls on the walls. This was the rolling home of the railroad guards, men whose business it was to be forever guarding freight rolling from here to there. The four guards went inside and closed the door.
A little while later they came out smoking cigars, talking contentedly in the mellow lower register of the German language. One of them saw Billy’s face at the ventilator. He wagged a finger at him in affectionate warning, telling him to be a good boy.
The Americans across the way told the guards again about the dead man on their car. The guards got a stretcher out of their own cozy car, opened the dead man’s car and went inside. The dead man’s car wasn’t crowded at all. There were just six live colonels in there-and one dead one.
The Germans carried the corpse out. The corpse was Wild Bob. So it goes.
During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle to one another, and then to move. The locomotive and the last car of each train were marked with a striped banner of orange and black, indicating that the train was not fair game for airplanes that it was carrying prisoners of war.
The war was nearly over. The locomotives began to move east in late December. The war would end in May. German prisons everywhere were absolutely full, and there was no longer any food for the prisoners to eat, and no longer any fuel to keep them warm. And yet-here came more prisoners.
Billy Pilgrim’s train, the longest train of all, did not move for two days.
‘This ain’t bad,’ the hobo told Billy on the second day. ‘This ain’t nothing at all.’
Billy looked out through the ventilator. The railroad yard was a desert now, except for a hospital train marked with red crosses-on a siding far, far away. Its locomotive whistled. The locomotive of Billy Pilgrim’s train whistled back. They were saying, ‘Hello.’
Even though Billy’s train wasn’t moving., its boxcars were kept locked tight. Nobody was to get off until the final destination. To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of blackbread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.