Here is what the message said:
PLEASE LEAVE
THIS LATRINE AS
TIDY AS YOU
FOUND IT!
Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over.
An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, ‘There they go, there they go.’ He meant his brains.
That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.
Billy reeled away from his vision of Hell. He passed three Englishmen who were watching the excrement festival from a distance. They were catatonic with disgust.
‘Button your pants!’ said one as Billy went by.
So Billy buttoned his pants. He came to the door of the little hospital by accident. He went through the door,, and found himself honeymooning again, going from the bathroom back to bed with his bride on Cape Ann.
‘I missed you’ said Valencia.
‘I missed you,’ said Billy Pilgrim.
Billy and Valencia went to sleep nestled like spoons, and Billy traveled in time back to the train ride he had taken in 194 4 from maneuvers in South Carolina to his father’s funeral in Ilium. He hadn’t seen Europe or combat yet. This was still in the days of steam locomotives.
Billy had to change trains a lot. All the trains were slow. The coaches stunk of coal smoke and rationed tobacco and rationed booze and the farts of people eating wartime food. The upholstery of the iron seats was bristly, and Billy couldn’t sleep much. He got to sleep soundly when he was only three hours from Ilium, with his legs splayed toward the entrance of the busy dining car.
The porter woke him up when the train reached Ilium. Billy staggered off with his duffel bag, and then he stood on the station platform next to the porter, trying to wake up.
‘Have a good nap, did you?’ said the porter.
‘Yes,’ said Billy.
‘Man,’ said the porter, ‘you sure had a hard-on.’
At three in the morning on Bill’s morphine night in prison, a new patient was carried into the hospital by two lusty Englishmen. He was tiny. He was Paul Lazzaro, the polka-dotted car thief from Cicero, Illinois. He had been caught stealing cigarettes from under the pillow of an Englishman. The Englishman, half asleep, had broken Lazzaro’s right arm and knocked him unconscious.
The Englishman who had done this was helping to carry Lazzaro in now. He had fiery red hair and no eyebrows. He had been Cinderella’s Blue Fairy Godmother in the play. Now he supported his half of Lazzaro with one hand while he closed the door behind himself with the other. ‘Doesn’t weigh as much as a chicken,’ he said.
The Englishman with Lazzaro’s feet was the colonel who had given Billy his knock-out shot.
The Blue Fairy Godmother was embarrassed, and angry, too. ‘If I’d known I was fighting a chicken,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have fought so hard.’
‘Um.’
The Blue Fairy Godmother spoke frankly about how disgusting all the Americans were. ‘Weak, smelly, self-pitying-a pack of sniveling, dirty, thieving bastards,’ he said. ‘They’re worse than the bleeding Russians.’
‘Do seem a scruffy lot,’ the colonel agreed.
A German major came in now. He considered the Englishmen as close friends. He visited them nearly every day, played games with them, lectured to them on German history, played their piano, gave them lessons in conversational German. He told them often that, if it weren’t for their civilized company, he would go mad. His English was splendid.
He was apologetic about the Englishmen’s having to put up with the American enlisted men. He promised them that they would not be inconvenienced for more than a day or two, that the Americans would soon be shipped to Dresden as contract labor. He had a monograph with him, published by the German Association of Prison Officials. It was a report on the behavior in Germany of American enlisted men as prisoners of war. It was written by a former American who had risen high in the German Ministry of Propaganda. His name was Howard W. Campbell, Jr. He would later hang himself while awaiting trial as a war criminal.
So it goes.
While the British colonel set Lazzaro’s broken arm and mixed plaster for the cast, the German major translated out loud passages from Howard W. Campbell, Jr.‘s monograph. Campbell had been a fairly well-known playwright at one time. His opening line was this one:
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t You rich? ‘ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand-glued to a lollipop stick and, flying from the cash register.
The author of the monograph, a native of Schenectady, New York, was said by some to have had the highest I.Q. of all the war criminals who were made to face a death by hanging. So it goes.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.
Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German prisons ceases to be a mystery.
Howard W. Cambell, Jr., now discussed the uniform of the American enlisted in the Second World War: Every other army in history, prosperous or not, has attempted to clothe even its lowliest soldiers so as to make them impressive to themselves and others as stylish experts in drinking and copulation and looting and sudden death. The American Army, however, sends its enlisted men out to fight and die in a modified business suit quite evidently made for another man, a sterilized but unpressed gift from a nose-holding charity which passes out clothing to drunks in the slums.
When a dashingly-clad officer addresses such a frumpishly dressed bum, he scolds him, as an officer in an army must. But the officer’s contempt is not, as in ‘other armies, avuncular theatricality. It is a genuine expression of hatred for the poor, who have no one to blame for their misery but themselves.
A prison administrator dealing with captured American enlisted men for the first time should be warned: Expect no brotherly love, even between brothers. There will be no cohesion between the individuals. Each will be a sulky child who often wishes he were dead
Campbell told what the German experience with captured American enlisted men had been. They were known everywhere to be the most self-pitying, least fraternal and dirtiest of all prisoners of war, said Campbell. They were incapable of concerted action on their own behalf. They despised any leader from among their own number, refused to follow or even listen to him, on the grounds that he was no better than they were, that he should stop putting on airs.
And so on. Billy Pilgrim went to sleep, woke up as a widower in his empty home in Ilium. His daughter Barbara was reproaching him for writing ridiculous letters to the newspapers.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Barbara inquired. It was 1968 again.
‘Of course.’ He had been dozing.
‘If you’re going to act like a child, maybe we’ll just have to treat you like a child.’
‘That isn’t what happens next,’ said Billy.
‘We’ll see what happens next.’ Big Barbara now embraced herself. ‘It’s awfully cold in here. Is the heat on?’
‘The heat? ‘
‘The furnace-the thing in the basement, the thing that makes hot air that comes out of these registers. I don’t think it’s working.’