Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [17]
“Men,” Poritsky said, “I hate to tell soldiers not to be ascared. I hate to tell ’em there ain’t nothing to be ascared of. It’s an insult to ’em. But the scientists tell me nineteen-eighteen can’t do nothing to us, and we can’t do nothing to nineteen-eighteen. We’ll be ghosts to them, and they’ll be ghosts to us. We’ll be walking through them and they’ll be walking through us like we was all smoke.”
I blowed across the muzzle of my rifle. I didn’t get a tune out of it. Good thing I didn’t, because it would of broke up the meeting.
“Men,” Poritsky said, “I just wish you could take your chances back in nineteen-eighteen, take your chances with the worst they could throw at you. Them as lived through it would be soldiers in the finest sense of the word.”
Nobody argued with him.
“Men,” that great military scientist said, “I reckon you can imagine the effect on our enemy when he sees the battlefield crawling with all them ghosts from nineteen-eighteen. He ain’t going to know what to shoot at.” Poritsky busted out laughing, and it took him a while to pull hisself back together. “Men,” he said, “we’ll be creeping through them ghosts. When we reach the enemy, make him wish to God we was ghosts, too—make him sorry he was ever born.”
This enemy he was talking about wasn’t nothing but a line of bamboo poles with rags tied to ’em, about half a mile away. You wouldn’t believe a man could hate bamboo and rags the way Poritsky done.
“Men,” Poritsky said, “if anybody’s thinking of going A.W.O.L., here’s your golden opportunity. All you got to do is cross one of them lines of flares, go through the edge of the beam. You’ll disappear into nineteen-eighteen for real—won’t be nothing ghostly about it. And the M.P. ain’t been born who’s crazy enough to go after you, on account of can’t nobody who ever crosses over come back.”
I cleaned between my front teeth with my rifle sight. I figured out all by myself that a professional soldier was happiest when he could bite somebody. I knowed I wasn’t never going to reach them heights.
“Men,” Poritsky said, “the mission of this here time-screen company ain’t no different from the mission of ever company since time began. The mission of this here time-screen company is to kill! Any questions?”
We’d all done had the Articles of War read to us. We all knowed asking sensible questions was worse’n killing your own mother with a axe. So there wasn’t no questions. Don’t expect there ever has been.
“Lock and load,” Poritsky said.
We done it.
“Fix bayonets,” Poritsky said.
We done it.
“Shall we go, girls?” Poritsky said.
Oh, that man knowed his psychology backwards and forwards. I expect that’s the big difference between officers and enlisted men. Calling us girls instead of boys, when we was really boys, just made us so mad we couldn’t hardly see straight.
We was going out and tear up bamboo and rags till there wasn’t going to be no more fishpoles or crazy quilts for centuries.
Being in the beam of that there time machine was a cross between flu, wearing bifocals that was made for somebody else who couldn’t see good, and being inside a guitar. Until they improves it, it ain’t never going to be safe or popular.
We didn’t see no folks from nineteen-eighteen at first. All we seen was their holes and barbed-wire, where there wasn’t no holes and barbed-wire no more. We could walk over them holes like they had glass roofs over ’em. We could walk through that barbed-wire without getting our pants tore. They wasn’t ours—they was nineteen-eighteen’s.
There was thousands of soldiers watching us, folks from ever country there was.
The show we put on for ’em was just pitiful.
That time-machine beam made us sick to our stomachs and half blind. We was supposed to whoop it up and holler to show how professional we was. But we got out there between them flares, and didn’t hardly nobody let out a peep for fear they’d throw up. We was supposed to advance aggressively, only we couldn’t tell what belonged to us, and