Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [18]
If I had of been a observer, I would of said we was comical.
I was the first man in the first squad of the first platoon of that time-screen company, and wasn’t but one man in front of me. He was our noble captain.
He only hollered one thing at his fearless troops, and I thought he hollered that to make us even more bloodthirsty than we was. “So long, Boy Scouts!” he hollered. “Write your mothers regular, and wipe your noses when they runs!”
Then he bent over, and he run off across no man’s land as fast as he could go.
I done my best to stick with him, for the honor of the enlisted men. We was both falling down and getting up like a couple of drunks, just beating ourselves to pieces on that battlefield.
He never looked around to see how me and the rest was doing. I thought he didn’t want nobody to see how green he was. I kept trying to tell him we’d done left everbody way behind, but the race took ever bit of breath I had.
When he headed off to one side, towards a line of flares, I figured he wanted to get in the smoke where folks couldn’t see him, so he could get sick in private.
I had just fell into the smoke after him when a barrage from nineteen-eighteen hit.
That poor old world, she rocked and rolled, she spit and tore, she boiled and burned. Dirt and steel from nineteen-eighteen flew through Poritsky and me ever which way.
“Get up!” Poritsky hollered at me. “That’s nineteen-eighteen! Can’t hurt you none!”
“It would if it could!” I hollered back at him.
He made like he was going to kick me in the head. “Get up, soldier!” he said.
I done it.
“Get back with the rest of them Boy Scouts,” he said. He pointed through a hole in the smoke, pointed back to where we’d come from. I seen the rest of the company was showing them thousands of observers how experts laid down and quivered. “That’s where you belong,” Poritsky said. “This here’s my show, and it’s a solo.”
“Beg pardon?” I said. I turned my head to follow a nineteen-eighteen boulder that had just flew through both our heads.
“Look at me!” he hollered.
I done it.
“Here’s where we separates the men from the boys, soldier,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Can’t hardly nobody run as fast as you can.”
“I ain’t talking about running,” he said. “I’m talking about fighting!” Oh, it was a crazy conversation. Nineteen-eighteen tracers had started going through us.
I thought he was talking about fighting bamboo and rags. “Ain’t nobody feeling very good, Captain, but I expect we’ll win,” I said.
“I mean I’m going through these here flares to nineteen-eighteen!” he hollered. “Ain’t nobody else man enough to do that. Now, get the hell out of here!”
I seen he wasn’t fooling a bit. He really did think that’d be grand, if he could wave a flag and stop a bullet, even if it was in some war that’d been over for a hundred years or more. He wanted to get in his lick, even if the ink on the peace treaties was so faded you couldn’t hardly read them no more.
“Captain,” I said to him, “I ain’t nothing but a enlisted man, and enlisted men ain’t even supposed to hint. But Captain,” I said, “I don’t think that makes good sense.”
“I was born to fight!” he hollered. “I’m rusting out inside!”
“Captain,” I said, “everthing there is to fight for has already done been won. We got peace, we got freedom, everbody everwhere is like brothers, everbody got nice houses and chicken ever Sunday.”
He didn’t hear me. He was walking towards the line of flares, towards the edge of the time-machine beam, where the smoke from the flares was thickest.
He stopped just before he got into nineteen-eighteen forever. He looked down at something, and I thought maybe he’d done found a bird’s nest or a daisy in no man’s land.
What he’d found wasn’t neither. I went up to him and seen he was standing over a nineteen-eighteen shell hole, just like he was hanging in air.
There was two dead men in that sorry hole, two live ones, and mud. I knowed that two was dead, on account of one didn’t have