Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [19]
If you got a heart, and you come on something like that in a thick smoke, ain’t nothing else in this universe going to be real. There wasn’t no more Army of the World; there wasn’t no more peace everlasting; there wasn’t no more LuVerne, Indiana; there wasn’t no more time machine.
There was just Poritsky and me and the hole.
If I was ever to have a child, this is what I’d tell it: “Child,” I’d say, “don’t never mess with time. Keep now now and then then. And if you ever get lost in thick smoke, child, set still till it clears. Set still till you can see where you are and where you been and where you’re going, child.”
I’d shake that child. “Child, you hear?” I’d say. “You listen to what your Daddy says. He know.”
Ain’t never going to see no sweet child of mine, I expect. But I aims to feel one, smell one, and hear one. Damn if I don’t.
You could see where the four poor nineteen-eighteen souls had been crawling around and around in that hole, like snails crawling around in a fishbowl. There was a track leading from each one—the live ones and the dead ones.
A shell lit in the hole and blowed up.
When the mud fell back down, there wasn’t but one man left alive.
He turned over from his belly to his back, and he let his arms flop out. It was like he was offering his soft parts to nineteen-eighteen, so it could kill him easy, if it wanted to kill him so bad.
And then he seen us.
He wasn’t surprised to see us hanging there in air over him. Wasn’t nothing could surprise him no more. Real slow and clumsy, he dug his rifle out of the mud and aimed it at us. He smiled like he knowed who we was, like he knowed he couldn’t hurt us none, like it was all a big joke.
There wasn’t no way a bullet could get through that rifle bore, it was so clogged with mud. The rifle blowed up.
That didn’t surprise him none, neither, didn’t even seem to hurt. That smile he give us, the smile about the joke, was still there when he laid back and died.
The nineteen-eighteen barrage stopped.
Somebody blowed a whistle from way far off.
“What you crying about, soldier?” Poritsky said.
“I didn’t know I was, Captain,” I said. My skin felt extra-tight, and my eyes was hot, but I didn’t know I was crying.
“You was and you are,” he said.
Then I really did cry. I knowed for sure I was just sixteen, knowed I wasn’t nothing but a over-growed baby. I set down, and I swore I wouldn’t get up again, even if the captain kicked my head off.
“There they go!” Poritsky hollered, real wild. “Look, soldier, look! Americans!” He fired his pistol off like it was the Fourth of July. “Look!”
I done it.
Looked like a million men crossing the beam of the time machine. They’d come from nothing on one side, melt away to nothing on the other. Their eyes was dead. They put one foot in front of the other like somebody’d wound ’em up.
All of a sudden, Captain Poritsky hauled me up like I didn’t weigh nothing. “Come on, soldier—we’re going with ’em!” he hollered.
That crazy man drug me right through that line of flares.
I screamed and I cried and I bit him. But it was too late.
There wasn’t no flares no more.
There wasn’t nothing but nineteen-eighteen all around.
I was in nineteen-eighteen for good.
And then another barrage hit. And it was steel and high-explosive, and I was flesh, and then was then, and steel and flesh was all balled up together.
I woke up here.
“What year is it?” I asked ’em.
“Nineteen-eighteen, soldier,” they said.
“Where am I?” I asked ’em.
They told me I was in a cathedral that’d been turned into a hospital. Wish I could see it. I can hear from the echoes how high and grand it is.
I ain’t no hero.
With heroes all around me here, I don’t embroider my record none. I never bayoneted or shot nobody, never throwed a grenade, never even seen a German, unless them was Germans in that terrible hole.
They should ought to have special hospitals for heroes, so heroes wouldn’t have to lay next to the likes of me.
When somebody new comes around to hear me talk, I always tell ’em right off I wasn’t in