Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [40]
As the others busied themselves with preparing the food, he watched the barn, for the little boy had come out of his house, and was moving toward the barn as swiftly as his crutches would carry him. He disappeared into the barn for an agonizing long time. Paul heard his faint shriek, and saw him come to the door, carrying the soft white pelt with him. He rubbed it against his cheek, and then sank to the doorsill to bury his face in the fur and sob his heart out.
Paul looked away, and did not look again. The other two did not see the child, and Paul did not tell them about him. When the three sat down to supper, one boy began grace: “Our Father, we thank thee for this food thou hast set before us…”
Heading for the American lines, moving casually from one village to the next, Paul’s companions accumulated a sizeable quantity of German treasure. For some reason, all that Paul brought home was one rusty and badly bent Luftwaffe saber.
Just You and Me, Sammy
I.
This story is about soldiers, but it isn’t exactly a war story. The war was over when it all happened, so I guess that makes it a murder story. No mystery, just murder.
My name is Sam Kleinhans. It’s a German name, and, I’m sorry to say, my father was mixed up in the German-American Bund in New Jersey for a while before the war. When he found out what it was all about, he got out in a hurry. But a lot of the people in our neighborhood went for the Bund in a big way. A couple of families on our street, I remember, got so excited about what Hitler was doing in the Fatherland, they sold everything they had, and went back to Germany to live.
Some of their kids were just about my age, and, when the U.S. got into the war and I went overseas as a rifleman, I wondered if I might not wind up shooting at some of my old playmates. I don’t think I did. I found out afterwards that most of the Bund kids who took out German citizenship wound up as riflemen on the Russian front. A few got into small-time intelligence work, trying to mix in with American troops without being noticed, but not many. The Germans didn’t trust them worth a damn—or at least that’s what one of our former neighbors told Father in a letter asking him for a CARE parcel. The same man said he’d do anything to get back to the States, and I imagine they all feel that way.
Being so close to them and the Bund monkey business made me pretty self-conscious about my German ancestry when we finally got into the war. I must have seemed like quite a jerk to a lot of the guys, sounding off the way I did about loyalty, fighting for a cause, and all that. Not that the other guys in the Army didn’t believe in those things—it’s just that it wasn’t fashionable to talk about them. Not in World War II.
Thinking back on it, I know I was corny. I remember what I said on the morning of May eighth, for instance, the day the war with Germany ended. “Isn’t it glorious!” I said.
“Ain’t what glorious?” said Private George Fisher, raising one eyebrow, as though he’d said something pretty deep. He was scratching his back on a strand of barbed-wire, thinking about something else, I guess. Food and cigarettes, probably, and maybe even women.
It wasn’t very smart to be seen talking with George anymore. He didn’t have any friends left in camp, and anybody who tried to be buddies with him was likely to wind up in the same lonely spot. All of us were milling around, and George and I just happened—I thought then—to come together there by the gate.
The Germans had made him head American in our prison camp. They said it was because he could speak German. At any rate, he made a good thing out of it. He was a lot fatter than the rest of us—so he probably was thinking about women. Nobody else had mentioned the subject since about a month after we’d been captured. Everybody but George had been living on potatoes for eight months, so, like I said, the subject of women was about as popular as the subject of raising orchids or playing the zither.
The way I felt then, if Betty Grable had showed up and said she