God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [21]
Eliot led a platoon from his company in an assault on the building. His customary weapon was a Thompson submachinegun. But he went in with a rifle and fixed bayonet this time, because of the danger of shooting one of his own men in the smoke. He had never stuck a bayonet into anybody before, not in years of carnage.
He pitched a grenade into a window. When it went off, Captain Rosewater went through the window himself, found himself standing in a sea of very still smoke whose undulating surface was level with his eyes. He tilted his head back to keep his nose in air. He could hear Germans, but he couldn't see them.
He took a step forward, stumbled over one body, fell on another. They were Germans who had been killed by his grenade. He stood up, found himself face-to-face with a helmeted German in a gas mask.
Eliot, like the good soldier he was, jammed his knee into the man's groin, drove his bayonet into his throat, withdrew the bayonet, smashed the man's jaw with his rifle butt.
And then Eliot heard an American sergeant yelling somewhere off to his left. The visibility was apparently a lot better over there, for the sergeant was yelling, "Cease fire! Hold your fire, you guys. Jesus Christ—these aren't soldiers. They're firemen!"
It was true: Eliot had killed three unarmed firemen. They were ordinary villagers, engaged in the brave and uncontroversial business of trying to keep a building from combining with oxygen.
When the medics got the masks off the three Eliot had killed, they proved to be two old men and a boy. The boy was the one Eliot had bayoneted. He didn't look more than fourteen.
Eliot seemed reasonably well for about ten minutes after that. And then he calmly lay down in front of a moving truck.
The truck stopped in time, but the wheels were touching Captain Rosewater. When some of his horrified men picked him up, they found out Eliot was stiff, so rigid that they might have carried him by his hair and his heels.
He stayed like that for twelve hours, and would not speak or eat—so they shipped him back to Gay Paree.
"What did he seem like there in Paris?" the Senator wanted to know. "Did he seem sane enough to you then?"
"That's how I happened to meet him."
"I don't understand."
"Father's string quartet played for some of the mental patients in one of the American hospitals— and Father got talking to Eliot, and Father thought Eliot was the sanest American he had ever met. When Eliot was well enough to leave, Father had him to dinner. I remember Father's introduction: 'I want you all to meet the only American who has so far noticed the Second World War.' "
"What did he say that was so sane?"
"It was the impression he made, really—more than—than the particular things he said. I remember how my father described him. He said, 'This young Captain I'm bringing home—he despises art. Can you imagine? Despises it—and yet he does it in such a way that I can't help loving him for it. What he's saying, I think, is that art has failed him, which, I must admit, is a very fair thing for a man who has bayoneted a fourteen-year-old boy in the line of duty to say.' "
"I loved Eliot on sight."
"Isn't there some other word you could use?"
"Than what?"
"Than love."
"What better word is there?"
"It was a perfectly good word—until Eliot got hold of it. It's spoiled for me now. Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do, then those of us who love particular people for particular reasons had better find ourselves a new word." He looked up at an oil painting of his deceased wife. "For instance—I loved her more than I loved our garbage collector, which makes me guilty of the most unspeakable of modern crimes: Dis-crim-i-nay-tion."
Sylvia smiled wanly. "For want of a better word, could I go on using the old one—just for tonight?"