Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut [21]
Weary’s eyes were tearful also. Weary was crying because of horrible pains in his feet. The hinged clogs were transforming his feet into blood puddings.
At each road intersection Billy’s group was joined by more Americans with their hands on top of their haloed heads. Billy had smiles for them all. They were moving like water, downhill all the time, and they flowed at last to a main highway on a valley’s floor. Through the valley flowed a Mississippi of humiliated Americans. Tens of thousands of Americans shuffled eastward, their hands clasped on top of their heads. They sighed and groaned.
Billy and his group joined the river of humiliation, and the late afternoon sun came out from the clouds. The Americans didn’t have the road to themselves. The westbound lane boiled and boomed with vehicles which were rushing German reserves to the front. The reserves were violent, windburned, bristly men. They had teeth like piano keys.
They were festooned with machine-gun belts, smoked cigars and guzzled booze. They took wolfish bites from sausages, patted their horny palms with potato-masher grenades.
One soldier in black was having a drunk hero’s picnic all by himself on top of a tank. He spit on the Americans. The spit hit Roland Weary’s shoulder, gave Weary a fourragère of snot and blutwurst and tobacco juice and Schnapps.
• • •
Billy found the afternoon stingingly exciting. There was so much to see—dragon’s teeth, killing machines, corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory. So it goes.
Bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down, Billy beamed lovingly at a bright lavender farmhouse that had been spattered with machine-gun bullets. Standing in its cockeyed doorway was a German colonel. With him was his unpainted whore.
Billy crashed into Weary’s shoulder, and Weary cried out sobbingly. “Walk right! Walk right!”
They were climbing a gentle rise now. When they reached the top, they weren’t in Luxembourg any more. They were in Germany.
A motion-picture camera was set up at the border—to record the fabulous victory. Two civilians in bearskin coats were leaning on the camera when Billy and Weary came by. They had run out of film hours ago.
One of them singled out Billy’s face for a moment, then focused at infinity again. There was a tiny plume of smoke at infinity. There was a battle there. People were dying there. So it goes.
And the sun went down, and Billy found himself bobbing in place in a railroad yard. There were rows and rows of boxcars waiting. They had brought reserves to the front. Now they were going to take prisoners into Germany’s interior.
Flashlight beams danced crazily.
The Germans sorted out the prisoners according to rank. They put sergeants with sergeants, majors with majors, and so on. A squad of full colonels was halted near Billy. One of them had double pneumonia. He had a high fever and vertigo. As the railroad yard dipped and swooped around the colonel, he tried to hold himself steady by staring into Billy’s eyes.
The colonel coughed and coughed, and then he said to Billy, “You one of my boys?” This was a man who had lost an entire regiment, about forty-five hundred men—a lot of them children, actually. Billy didn’t reply. The question made no sense.
“What was your outfit?” said the colonel. He coughed and coughed. Every time he inhaled his lungs rattled like greasy paper bags.
Billy couldn’t remember the outfit he was from.
“You from the Four-fifty-first?”
“Four-fifty-first what?” said Billy.
There was a silence. “Infantry regiment,” said the colonel at last.
“Oh,” said Billy Pilgrim.
There was another long silence, with the colonel dying and dying, drowning where he stood. And then he cried out wetly, “It’s me, boys! It’s Wild Bob!” That is what he had always wanted his troops to call him: “Wild Bob.”
None of the people who could hear him were actually from his regiment, except for Roland Weary, and Weary wasn’t listening. All Weary could think of was the agony in his own feet.
But the colonel