Slaughterhouse Five

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SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

OR THE CHILDREN'S

CRUSADE

A Duty-dance with Death

KURT VONNEGUT, JR.

A fourth-generation German-American

now living in easy circumstances

on Cape Cod

[and smoking too much],

who, as an American infantry scout

hors de combat,

as a prisoner of war,

witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany,

'The Florence of the Elbe,'

a long time ago,

and survived to tell the tale.

This is a novel

somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic

manner of tales

of the planet Tralfamadore,

where the flying saucers

come from.

Peace.

Granada Publishing Limited

Published in 1972 by Panther Books Ltd

Frogmore, St Albans, Herts AL2 2NF

Reprinted 1972, 1973 (twice), 1974, 1975

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1970

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd

Bungy, Suffolk

Set in Linotype Plantin

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade

or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the

publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is published at a net price and is supplied subject to the

Publishers Association Standard Conditions of Sale registered under the

Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1956.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following

material:

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF THEODORE ROETHKE

printed by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.

THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN by David Irving:

From the Introduction by Ira C. Eaker, Lt. Gen. USAF (RET.) and Foreword by

Air Marshall Sir Robert Saundby. Copyright (1963 by William Kimber and

Co. Limited. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. and

William Kimber and Co. Limited.

'Leven Cent Cotton' by Bob Miller and Emma Dermer: Copyright ( 1928,

1929 by MCA Music, a Division of MCA Inc. Copyright renewed 1955,1956

and assigned to MCA Music, a division of MCA Inc. Used by permission.

for

Mary O'Hare

and

Gerhard M¸ller

The cattle are lowing,

The Baby awakes,

But the little Lord Jesus

No crying He makes.

One

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much

true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that

wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal

enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all

the names.

I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in

1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has.

There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.

I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we

made friends with a taxi driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where

we had been locked up at night as prisoner of war. His name was Gerhard

M¸ller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We

asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was

terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there

wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now.

He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent

education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.

He sent O'Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:

'I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a

happy New Year and I hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and

freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will.'

I like that very much: 'If the accident will.'

I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and

anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-

three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the

destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what

I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least

make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.

But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then-not enough

of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either,

when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with

his sons full grown. I think of how useless the Dresden -part of my memory

has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has been to write about, and I am

reminded of the famous limerick:

There was a young man from Stamboul,

Who soliloquized thus to his tool,

'You took all my wealth

And you ruined my health,

And now you won't pee, you old fool'

And I'm reminded, too, of the song that goes

My name is Yon Yonson,

I work in Wisconsin,

I work in a lumbermill there.

The people I meet when I walk down the street,

They say, 'What's your name?

And I say,

'My name is Yon Yonson,

I work in Wisconsin...

And so on to infinity.

Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working

on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised

his eyebrows and inquired, 'Is it an anti-war book?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I guess.'

'You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war

books?'

'No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?'

'I say, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?"'

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they

were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.

And, even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be

plain old death.

When I was somewhat younger, working on my famous Dresden book, I

asked an old war buddy named Bernard V. O'Hare if I could come to see

him. He was a district attorney in Pennsylvania. I was a writer on Cape Cod.

We had been privates in the war, infantry scouts. We had never expected to

make any money after the war, but we were doing quite well.

I had the Bell Telephone Company find him for me. They are wonderful

that way. I have this, disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and

the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like

mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the

telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or

that one, from whom I have not heard in years.

I got O'Hare on the line in this way. He is short and I am tall. We were

Mutt and Jeff in the war. We were captured together in the war. I told him

who I was on the telephone. He had no trouble believing it. He was up. He

was reading. Everybody else in his house was asleep.

'Listen,' I said, 'I'm writing this book about Dresden. I'd like some help

remembering stuff. I wonder if I could come down and see you, and we

could drink and talk and remember.'

He was unenthusiastic. He said he couldn't remember much. He told me,

though, to come ahead.

'I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar

Derby,' I said. 'The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and

thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American

foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he's given a

regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad.'

'Um,' said O'Hare.

'Don't you think that's really where the climax should come?' 'I don't

know anything about it,' he said. 'That's your trade, not mine.'

As a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful

dialogue and suspense and confrontations, I had outlined the Dresden story

many times. The best outline I ever made, or anyway the prettiest one, was

on the back of a roll of wallpaper.

I used my daughter's crayons, a different color for each main character.

One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end

was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle.

And the blue line met the red line and then the yellow line, and the yellow

line stopped because the character represented by the yellow line was dead.

And so on. The destruction of Dresden was represented by a vertical band

of orange cross-hatching, and all the lines that were still alive passed

through it, came out the other side.

The end, where all the lines stopped, was a beetfield on the Elbe, outside

of Halle. The rain was coming down. The war in Europe had been over for a

couple of weeks. We were formed in ranks, with Russian soldiers guarding

us-Englishmen, Americans, Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen, Canadians,

South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians, thousands of us about to stop

being prisoners of war.

And on the other side of the field were thousands of Russians and Poles

and Yugoslavians and so on guarded by American soldiers. An exchange was

made there in the rain-one for one. O'Hare and I climbed into the back of

an American truck with a lot of others. O'Hare didn't have any souvenirs.

Almost everybody else did. I had a ceremonial Luftwaffe saber, still do. The

rabid little American I call Paul Lazzaro in this book had about a quart of

diamonds and emeralds and rubies and so on' He had taken these from

dead people in the cellars of Dresden.' So it goes.

An idiotic Englishman, who had lost all his teeth somewhere had his

souvenir in a canvas bag. The bag was resting on my insteps. He would peek

into the bag every now and then, and he would roll his eyes and swivel his

scrawny neck,, trying to catch people looking covetously at his bag. And he

would bounce the bag on my insteps.

I thought this bouncing was accidental. But I was mistaken. He had to show

somebody what was in the bag, and he had decided he could trust me. He

caught my eye, winked, opened the bag. There was a plaster model of the

Eiffel Tower in there. It was painted gold. It had a clock in it.

'There's a smashin' thing,' he said.

And we were flown to a rest camp in France, where we were fed chocolate

malted milkshakes and other rich foods until we were all covered with baby

fat. Then we were sent home, and I married a pretty girl who was covered

with baby fat, too.

And we had babies.

And they're all grown up now, and I'm an old fart with his memories and

his Pall Malls. My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a

lumbermill there.

Sometimes I try to call up old girl friends on the telephone late at night,

after my wife has gone to bed. 'Operator, I wonder if you could give me the

number of a Mrs. So-and-So. I think she lives at such-and-such.'

'I'm sorry, sir. There is no such listing.'

'Thanks, Operator. Thanks just the same.'

And I let the dog out or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I

like him, and he lets me know he likes me. He doesn't mind the smell of

mustard gas and roses.

'You're all right, Sandy, I'll say to the dog. 'You know that, Sandy? You're

O.K.'

Sometimes I'll turn on the radio and listen to a talk program from Boston

or New York. I can't stand recorded music if I've been drinking a good deal.

Sooner or later I go to bed, and my wife asks me what time it is. She

always has to know the time. Sometimes I don't know, and I say, 'Search

me.'

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of

Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the

Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there

was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that

still.

Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or

disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, 'You know-you

never wrote a story with a villain in it.'

I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.

While I was studying to be an anthropologist, I was also working as a

police reporter for the famous Chicago City News Bureau for twenty-eight

dollars a week. One time they switched me from the night shift to the day

shift., so I worked sixteen hours straight. We were supported by all the

newspapers in town, and the AP and the UP and all that. And we would cover

the courts and the police stations and the Fire Department and the Coast

Guard out on Lake Michigan and all that. We were connected to the

institutions that supported us by means of pneumatic tubes which ran

under the streets of Chicago.

Reporters would telephone in stories to writers wearing headphones, and

the writers would stencil the stories on mimeograph sheets. The stories

were mimeographed and stuffed into the brass and velvet cartridges which

the pneumatic tubes ate. The very toughest reporters and writers were

women who had taken over the jobs of men who'd gone to war.

And the first story I covered I had to dictate over the telephone to one of

those beastly girls. It was about a young veteran who had taken a job

running an old-fashioned elevator in an office building. The elevator door

on the first floor was ornamental iron lace. Iron ivy snaked in and out of the

holes. There was an iron twig with two iron lovebirds perched upon it.

This veteran decided to take his car into the basement, and he closed the

door and started down, but his wedding ring Was caught in all the

ornaments. So he was hoisted into the air and the floor of the car went

down, dropped out from under him, and the top of the car squashed him.

So it goes.

So I phoned this in, and the woman who was going to cut the stencil

asked me. 'What did his wife say?'

'She doesn't know yet,' I said. 'It just happened.'

'Call her up and get a statement.'

'What?'

'Tell her you're Captain Finn of the Police Department. Say you have some

sad news. Give her the news, and see what she says.'

So I did. She said about what you would expect her to say. There was a

baby. And so on.

When I got back to the office, the woman writer asked me, just for her

own information, what the squashed guy had looked Eke when he was

squashed.

I told her.

'Did it bother you?' she said. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy

Bar.

'Heck no, Nancy,' I said. 'I've seen lots worse than that in the war.'

Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a

famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much

worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn't know that, either.

There hadn't been much publicity.

I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party

about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a

member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told

me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made

soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on.

All could say was, 'I know, I know. I know.'

The Second World War had certainly made everybody very tough. And I

became a public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New

York, and a volunteer fireman in the Village of Alplaus, where I bought my

first home. My boss there was one of the toughest guys I ever hope to meet.

He had been a lieutenant colonel in public relations in Baltimore. While I

was in Schenectady he joined the Dutch Reformed Church, which is a very

tough church, indeed.

He used to ask me sneeringly sometimes why I hadn't been an officer,, as

though I'd done something wrong.

My wife and I had lost our baby fat. Those were our scrawny years. We

had a lot of scrawny veterans and their scrawny wives for friends. The

nicest veterans in Schenectady,, I thought,, the kindest and funniest ones,

the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

I wrote the Air Force back then, asking for details about the raid on

Dresden, who ordered it, how many planes did it, why they did it, what

desirable results there had been and so on. I was answered by a man who,

like myself, was in public relations. He said that he was sorry, but that the

information was top secret still.

I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, 'Secret? My God-from

whom?'

We were United World Federalists back then. I don't know what we are

now. Telephoners, I guess. We telephone a lot-or I do, anyway, late at night.

A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V.

O'Hare, I really did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 or so-

whatever the last year was for the New York World's Fair. Eheu, fugaces

labuntur anni. My name is Yon Yonson. There was a young man from

Stamboul.

I took two little girls with me, my daughter, Nanny, and her best friend,

Allison Mitchell. They had never been off Cape Cod before. When we saw a

river, we had to stop so they could stand by it and think about it for a while.

They had never seen water in that long and narrow, unsalted form before.

The river was the Hudson. There were carp in there and we saw them. They

were as big as atomic submarines.

We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the

Delaware. There were lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to

go, always time to go. The little girls were wearing white party dresses and

black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were.

'Time to go, girls,' I'd say. And we would go.

And the sun went down, and we had supper in an Italian place, and then I

knocked on the front door of the beautiful stone house of Bernard V.

O'Hare. I was carrying a bottle of Irish whiskey like a dinner bell.

I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book. I dedicate it to

Gerhard M¸ller, the Dresden taxi driver, too. Mary O'Hare is a trained

nurse, which is a lovely thing for a woman to be.

Mary admired the two little girls I'd brought, mixed them in with her own

children, sent them all upstairs to play games and watch television. It was

only after the children were gone that I sensed that Mary didn't like me or

didn't like something about the night. She was polite but chilly.

'It's a nice cozy house you have here,' I said, and it really was.

'I've fixed up a place where you can talk and not be bothered,' she said.

'Good,' I said, and I imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a paneled

room, where two old soldiers could drink and talk. But she took us into the

kitchen. She had put two straight-backed chairs at a kitchen table with a

white porcelain top. That table top was screaming with reflected light from

a two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had prepared an operating room.

She put only one glass on it, which was for me. She explained that O'Hare

couldn't drink the hard stuff since the war.

So we sat down. O'Hare was embarrassed, but he wouldn't tell me what

was wrong. I couldn't imagine what it was about me that could bum up

Mary so. I was a family man. I'd been married only once. I wasn't a drunk.

I hadn't done her husband any dirt in the war.

She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube

tray in the stainless steel sink. Then she went into another part of the

house. But she wouldn't sit still. She was moving all over the house,

opening and shutting doors, even moving furniture around to work off

anger.

I asked O'Hare what I'd said or done to make her act that way.

'It's all right,' he said. "Don't worry about it. It doesn't have anything to

do with you.' That was kind of him. He was lying. It had everything to do

with me.

So we tried to ignore Mary and remember the war. I took a couple of

belts of the booze I'd brought. We would chuckle or grin sometimes, as

though war stories were coming back, but neither one of us could

remember anything good. O'Hare remembered one guy who got into a lot

of wine in Dresden, before it was bombed, and we had to take him home in

a wheelbarrow.

It wasn't much to write a book about. I remembered two Russian soldiers

who had looted a clock factory. They had a horse-drawn wagon full of

clocks. They were happy and drunk. They were smoking huge cigarettes

they had rolled in newspaper.

That was about it for memories, and Mary was still making noise. She

finally came out in the kitchen again for another Coke. She took another

tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator, banged it in the sink, even though

there was already plenty of ice out.

Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger

was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment

of a much larger conversation. "You were just babies then!' she said.

'What?" I said.

'You were just babies in the war-like the ones upstairs! '

I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right

at the end of childhood.

'But you're not going to write it that way, are you.' This wasn't a

question. It was an accusation.

'I-I don't know,' I said.

'Well, I know,' she said. 'You'll pretend you were men instead of babies,

and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or

some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will

look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought

by babies like the babies upstairs.'

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want

her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars

were partly encouraged by books and movies.

So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise 'Mary,' I said, 'I

don't think this book is ever going to be finished. I must have written five

thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it,

though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra

or John Wayne.

'I tell you what,' I said, 'I'll call it The Children's Crusade.'

She was my friend after that.

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摘要：

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVEORTHECHILDREN'SCRUSADEADuty-dancewithDeathKURTVONNEGUT,JR.Afourth-generationGerman-AmericannowlivingineasycircumstancesonCapeCod[andsmokingtoomuch],who,asanAmericaninfantryscouthorsdecombat,asaprisonerofwar,witnessedthefire-bombingofDresden,Germany,'TheFlorenceoftheElbe,'alongtime...

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