Read Online Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - Free Book Online

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 imagined that he was addressing his beloved troops for the last time, and he told them that they had nothing to be ashamed of, that there were dead Germans all over the battlefield who wished to God that they had never heard of the Four-fifty-first. He said that after the war he was going to have a regimental reunion in his home town, which was Cody, Wyoming. He was going to barbecue whole steers.
    He said all this while staring into Billy’s eyes.He made the inside of poor Billy’s skull echo with balderdash. “God be with you, boys!” he said, and that echoed and echoed. And then he said, “If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!”
    I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare.

    Billy Pilgrim was packed into a boxcar with many other privates. He and Roland Weary were separated. Weary was packed into another car in the same train.
    There were narrow ventilators at the corners of the car, under the eaves. Billy stood by one of these, and, as the crowd pressed against him, he climbed part way up a diagonal corner brace to make more room. This placed his eyes on a level with the ventilator, so he could see another train about ten yards away.
    Germans were writing on the cars with blue chalk—the number of persons in each car, their rank, their nationality, the date on which they had been put aboard. Other Germans were securing the hasps on the car doors with wire and spikes and other trackside trash. Billy could hear somebodywriting on his car, too,