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

but he couldn’t see who was doing it.
    Most of the privates on Billy’s car were very young—at the end of childhood. But crammed into the corner with Billy was a former hobo who was forty years old.
    “I been hungrier than this,” the hobo told Billy. “I been in worse places than this. This ain’t so bad.”

    A man in a boxcar across the way called out through the ventilator that a man had just died in there. So it goes. There were four guards who heard him. They weren’t excited by the news.
    “Yo, yo,” said one, nodding dreamily. “Yo, yo.”
    And the guards didn’t open the car with the dead man in it. They opened the next car instead, and Billy Pilgrim was enchanted by what was in there. It was like heaven. There was candlelight, and there were bunks with quilts and blankets heaped on them. There was a cannonball stove with a steaming coffeepot on top. There was a table with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and a sausage on it. There were four bowls of soup.
    There were pictures of castles and lakes and pretty girls on the walls. This was the rolling home of the railroad guards, men whose business it was to be forever guarding freight rolling from here to there. The four guards went inside and closed the door.
    A little while later they came out smoking cigars, talking contentedly in the mellow lower register of the German language. One of them saw Billy’s face at the ventilator. He wagged a finger at him in affectionate warning, telling him to be a good boy.
    The Americans across the way told the guards again about the dead man on their car. The guards got a stretcher out of their own cozy car, opened the dead man’s car and went inside. The dead man’s car wasn’t crowded at all. There were just six live colonels in there—and one dead one.
    The Germans carried the corpse out. The corpse was Wild Bob. So it goes.

    During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle to one another, and then to move. The locomotive and the last car of each train were marked with a striped banner of orange and black, indicating that the train was not fair game for air-planes—that it was carrying prisoners of war.
    •  •  •
    The war was nearly over. The locomotives began to move east in late December. The war would end in May. German prisons everywhere were absolutely full, and there was no longer any food for the prisoners to eat, and no longer any fuel to keep them warm. And yet—here came more prisoners.

    Billy Pilgrim’s train, the longest train of all, did not move for two days.
    “This ain’t bad,” the hobo told Billy on the second day. “This ain’t nothing at all.”
    Billy looked out through the ventilator. The railroad yard was a desert now, except for a hospital train marked with red crosses—on a siding far, far away. Its locomotive whistled. The locomotive of Billy Pilgrim’s train whistled back. They were saying, “Hello.”

    Even though Billy’s train wasn’t moving, its boxcars were kept locked tight. Nobody was to get off until the final destination. To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excretedthrough its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of blackbread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.
    Human beings in there were excreting into steel helmets which were passed to the people at the ventilators, who dumped them. Billy was a dumper. The human beings also passed canteens, which guards would fill with water. When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.

    Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. The legs of those who stood were like fence posts driven into a warm, squirming, farting, sighing earth. The queer earth was a mosaic of sleepers who nestled like spoons.
    Now the train began to creep eastward.
    Somewhere in there was Christmas. Billy Pilgrim