Armageddon In Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut Read Free Book Online Page A

barrages! Fire fights! Bayonet duels! Hand-to-hand! Ain’t you glad, soldier?”
    “Ain’t I what , sir?” I said.
    “Ain’t you glad ?” Poritsky said.
    I looked at Earl, then back at the captain. “Oh, yes, sir,” I said. I shook my head real slow and heavy. “Yes, sir,” I said. “Yes, indeedy-do.”
     
    When you’re in the Army of the World, with all the fancy new weapons they got, there ain’t but one thing to do. You got to believe what the officers tell you, even if it don’t make sense. And the officers, they got to believe what the scientists tell ’em.
    Things has got that far beyond the common man, and maybe they always was. When a chaplain hollered at us enlisted men about how we got to have great faith that don’t ask no questions, he was carrying coals to Newcastle.
    When Poritsky finally done told us we was going to attack with the help of a time machine, there wasn’t no intelligent ideas a ordinary soldier like me could have. I just set there like a bump on a log, and I looked at the bayonet stud on my rifle. I leaned over, so’s the front of my helmet rested on the muzzle, and I looked at that there bayonet stud like it was a wonder of the world.
    All two hundred of us in the time-screen company was in a big dugout, listening to Poritsky. Wasn’t nobody looking at him. He was just too happy about what was going to happen, feeling hisself all over like he hoped he wasn’t dreaming.
    “Men,” that crazy captain said, “at oh-five-hundred hours the artillery will lay down two lines of flares, two hundred yards apart. Them flares will mark the edges of the beam of the time machine. We will attack between them flares.”
    “Men,” he said, “between them lines of flares it will be today and July eighteenth, nineteen-eighteen, both at the same time.”
    I kissed that bayonet stud. I like the taste of oil and iron in small amounts, but that ain’t encouraging nobody to bottle it.
    “Men,” Poritsky said, “you’re going to see some things out there that’d turn a civilian’s hair white. You’re going to see the Americans counter-attacking the Germans back in olden times at Château-Thierry.” My, he was happy. “Men,” he said, “it’s going to be a slaughterhouse in Hell.”
    I moved my head up and down, so’s my helmet acted like a pump. It pumped air down over my forehead. At a time like that, little things can be extra-nice.
    “Men,” Poritsky said, “I hate to tell soldiers not to be ascared. I hate to tell ’em there ain’t nothing to be ascared of . It’s an insult to ’em. But the scientists tell me nineteen-eighteen can’t do nothing to us, and we can’t do nothing to nineteen-eighteen. We’ll be ghosts to them, and they’ll be ghosts to us. We’ll be walking through them and they’ll be walking through us like we was all smoke.”
    I blowed across the muzzle of my rifle. I didn’t get a tune out of it. Good thing I didn’t, because it would of broke up the meeting.
    “Men,” Poritsky said, “I just wish you could take your chances back in nineteen-eighteen, take your chances with the worst they could throw at you. Them as lived through it would be soldiers in the finest sense of the word.”
    Nobody argued with him.
    “Men,” that great military scientist said, “I reckon you can imagine the effect on our enemy when he sees the battlefield crawling with all them ghosts from nineteen-eighteen. He ain’t going to know what to shoot at.” Poritsky busted out laughing, and it took him a while to pull hisself back together. “Men,” he said, “we’ll be creeping through them ghosts. When we reach the enemy, make him wish to God we was ghosts, too—make him sorry he was ever born.”
    This enemy he was talking about wasn’t nothing but a line of bamboo poles with rags tied to ’em, about half a mile away. You wouldn’t believe a man could hate bamboo and rags the way Poritsky done.
    “Men,” Poritsky said, “if anybody’s thinking of