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

going A.W.O.L., here’s your golden opportunity. All you got to do is cross one of them lines of flares, go through the edge of the beam. You’ll disappear into nineteen-eighteen for real—won’t be nothing ghostly about it. And the M.P. ain’t been born who’s crazy enough to go after you, on account of can’t nobody who ever crosses over come back.”
    I cleaned between my front teeth with my rifle sight. I figured out all by myself that a professional soldier was happiest when he could bite somebody. I knowed I wasn’t never going to reach them heights.
    “Men,” Poritsky said, “the mission of this here time-screen company ain’t no different from the mission of ever company since time began. The mission of this here time-screen company is to kill! Any questions?”
    We’d all done had the Articles of War read to us. We all knowed asking sensible questions was worse’n killing your own mother with a axe. So there wasn’t no questions. Don’t expect there ever has been.
    “Lock and load,” Poritsky said.
    We done it.
    “Fix bayonets,” Poritsky said.
    We done it.
    “Shall we go, girls?” Poritsky said.
    Oh, that man knowed his psychology backwards and forwards. I expect that’s the big difference between officers and enlisted men. Calling us girls instead of boys, when we was really boys, just made us so mad we couldn’t hardly see straight.
    We was going out and tear up bamboo and rags till there wasn’t going to be no more fishpoles or crazy quilts for centuries.
     
    Being in the beam of that there time machine was a cross between flu, wearing bifocals that was made for somebody else who couldn’t see good, and being inside a guitar. Until they improves it, it ain’t never going to be safe or popular.
    We didn’t see no folks from nineteen-eighteen at first. All we seen was their holes and barbed-wire, where there wasn’t no holes and barbed-wire no more. We could walk over them holes like they had glass roofs over ’em. We could walk through that barbed-wire without getting our pants tore. They wasn’t ours—they was nineteen-eighteen’s.
    There was thousands of soldiers watching us, folks from ever country there was.
    The show we put on for ’em was just pitiful.
    That time-machine beam made us sick to our stomachs and half blind. We was supposed to whoop it up and holler to show how professional we was. But we got out there between them flares, and didn’t hardly nobody let out a peep for fear they’d throw up. We was supposed to advance aggressively, only we couldn’t tell what belonged to us, and what was nineteen-eighteen’s. We’d walk around things that wasn’t there, and fall over things that was there.
    If I had of been a observer, I would of said we was comical.
    I was the first man in the first squad of the first platoon of that time-screen company, and wasn’t but one man in front of me. He was our noble captain.
    He only hollered one thing at his fearless troops, and I thought he hollered that to make us even more bloodthirsty than we was. “So long, Boy Scouts!” he hollered. “Write your mothers regular, and wipe your noses when they runs!”
    Then he bent over, and he run off across no man’s land as fast as he could go.
    I done my best to stick with him, for the honor of the enlisted men. We was both falling down and getting up like a couple of drunks, just beating ourselves to pieces on that battlefield.
    He never looked around to see how me and the rest was doing. I thought he didn’t want nobody to see how green he was. I kept trying to tell him we’d done left everbody way behind, but the race took ever bit of breath I had.
    When he headed off to one side, towards a line of flares, I figured he wanted to get in the smoke where folks couldn’t see him, so he could get sick in private.
    I had just fell into the smoke after him when a barrage from nineteen-eighteen hit.
     
    That poor old world, she rocked and rolled, she spit and tore, she boiled and