So it goes.....

This is a great passage from Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five".

It is a complex tale rooted in his witnessing, as a Prisoner of War, of the Allied bombing of City of Dresden in February 1945.

Up until that time it had been relatively untouched by hostile action and its targeting to demoralise the civilian population of Germany has always been the subject of controversy and debate by historians and military tacticians.

The main character of the novel, Billy Pilgrim, recounts the horrific post-attack events as seen first hand by Vonnegut who, along with his fellow prisoners and guards, emerged from a subterranean former abattoir number 5 after which the book was named.

After considerable thought about how to put together his experiences into the written form Vonnegut opted for a science-fiction-anti-war approach and the following is one of the many flashbacks and out of sequence pieces.


"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. 

Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen.

They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. 

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes.

The containers were stored neatly in racks.

The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America where factories were operating day and night dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work.

The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again. 

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed..........Everybody turned into a baby and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed"

Found on pages 60 and 61 of Vintage Vonnegut by Penguin Random House 1991