The Children’s Crusade

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim. He’s an American born in 1922, but he’s a senile widower who has “come unstuck in time” when we meet him. He can revisit any moment in his life as if he’s watching a video, and the novel consists of non-linear video clips of Billy’s life, including the time he was kidnapped by aliens, brought to Tralfamadore, and put in a zoo.

The Tralfamadorians teach Billy about time and how it’s like looking at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. ”All the moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.” Except for their habit of putting humans in zoos, the Tralfamadorians are pretty cool dudes. ”They can see how permanent all the moments [of time] are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” So people die, but they also continue living in all the prior moments, which will always exist. That’s either comforting or distressing. It depends on how much love and happiness you’ve experienced in your allotted time – things you may not have much control over.

Billy blinks and it’s 1945, and he’s a chaplain’s assistant in World War II. In his first battle he becomes a prisoner of war, and he’s sent to a German POW camp where he and his fellow American POWs meet a group of English POWs, who were captured early in the war. The English POWs look “stylish and reasonable, and fun” so their German guards love them. The Americans are wrecks. They don’t make war look stylish, reasonable or fun, so the Germans send them to Dresden to sweep the streets. They’ll be exhibits in a different zoo.

Dresden looks like a “Sunday school picture of Heaven.” The Allies have bombed nearly every other German city, but Dresden is unscathed because it serves no military purpose. Less than a month after Billy’s arrival, the Allies inexplicably bomb it turning it into “one big flame.” 135,000 people were killed for no reason at all. Billy is one of the few survivors, and he traverses the demolished landscape looking for someone new to surrender to. 

Slaughterhouse-Five is a success on all levels. It’s a comic opera that skewers American-style capitalism and consumerism. ”Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” It’s elite science fiction that explores what time means and how that affects our understanding of life and death. But at its heart, Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the all-time great anti-war novels. As fantastical as the novel is, it won’t allow you to ignore a fundamental truth: wars are fought by babies. Every war is a children’s crusade, and it’s the children, our children, who suffer most the brutal consequences of our tragic inability to get along.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor