Another cripple was ringing a doorbell across the street. He was an crutches. He had only one leg. He was so jammed between his crutches that his shoulders hid his ears.

Billy knew what the cripples were up to: They were selling subscriptions to magazines that would never come. People subscribed to them because the salesmen were so pitiful. Billy had heard about this racket from a speaker at the Lions Club two weeks before — a man from the Better Business Bureau. The man said that anybody who saw cripples working a neighbourhood for magazine subscriptions should call the police.

Billy looked down the street, saw a new, Buick Riviera parked about half a block away. There was a man in it, and Billy assumed correctly that he was the man who had hired the cripples to do this thing. Billy went on weeping as he contemplated the cripples and their boss. His doorchimes clanged hellishly.

He closed his eyes, and opened them again. he was still weeping, but he was back in Luxembourg again. He was marching with a lot of other prisoners. It was a winter wind that was bringing tears to his eyes.

Ever since Billy had been thrown into shrubbery for the sake of the picture, he had been seeing Saint Elmo’s fire, a sort of electronic radiance around the heads of his companions and captors. It was in the treetops and on the rooftops of Luxembourg, too. It was beautiful.

Billy was marching with his hands on top of his head, and so were all the other Americans. Billy was bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down. Now he crashed into Roland Weary accidentally. “I beg your pardon,” he said.

Weary’s eyes were tearful also. Weary was crying because of horrible pains in his feet. The hinged clogs were transforming his feet into blood puddings.

At each road intersection Billy’s group was joined by more Americans with their hands on top of their haloed heads. Billy had smiled for them all. They were moving like water, downhill all the time, and they flowed at last to a main highway on a valley’s floor. Through the valley flowed a Mississippi of humiliated Americans. Tens of thousands of Americans shuffled eastward, their hands clasped on top of their heads. They sighed and groaned.

Billy and his group joined the river of humiliation, and the late afternoon sun came out from the clouds. The Americans didn’t have the road to themselves. The west-bound lane boiled and boomed with vehicles which were rushing German reserves to the front. The reserves were violent, windburned, bristly men. They had teeth like piano keys.

They were festooned with machine-gun belts, smoked cigars, and guzzled booze. They took wolfish bites from sausages, patted their horny palms with potato-masher grenades.

One soldier in black was having a drunk herd’s picnic all by himself on top of a tank. He spit on the Americans. The spit hit Roland Weary’s shoulder, gave Weary a fourragière of snot and blutwurst and tobacco juice, and Schnapps.

Billy found the afternoon stingingly exciting. There was so much to see-dragon’s teeth, killing machine, corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory. So it goes.

Bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down, Billy beamed lovingly at a bright lavender farmhouse that had been spattered with machine-gun bullets. Standing in its cock-eyed doorway was a German colonel. With him was his unpainted whore.

Billy crashed into Weary’s shoulder, and Weary cried out sobbingly. “Walk right! Walk right!”

They were climbing a gentle rise now. When they reached the top, they weren’t in Luxembourg any more. They were in Germany.

A motion-picture camera was set up at the border — to record the fabulous victory. Two civilians in bearskin coats were leaning on the camera when Billy and Weary came by. They had run out of film hours ago.

One of them singled out Billy’s face for a moment, then focused at infinity again. There was a tiny plume of smoke at infinity. There was a battle there. People were dying there. So it goes.

And the sun went down, and Billy found himself bobbing in place in a railroad yard. There were rows and rows of boxcars waiting. They had brought reserves to the front. Now they were going to take prisoners into Germany’s interior.

Flashlight beams danced crazily.

The Germans sorted out the prisoners according to rank. They put sergeants with sergeants, majors with majors, and so on. A squad of full colonels was halted near Billy. One of them had double pneumonia. He had a high fever and vertigo. As the railroad yard dipped and swooped around the colonel, he tried to hold himself steady by staring into Billy’s eyes.

The colonel coughed and coughed, and then he said to Billy, “You one of my boys?” This was a man who had lost an entire regiment, about forty-five hundred men — a lot of them children, actually. Billy didn’t reply. The question made no sense.

“What was your outfit?” said the colonel. He coughed and coughed. Every time he inhaled his lungs rattled like greasy paper bags.

Billy couldn’t remember the outfit he was from.

“You from the Four-fifty-first?”

“Four-fifty-first what?” said Billy.

There was a silence. “Infantry regiment,” said the colonel at last.

“Oh,” said Billy Pilgrim.

There was another long silence, with the colonel dying and dying, drowning where he stood. And then he cited out wetly, “It’s me, boys! It’s Wild Bob!” That is what he had always wanted his troops to call him: “Wild Bob.”

None of the people who could hear him were actually from his regiment, except for Roland Weary, and Weary wasn’t listening. All Weary could think of was the agony in his own feet.

But the colonel imagined that he was addressing his beloved troops for the last time, and he told them that they had nothing to be ashamed of, that there were dead Germans all over the battlefield who wished to God that they had never heard of the Four-fifty-first. He said that after the war he was going to have a regimental reunion in his home town, which was Cody, Wyoming. He was going to barbecue whole steers.

He said all this while staring into Billy’s eyes. He made the inside of poor Bill’s skull echo with balderdash. “God be with you, boys!” he said, and that echoed and echoed. And then he said. “If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!”

I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare.

Billy Pilgrim was packed into a boxcar with many other privates. He and Roland Weary were separated. Weary was packed into another car in the same train.

There were narrow ventilators at the corners of the car, under the eaves. Billy stood by one of these, and, as the crowd pressed against him, he climbed part way up a diagonal corner brace to make more room. He placed his eyes on a level with the ventilator, so he could see another train about ten yards away.

Germans were writing on the cars with blue chalk — the number of persons in each car, their rank, their nationality, the date on which they had been put aboard. Other Germans were securing the hasps on the car doors with wire and spikes and other trackside trash. Billy could hear somebody writing on his car, too, 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.