“Slaughterhouse Five” [.]

The war and the prisoners:

• ...had a meek faith in a loving Jesus which most soldiers found putrid.
• It was lined with crimson plush, and nestled in that passionate plush...
• He didn’t look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.
• a Tiger tank... swiveled its 88-millimeter snout around sniffingly.
• He was so hot and bundled up, in fact, that he had no sense of danger.
• the pitiful buttons of Billy’s spine / a bleary civilian curiosity
• It is, in the imagination of combat’s fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called “mopping up.”
• living like woods creatures, living from moment to moment in useful terror, thinking brainlessly with their spinal cords
• Those boots were almost all he owned in this world. They were his home.

• Through the valley flowed a Mississippi of humiliated Americans.
• The last car of each train were marked with a striped banner of orange and black, indicating that the train was not fair game for airplanes—that it was carrying prisoners of war.
• When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.
• They had never dealt with Americans before, but they surely understood this general sort of freight. They knew that it was essentially a liquid which could be induced to flow slowly toward cooing and light.
• They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun.
• Edgar Derby, mournfully pregnant with patriotism and middle age and imaginary wisdom.
• The (Dresden) skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd.
• most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.
• The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals.
• Their stones had crashed down, had tumbled against one another until they locked at last in low and graceful curves.
• That was one of the things about the end of the war: Absolutely anybody who wanted a weapon could have one.

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