Armageddon in Retrospect

by Kurt Vonnegut

  I sighed and shook my head. “The Czechs have paid with interest, God knows. Hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” We’d lost most of our young men, Marta’s husband among them, in suicide waves before main Russian attacks; and our largest cities were little more than gravel and smoke.

  “And, after paying it, we get a new commissar. They’re no different from the rest,” she said bitterly. “It was childish to expect anything else.”

  Her terrible disappointment, for which I’d built her up, her apathy and hopelessness—good God in Heaven, I couldn’t bear it! And there would be no more liberators. The only strength left anywhere in the world was in America, and the Americans were in Beda.

  Dully, I set to work on the American eagle again. The captain had given me a dollar bill from which to copy the insignia. “Let me see—nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen arrows in the claw.”

  There was a diffident knock on the door, and Captain Donnini walked in. “Pardon me,” he said.

  “I guess we’ll have to,” I said. “Your side won the war.”

  “Afraid I didn’t have much to do with it.”

  “The major didn’t leave anybody for the captain to shoot,” said Marta.

  “What happened to your window?” said the captain.

  There was shattered glass all over the floor, and a big piece of cardboard now kept the weather from coming in the window. “It was liberated last night by a beer bottle,” I said. “I’ve written the major a note about it—for which I’ll probably be beheaded.”

  “What’s that you’re making?”

  “An eagle with thirteen arrows in one claw, and an olive branch in the other.”

  “You’re well-off. You could be whitewashing rocks. You were kept off the list, just so you could finish the desk.”

  “Yes, I saw the rock whitewashers,” I said. “With the whitewashed rocks, Beda looks better than it did before the war. You’d never know it had been shelled.” The major had ordered that a stirring message be written on his lawn in whitewashed rock: 1402 MP Company, Major Lawson Evans Commanding. The flower beds and walks were also being outlined in rock.

  “Oh, he’s not a bad man,” said the captain. “It’s a miracle he’s come through it all as well as he has.”

  “It’s a miracle any of us have come through as well as we have,” said Marta.

  “Yes, I realize that. I know—you’ve been through terrible times. But, well, so has the major. He lost his family in the Chicago bombings, his wife and three children.”

  “I lost my husband in the war,” said Marta.

  “So what are you trying to tell us—that we’re all doing penance for the death of the major’s family? Does he think we wanted them killed?” I said.

  He leaned against the workbench, and closed his eyes. “Oh hell, I don’t know, I don’t know. I thought it would help you to understand him—make you not hate him. Nothing makes any sense, though—nothing seems to help.”

  “Did you think you could help, Captain?” said Marta.

  “Before I came over here—yes, I did. Now I know I’m not what’s needed, and I don’t know what is. I sympathize with everybody, damn it, and see why they are the way they are—you two, all the people in town, the major, the enlisted men. Maybe, if I’d got a bullet through me or had somebody come after me with a flame-thrower, maybe I’d be more of a man.”

  “And hate like everyone else,” said Marta.

  “Yes—and be as sure of myself as everybody else seems to be on account of it.”

  “Not sure—numb,” I said.

  “Numb,” he repeated, “everyone has reasons for being numb.”

  “That’s the last defense,” said Marta. “Numbness or suicide.”

  “Marta!” I said.

  “You know it’s true,” she said flatly. “If gas chambers were set up on European street corners, they’d have longer queues than the bakeries. When does all the hate end? Never.”

  “Marta, for the love of Heaven, I won’t have you talking that way,” I said.

  “Major Evans talks that way, too,” said Captain Donnini. “Only he says he wants to go on fighting. Once or twice, when he’s been tight, he’s said he wished he’d been killed—that there wasn’t anything to go home to. He took fantastic chances in the fighting, and never got a scratch.”

  “Poor man,” said Marta, “no more war.”

  “Well, there’s still guerrilla action—a lot of it around Leningrad. He’s applied for a transfer there, so he can get into it.” He looked down and spread his fingers over his knees. “Well, anyway, what I came to tell you was that the major wants his desk tomorrow.”

  The door swung open, and the major strode into the workshop. “Captain, where the hell have you been? I sent you on an errand that should have taken five minutes, and you’ve been gone thirty.”

  Captain Donnini stood at attention. “Sorry, sir.”

  “You know how I feel about my men fraternizing with the enemy.”

  “Yessir.”

  He confronted me. “Now what’s this about your window?”

  “One of your men broke it last night.”

  “Now, isn’t that too damn bad?” It was another one of his unanswerable questions. “I said, isn’t that too damn bad, Pop?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pop, I’m going to tell you something that I want you to get through your head. And then I want you to make sure everybody else in town understands it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve lost a war. Have you got that? And I’m not here to have you or anybody else cry on my shoulder. I’m here to see that everybody damn well understands they lost a war, and to see that nobody makes trouble. And that’s all I’m here for. And the next person who tells me he was a pal of the Russians because he had to be gets his teeth kicked in. And that goes for the next person who tells me he’s got it rough. You haven’t got it half rough enough.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s your Europe,” said Marta quietly.

  He turned to her angrily. “If it were mine, young lady, I’d have the engineers bulldoze the whole lousy mess flat. Nothing in it but gutless wonders who’ll follow any damn dictator that comes along.” Again I was struck, as I’d been on the first day, by how awfully tired and distracted he seemed.

  “Sir—” said the captain.

  “Be quiet. I didn’t fight my way here so the Eagle Scouts could take over. Now, where’s my desk?”

  “I’m finishing the eagle.”

  “Let’s have a look.” I handed him the disk. He swore softly, and touched the insignia on his cap. “Like this one,” he said. “I want it exactly like this one.”

  I blinked at the insignia on his cap. “But it is like that one. I copied exactly from a dollar bill.”

  “The arrows, Pop! Which claw are the arrows in?”

  “Oh—on your hat they’re in the right claw, on the bill they’re in the left.”

  “All the difference in the world, Pop: one’s the Army, the other’s for civilians.” He raised his knee, and snapped the carving over it. “Try again. You were so anxious to please the Russian commandant, please me!”

  “Could I say something?” I said.

  “No. All I want to hear from you is that I’ll get the desk tomorrow morning.”

  “But the carving will take days.”

  “Stay up all night.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He walked out, with the captain at his heels.

  “What were you going to tell him?” said Marta, with a wry smile.

  “I was going to tell him that the Czechs have fought against the Europe he hates as hard and long as he has. I was going to tell him—Oh well, what’s the use?”

  “Go on.”

  “You’ve heard it a thousand times, Marta. It’s a tiresome story, I suppose. I wanted to tell him how I’ve fought the Hapsburgs and the Nazis, and then the Czech communists, and then the Russians�
��fought them in my own small ways. Not once have I sided with a dictator, and I never will.”

  “Better get to work on the eagle. Remember, arrows in the right hand.”

  “Marta, you’ve never tasted Scotch, have you?” I dug the claws of a hammer into a crack in the floor, and pried up the board. There lay the dusty bottle of Scotch I had saved for the great day of my dreams.

  It was delicious, and the two of us got quite drunk. While I worked, we relived the old days, Marta and I, and for a while it seemed almost as though her mother were alive again, and Marta was a young, pretty, and carefree girl again, and we had our home and friends in Prague again, and…Oh God, it was lovely for a little while.

  Marta fell asleep on the cot, and I hummed to myself as I chiseled out the American eagle long into the night. It was a crude, slap-dash job, and I covered its faults with putty and the fake gilt.

  A few hours before sunrise, I glued the emblem to the desk, applied clamps, and dropped off to sleep. It was ready for the new commandant, exactly, save for the emblem, as I had designed it for the Russian.

  They came for the desk early the next morning, a half-dozen soldiers and the captain. The desk looked like a casket for an Oriental potentate as they carried it like pallbearers across the street. The major met them at the door, and cried warnings whenever they threatened to bump the treasure against the doorframe. The door closed, the sentry took up his position before it again, and there was nothing more to see.

  I went into my workroom, cleared the shavings from the bench, and began a letter to Major Lawson Evans, 1402 MP Company, Beda, Czechoslovakia.

  Dear sir: I wrote, There is one thing about the desk I neglected to tell you. If you will look just below the eagle, you will find…

  I didn’t take it across the street right away, although I’d intended to. It made me feel a little sick to read it over—something I never would have felt had it been addressed to the Russian commandant, who was to have received it originally. Thinking about the letter spoiled my lunch, though I haven’t had enough to eat for years. Marta was too lost in her own depression to notice, though she scolds me when I don’t look out for myself. She took away my untouched plate without a word.

  Late in the afternoon, I drank the last of the Scotch, and walked across the street. I handed the envelope to the sentry.

  “This another one about the window, Pop?” said the sentry. Apparently the window episode was a joke in wide circulation.

  “No, another matter—about the desk.”

  “O.K., Pop.”

  “Thanks.”

  I went back to my workshop, and lay down on my cot to wait. I even managed to nap a little.

  It was Marta who awakened me.

  “All right, I’m ready,” I murmured.

  “Ready for what?”

  “The soldiers.”

  “Not the soldiers—the major. He’s leaving.”

  “He’s what?” I threw my legs over the side of the cot.

  “He’s getting into a jeep with all of his equipment. Major Evans is leaving Beda!”

  I hurried to the front window, and pulled aside the cardboard. Major Evans was seated in the rear of a jeep, in the midst of duffel bags, a bed roll, and other equipment. One would have thought from his appearance that a battle was raging on the outskirts of Beda. He glowered from beneath a steel helmet, and he had a carbine beside him, and a cartridge belt, knife, and pistol about his waist.

  “He got his transfer,” I said in wonderment.

  “He’s going to fight the guerrillas,” laughed Marta.

  “God help them.”

  The jeep started. Major Evans waved, and jolted away into the distance. The last I saw of the remarkable man was as the jeep reached the crest of a hill at the town’s edge. He turned, thumbed his nose, and was lost from sight in the valley beyond.

  Captain Donnini, across the street, caught my eye and nodded.

  “Who’s the new commandant?” I called.

  He tapped his chest.

  “What is an Eagle Scout?” whispered Marta.

  “Judging from the major’s tone, it’s something very un-soldierly, naive, and soft-hearted. Shhhh! Here he comes.”

  Captain Donnini was half solemn, half amused with his new importance.

  He lit a cigarette thoughtfully, and looked as though he were trying to phrase something in his mind. “You asked when the end of hate would come,” he said at last. “It comes right now. No more labor battalions, no more stealing, no more smashing. I haven’t seen enough to hate.” He puffed on the cigarette and thought some more. “But I’m sure I can hate the people of Beda as bitterly as Major Evans did if they don’t start out tomorrow to rebuild this into a decent place for the children.”

  He turned quickly, and recrossed the street.

  “Captain,” I called, “I wrote a letter to Major Evans—”

  “He turned it over to me. I haven’t read it yet.”

  “Could I have it back?”

  He looked at me questioningly. “Well, all right—it’s on my desk.”

  “The letter is about the desk. There’s something I’ve got to fix.”

  “The drawers work fine.”

  “There’s a special drawer you don’t know about.”

  He shrugged. “Come on.”

  I threw some tools into a bag, and hurried to his office. The desk sat in magnificent isolation in the middle of the otherwise spartan room. My letter lay on its top.

  “You can read it, if you like,” I said.

  He opened the letter, and read aloud:

  “Dear sir: There is one thing about the desk I neglected to tell you. If you will look just below the eagle, you will find that the oak leaf in the ornamentation can be pressed in and turned. Turn it so that the stem points up at the eagle’s left claw. Then, press down on the acorn just above the eagle, and…”

  As he read, I followed my own directions. I pressed on the leaf and turned it, and there was a click. I pushed the acorn with my thumb, and the front of a small drawer popped out a fraction of an inch, just enough to let a person get a grip on it and pull it out the rest of the way.

  “Seems to be stuck,” I said. I reached up under the desk, and snipped a strand of piano wire hooked to the back of the drawer. “There!” I pulled the drawer out the rest of the way. “You see?”

  Captain Donnini laughed. “Major Evans would have loved it. Wonderful!” Appreciatively, he slid the drawer back and forth several times, wondering at how its front blended so perfectly with the ornamentation. “Makes me wish I had secrets.”

  “There aren’t many people in Europe without them,” I said. He turned his back for a moment. I reached under the commandant’s desk again, slipped a pin into the detonator, and removed the bomb.

  Armageddon in Retrospect

  Dear Friend:

  May I have a minute of your time? We have never met, but I am taking the liberty of writing to you because a mutual friend has spoken of you highly as being far above average in intellect and concern for your fellow men.

  The impact of each day’s news being as great as it is, it is very easy for us to forget quickly major events of a few days before. Let me, then, refresh your memory on an event that shook the world five short years ago, and which is now all but forgotten, save by a few of us. I refer to what has come to be known, for good biblical reasons, as Armageddon.

  You will remember, perhaps, the hectic beginnings at the Pine Institute. I confess that I went to work as administrator of the Institute with a sense of shame and foolishness, and for no other reason than money. I had many other offers, but the recruiter from the Institute offered to pay me twice as much as the best of them. I was in debt after three years of poverty as a graduate student, so I took the job, telling myself that I would stay one year, pay off my debts and build my savings, get a respectable job, and deny ever after that I’d been within a hundred miles of Verdigris, Oklahoma.

  Thanks to this lapse in integrity, I was ass
ociated with one of the truly heroic figures of our time, Dr. Gorman Tarbell.

  The assets I brought to the Pine Institute were general, chiefly the skills that go with a doctor’s degree in business administration. I might as easily have applied these assets to running a tricycle factory or an amusement park. I was not in any way the creator of the theories that brought us to and through Armageddon. I arrived on the scene quite late, when much of the important thinking had been done.

  Spiritually, and in terms of sacrifice, the name of Dr. Tarbell should head the list of real contributors to the campaign and victory.

  Chronologically, the list should probably begin with the late Dr. Selig Schildknecht, of Dresden, Germany, who spent, by and large fruitlessly, the last half of his life and inheritance in trying to get someone to pay attention to his theories on mental illness. What Schildknecht said, in effect, was that the only unified theory of mental illness that seemed to fit all the facts was the most ancient one, which had never been disproved. He believed that the mentally ill were possessed by the Devil.

  He said so in book after book, all printed at his own expense, since no publisher would touch them, and he urged that research be undertaken to find out as much as possible about the Devil, his forms, his habits, his strong points, his weaknesses.

  Next on the list is an American, my former employer, Jessie L. Pine of Verdigris. Many years ago, Pine, an oil millionaire, ordered 200 feet of books for his library. The book dealer saw an opportunity to get rid of, among other gems, the collected works of Dr. Selig Schildknecht. Pine assumed that the Schildknecht volumes, since they were in a foreign language, contained passages too hot to be printed in English. So he hired the head of the University of Oklahoma’s German Department to read them to him.

  Far from being infuriated by the book dealer’s selection, Pine was overjoyed. All his life he’d felt humiliated by his lack of education, and here he’d found a man with five university degrees whose fundamental philosophy agreed with his own, to wit: “Onliest thing in the world that’s wrong with folks is that the Devil’s got aholt of some of ’em.”