Chapter 7

"'All the real soldiers are dead,' she said.  It was true.  So it goes" (Vonnegut 159).

This picture shows toy soldiers scattered across a floor.  In this scene in the book, Billy Pilgrim, Edgar Derby, and a sixteen-year-old German guard named Werner Gluck have been sent to collect food for the prisoners of war working in the slaughterhouse.  The woman preparing the food points out that Werner Gluck is too young to be a soldier, Edgar Derby is too old to be one, and Billy Pilgrim doesn't have the dress or manner of a soldier.  She then says this quote.

This exchange shows, yet again, the anti-war sentiments of Slaughterhouse Five.  Slaughterhouse Five takes place towards the end of World War II, when the fighting has already been going on for years and many of the "real soldiers", the young men with full military training, have already been killed.  Vonnegut points out that by their ends, wars are fought by the old and the very young, people who probably did not want to be involved in the fighting in the first place.  The point is driven in again that wars will always change or destroy many innocent lives.  This is one scene out of the many in Slaughterhouse Five that portray war as a bad way of solving conflicts.