Dresden

"He was down in a meat locker the night Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine. The americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else. The rest of the guards had gone to the comforts of their own homes in Dresden. They were all being killed with their families. The girls that they had seen naked were all being killed too, in a much shallower shelter in another part of the stockyards."

"The day before Gluck had led the way to a building that he thought might contain the kitchen, and he opened the sliding door in it’s side. There wasn’t a kitchen in there, though. There was a dressing room adjacent to a communal shower, and there was a lot of steam. In the steam were about thirty teen-age girls with no clothes on. They were German refugees from Breslau, which had been tremendously bombed. They had just arrived in Dresden, too. Dresden was jammed with refugees. And there those girls were with all their private parts bare, for anybody to see. And there in the doorway were Gluck and Derby and Pilgrim – the childish soldier and the poor old high school teacher and the clown in his toga and silver shoes – staring. The girls screamed. They covered themselves with their hands and turned their backs and so on, and made themselves utterly beautiful."