Soldiers or Children?

For almost the entire time I was reading this book, I was frustrated with how dull,  uninteresting, and unmotivated the characters were. I also wondered why Vonnegut, writing an anti-war book, wouldn’t describe anything that actually resembled warfare. Then I read this quote, and started to understand Vonnegut’s motivations for writing this way.

“There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.”

    I took this quote as an explanation for why Vonnegut never showed the horrors of battle, and never showed his characters reacting too dramatically to anything. He wanted to reinforce the idea that most of the people who fight wars aren’t strong, heroic soldiers, but weak, spineless children. It seems to me that he showed only the miserable, unglamorous realities of war, while steering clear of the dramatic battles, so as not to risk us ever seeing these children as soldiers. I compared Slaughterhouse Five to All Quiet on the Western Front. The characters in All Quiet endured horrible things and mused about the horrors of war all the time, which did have a powerful effect. However, we saw the All quiet characters fight.  We saw them endure terrible things but be strong enough to get through it. We knew that they were children, but they seemed like real soldiers. In some ways, by not showing the gruesome battles, Vonnegut did a better job of illustrating the injustice of sending young and unprepared children to fight.

    What are your thoughts? Do you think Vonnegut made the book more or less powerful by choosing not to show scenes of warfare? What other explanations might there be for Vonnegut to write his characters and scenes this way?