The Children's Crusade

The novel has a subtitle of The Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance with Death. Vonnegut had promised Mary O'Hare that he would show that the people fighting in these wars were children who were not yet old enough to truly understand the destruction and pain of war. They still had a sense of innocence and Vonnegut tried to portray that for Mary through his character of Billy Pilgrim. Billy had a sense of childlike attitude to everything in the war. It did not seem as if the war had any effect on him until he finally gave up and cried.