War’s End
Near the end of the war, the general had to be strapped to his mount, having lost his right leg to the knee and his left foot to the ankle as well as the use of his right arm, which he fashioned in a sling. He wore an eye patch over his left eye and, as he was missing both ears, had to secure the band to his hair, the back right hemisphere of which had been scorched away leaving nothing but a purplish patch of scar. He wore a false leg made from wood and a false foot made from iron and leather. Around this time he also took to wearing a false mustache as his upper lip had been shot off, and so too, his four front teeth. He had no dentures cast, but the mustache was of a handsome, and some say, costly, weave. The general could be a vain man. His saddle had two extra belts that rose crosswise about his shoulders and kept him firmly affixed to his horse but also which, and much to the general’s annoyance, prevented him from standing in his stirrups whilst howling colorful invective as he dashed headlong to meet the enemy.
The enemy, in addition to having shot forty-five horses from under him, taken his leg, his foot, four teeth, both ears, an eye, a lip, and part of his scalp, had also filled him with twenty-six separate pieces of projectile and innumerable fragments of shrapnel. They were responsible for the death of his son, a young bugler in a separate brigade, had drowned two of his dogs, hung a third, grievously maimed a favorite boy messenger, and put to torch both his country house and his city office. Yet even if they hadn’t, they still would be, the general said, the worst kind of bastards. Jittery, weak-chinned, gutless, and cowhearted, physiologically speaking. Shifty, specious, spurious, blight weasels in regards to character. Their brains were witless, wileless, worthless pinches of fuzz. And concerning fortitude, they were spineless, sentimental, sanctimonious, pampered, privileged, parasitic namby-pambies. Also their policies were wrong. And thus, the war.
And thus it played out, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. He gave as well as he took. No other general had killed so many combatants in single melee, most having become accustomed to sheltering in a field tent and commanding via spyglass and signal. The general wouldn’t dream of it. And his men knew as much, for he daily told out his dreams, most of which consisted of graphic accounts of rendezvous with a whore mistress called Sweet Jenny. In fact, it would have been an odd day not to hear of how the general had made “Dear, Delicious Jen” mewl amidst his reverie. Still, only a secret few knew that the real Sweet Jenny wouldn’t go near the general let alone share an evening with him atop her settee, and that, upon his most recent visit to her parlor, The Lapping Cat, Sweet Jenny had locked herself in her rooms and sent out an under-whore called Eloquisha to manage the officers’ parley. But none of them would dare pronounce it.
The general’s petulance preceded the loss of his appendages and facial features. When he was still a major, he moved through captains at an alarming rate and for the most stickling of reasons. He once dismissed a man for the manner in which he had plucked a chicken that had been commandeered from a nearby farmstead. For the remainder of the war, and indeed, for an inordinate portion of his civilian life, the man was known as “Fluff-First Frederick,” later simply “Fluff.” Another unfortunate inferior was dismissed due to an uncontrollable whistle that escaped his nose during morning briefings. “Whistling Pete” enjoyed modest success leading a company in another regiment until he was shot dead during second watch, because, it was said, his whistle had given away his position.
The general, encamped at the time in a deep wood, read this account amongst his daily missives and came out of his tent to remind the men about his unerring instincts regarding substandard soldiers, whom he sought to “thumb out like weevils from a chestnut.” He then fired his pistol six times into a nearby tree to demonstrate the velocity of said thumb, giving away his position. When the nearby enemy scouting party returned with their full host in overwhelming number, the general, then the major, beset on both sides, led a courageous counter-charge, splitting his force and attacking both flanks simultaneously. His valor led to a succession of swift field promotions, and, as his leg needed amputating as a result of his part in the fracas, the general’s future likewise glittered with the promise of medals and other sundry commendations, the list of which only grew as his rank raised and body diminished. And thus it was, that at a contemplative thirty-four years of age, the general faced his first and final battle as general, though he could not know it at the time.
The enemy held two well fortified hills overseeing passage into a valley that was crucial to the general’s trajectory for the enemy capital. A supply line would be impossible to maintain without claiming this position. The enemy commander who oversaw the hills was an affirmed fusspot with a mad temper, known for laughing horribly at the things he hated. And since he loathed moving as much as losing, he ordered significant fortifications: watchtowers wrought, palisades erected, and trenches dug into both hillsides, as well as a special surprise furrowed deep into the vale itself. The enemy commander watched the construction from his tent on the western hill, giggling wickedly.
Ever the tactician, the general contemplated his foeman’s preparations, and, after reflecting on his own boldness the time he split his forces and emerged a newly-minted lieutenant colonel, he resolved to repeat the same brave stratagem. So freshly strapped to his mount, a buckskin quarter horse named Bill Henderson, the general led the charge upon the eastern hill himself. As his men neared the hill’s first line of fortifications, he brought the reins to his mouth, bit the leather, drew his sabre, and danced it horribly about his head. The enemy opened fire.
Here the battle proceeded much as one would expect: flashes, loud sounds, a great deal of blood, horses on fire, human beings on fire, hot, steaming piles of guts raining unexpectedly from above and with fantastic speed, blasphemy, euphemisms, false oaths, terror, self urination caused by terror, self defecation caused by both terror and the sudden loss of one’s head, euphoria, emptiness, visions of flame-sworded angels, vomit, asphyxia, lethargy, visions of the best dog you ever had miraculously come back to life, an unexplainable lightness, bewilderment, sweaty palms, a dragon, bite marks, friction burns, grappling in the Greco-Roman style, melancholia, and ultimately, quietus.
When the fighting was spent and the day with it, the general stood upon the eastern position’s zenith and glassed the western hill. There flew the enemy flag. With night now fallen and reports arriving, the general learned that half his power had been killed or wounded in attempting to take the hills. If only he could split himself along with his forces, then this day’s work might be done! Alas, they were reduced to settle into the enemy diggings, trade a number of cross-chasm shots to no avail, and consider next steps.
The following morning, the general had mustered his remnants into two columns and led the assault on the second hill. It began similarly to the previous day’s affairs. Cavalry surging, artillery booming, infantry evaporating. But then, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, the valley exploded.
At least a square quarter mile of it did. The enemy commander, intent to lose neither position nor promotion, had conceived a failsafe. He had ordered those soldiers who had once been miners to mine. And mine they did, a deep network of tunnels into the valley floor which they then packed with dynamite and promptly ignited during the second assault.
On the ascent, fierce atop his mount, nimbly cussing both enemy scum and his own fallen underlings alike, the general was well above the elevation of eruption. The shockwave, however, was so great as it rushed summit-ward that it nearly displaced the general’s hat. Since he wore a chinstrap, however, it only tipped forward, temporarily blinding his advance and preventing him from avoiding a low-hanging hickory branch which caught him square in the chest. Being absolutely attached to his horse via the aforementioned saddle rig, the general was knocked unconscious as his body snapped backward while brave Bill Henderson galloped fore.
When he awoke, still fast upon sturdy Bill, the general could not know that the majority of his remaining columns had been utterly incinerated. The enemy troops were later said to have shifted cinders in search of buttons or brass insignia, but any metal short of iron had melted and re-solidified into little blobs and burs. Bill must have carried the general back through the fire at some point since the nails in his hooves had softened, and he had thrown a shoe. Also, both rider and mount were singed considerably, Bill missing much of his mane, tail, and large swaths of hair; the general having lost the legs and arms of his uniform so that he appeared to be wearing a kind of sack that might stow root vegetables or a country infant. The general’s once proud mustache was likewise reduced to the plucked brush of a push broom. And so it was that he rode lipless, toothless, prostheses exposed, a ghoul in the night, straight unto the nearest friendly camp some fifty miles south of the great conflagration.
There he was greeted with a swig of corn liquor, a bed in the surgeon’s tent, and several hard hours of sawing upon his lame right arm which had “gone crisp” in the fire and was thus beyond the help of any salve or unguent. Bill Henderson was fed a hatful of oats and shot in the forehead. Then the camp’s commanding officer, a colonel the general had known briefly and surpassed merrily, relayed the news of surrender. The war was done, and they had lost. It had little to do with the general’s most recent failure since the war had been carrying on for many years, and the enemy were simply better outfitted for a long entanglement. The unbalanced odds, then, served as irrefutable proof of how valiant the general had been, particularly in executing an eleventh hour offensive. Who else could face such an impossible lot with neither a whimper nor sniffle? The colonel shook the general back to consciousness and informed him that they were to take their pistols and swords to the nearest enemy position which happened to be that apocalyptic valley the general had miraculously escaped.
While they saddled the horses, the general asked that his arm be buried and that he be there to oversee it. Though the men were technically un-beholding to his request as they were now common civilians, the general’s notoriety and fierce visage compelled them to comply. When one fellow, a long-haired private, began digging with his entrenching spade, the general promptly kicked him in the face and instructed that his arm was to be buried in the valley of his final combat, not in this “pig-fouled latrine.” No one dared mention that the foulness came from the general’s own disembodied arm which he had retrieved from the bloodied rags beneath the sawbone’s table and slung over his saddle like a coach gun. Before departing, the general told “Diggy Dick” that he hoped they should never cross paths as neighbors, being, as he was, “snappish to bald idiocy.” The private replied that his name was not Dick at all but Eustace, and the general shot him. The colonel had already emptied the pistols of their cartridges, however, so young “Dig” returned to his wife and child in the hill country with nothing more than a rousing tale and a deviated septum.
The retinue followed the smoke for several hours, stopping twice to right the general in his stirrups after he had lost consciousness. He slapped the men away and reminded them of the full-measure whipping he could further administer, being now without any enemy to direct his choler. At the site of the explosion, the general toed the ash and deemed it “as bonny a trough as any” for the interment of his appendage. They folded the arm into an artillery crate and buried it precisely six feet deep. The general insisted that any lower might obtrude the water table line, and while the arm had long since soured, he did not wish it found soggy, having, as did its former owner, never learned to swim. The colonel thought to smile at this sentiment, an almost parental display of consideration from man to limb, but when the general viciously saluted the lowered crate, the colonel merely clenched his jaw and echoed the salute.
At the enemy commander’s tent, the general relinquished his revolver but declared he’d rather cut off his other arm than turn over his sabre, and that if the gentleman didn’t approve, he was welcome to come and take it. The enemy commander, who wore a pince-nez fixed miraculously to the bridge of his button nose, laughed aloud. When the general wondered what could provoke such a “vulpish cackle,” the enemy commander replied he was preoccupied with ascertaining if the general could take soup through a “palate cleft so gapingly.” The colonel’s third finger was bitten quite severely in the skirmish that followed, and though the general was ultimately subdued, he did manage to smack the pince-nez from its sticking place.
Since the general’s wife had died of grief following the death of their son, and since his daughter had moved to a distant city with an industrialist who held patents for slide travels in milling machines, and since Sweet Jenny would neither admit his person into The Lapping Cat nor answer his letters, the general went south, as far south as he could, to a port town where he lived with his spinster sister. Having been blinded by the kick of a runaway mule, the sister hired a girl to keep the house and cook, and there the three of them subsisted. Though lacking the usual anatomical components that might contribute to healthy labor, as man of the house, the general was expected to provide, and provide he did, earning an income from giving speeches.
In parlors and on bandstands, he denigrated the government of the enemy, namely, the iniquity of their barely-concealed desires to rape, reap, and thief the wife, yield, and pocket of any good-minded God-fearer. He likewise expounded upon their unjust treatment of his countrymen following the war’s end. This two-pronged approach, which his critics summarized as “shame them, pity me,” engendered much sympathy and, as something of a self-made hero and first-hand expert on the subject, he earned both commendation and coin.
Indeed, the general’s supporters at this stage in his life would have died for him as freely as those who did fall to bullets, blades, and fiery doom. His speaking tours grew, and he traveled now for weeks at a time to halls full of veterans, laborers, lesser landowners, any who felt themselves slighted or abused in the recent catastrophe, a considerable figure that only accumulated as the general’s vitriol spread.
It came to be that a certain senator of great wealth and renown wrote to the general about running for elected office under the senator’s party banner. The general was agreeable, and the two convened at the general’s house to discuss. The senator, a tall and barrel-chested man, said he preferred to stand throughout the meeting, complaining that he’d crooked his back at a recent corn shucking festival. He further lamented he should’ve known better than to “trade cloggings with such vim-shanked scoundrels.” The general nodded grimly and deemed he should stand also, albeit with the aid of his silver-topped cane. While relaying what the general already knew, that the general’s plain-folk popularity and military renown would do the party a mite of service if they could get him on the ticket, the senator executed several hip twists and hock stretches that the general studied leeringly. At last, the senator came around to the particulars of party affirmation.
He began by inquiring about the general’s appearance. After the incident in the valley, the general had commissioned a replacement mustache of an even more flamboyant cut, one that curled in a daring arc extending beyond the edge of his jaw. He had also taken to wearing a wig of considerable volume. The side locks bushed out substantially, providing ample material on which to fasten his eye patch and compositionally accommodating for his lack of ears. All these contributed to a look that, the senator opined, made the general look more like a “grave, cycloptic lion” than the austere warrior he truly was. Similarly, the senator proffered that the general had earned a seat and should thus be conveyed via wheelchair. He would then have no use for his false leg, foot, and arm, for in addition to engendering pity instead of passion, they might impede the progression of the spokes.
After the general had not replied for some while, his sister who was seated against the wall exclaimed, “So that’s what he looks like!” with unaccustomed glee. The senator regarded the woman and her veering eyes and added that he only intended to present the general as his best self, the one who sacrificed his very flesh for the cause. He then dipped his knees and pointed his toes as though preparing to commence a Morris dance about a maypole. The sister laughed once more.
The general’s cane descended so many times upon the senator’s neck and face that the silver grip reddened. By the time the hired girl had fetched the senator’s driver to intervene, the general had already begun dragging the unconscious man to the door with his one good arm, noting that his own flesh had not been sacrificed but “pilfered by milksop swindlers.” The senator only blew blood bubbles while the general advised him to seek some other man to “display like a freak tent mummy” before tossing him, crumple-backed and unresponsive onto the roadstone.
The years advanced, and the general did not pass unscathed. The senator had him arrested but failed to bring him to charges. In the jailhouse, though, five men were required to bind the general with seven fathoms of nautical rope for a most unorthodox search. Every inch of him, both fabricated and corporeal was checked for contraband. The general dislocated his good shoulder in effecting an escape and barked himself hoarse before being returned to his sister for a week of bed rest. The senator’s party continued their hold on both local and state offices in all three branches of government. The general forwent politics but remained vociferous. As a result of the injuries sustained in his incarceration, however, he was forever confined to a wheelchair.
Though he continued to give speeches, the greater the distance between the war and his pulpit, the smaller the crowds he drew. People thrust their vehemence in alternating directions, and his was, at last, a tired call. Thus in a state of forced retirement, he managed to collect an officer’s pension paid out by the state, not those vile federal fleabags. He continued to grow old. His blind sister, who heretofore kept the downstairs bedroom, needed to move to the upstairs bedroom given the general’s new use of the wheelchair. It wasn’t long before she fell down the steps and died. He then took up a mongrel dog who remained forever underfoot, underwheel. The general kept watch on the front of his house and the back before going to the front again.
When he had outlived all his friends and relations, even his daughter having died from blood loss during the birthing of her first child, a girl, who also died shortly after and was buried in a small white coffin, the general wheeled himself to his front steps and peered down them at the several chaps colorfully conversing by the street. He hollered that they should disperse as he had not invited their gathering. The town had grown to a city in the intervening years, and in addition to welcoming a great many variants of horseless carriages had begun collecting roaming gaggles of listless young men who seemed intent to seek neither virtue nor useful occupation. These rogues ignored the shaking corpse on the porch above them, rolled and lit cigarettes, spat, and continued guying one another. The general leaned on the dog to steady himself as he made his way to the railing.
It was the neighbors who collected him and took him to the hospital where he learned he’d broken both hips and several ribs in the fall. The fellows whom he sought to smite had ignored him, did not give him so much as a tickle, did not even gibe him verbally as he lay bent as a bug. They only laughed and walked away. Still, his body would not capitulate. The doctors marveled at the “will of his zealous old bones” as he mended, bedridden. Despite his protestations, the dog was not allowed to sleep beneath him in that fly-plagued ward.
When at last he returned home, after having seen those in surrounding beds succumb to infection, pleurisy, even neurasthenia, he was told the dog had run off. But whether it was so or if someone had mercifully fired a round into its knobby skull assuming the general would never re-emerge, he blotted no eye, though his absent socket did occasionally issue discharge. For a day, he returned to his business of rolling from the front of the house to the back. Finally convinced that no one could do the job but himself, as it was with everything else in this God-blasted world, he resolved to cease nourishment, and, after a period of seven days, perished. He wrote a note, so the nation might know, “It’s nary to do with the dog.”
And yet, despite having seemingly arrived at his story’s end, the general managed to endure. For each limb he had planted, a monument had sprung, and like the farmer who dies before harvest, his wares doubled and trebled while his body turned to ether. In marble and bronze, his war was let to persevere, played and replayed even on the grounds which had admitted his blood. And when others came to take down the markers, to challenge the claims, of causation, morality, intent, those very same who had long since declared victory, it was as though the war had never ceased at all but had been let to edge its tail up to the snout of the one still to come. And still he lingers.
