“War’s End,” by Andrew Joseph Kane (Fiction ’18)

Andrew Joseph Kane, a 2018 fiction alum, was recently featured in Failbetter. Read an excerpt of Kane’s short story “War’s End” below:

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. 

Read the story in its entirety here: https://www.failbetter.com/content/war%E2%80%99s-end