Following criticism that I was unexpectedly nice to cats in yesterday's effort I hereby provide balance.

            “Stay together” shouted Captain Tiddles as the boat neared the beach.

            Private Winkles vomited into his helmet.  Tiddles could not tell whether it was from seasickness, terror or both.  He hoped the kitten would have the sense to put the helmet back on before the bullets started flying.  Having puke matting your fur was a lot more pleasant than having your brains blown out the back of your skull.
            “This is my sister” said Private Fluffles, showing a picture of a small marmalade kitten in a sundress to Private Whiskers. 
            “Nice hat” shouted Whiskers in reply, secretly thinking what a hot piece of ass she was.
            “Keep going until we hit the shingle” screamed Captain Tiddles as the beach loomed ever nearer.
            Bullets began ricocheting off the side of the landing craft.  The Badgers’ heavily fortified pillboxes were bristling with heavy machine guns and their gunners’ had obviously been practicing.
           
The Eighth Cat’s Are Shit Suicide Brigade had been sent in to establish a beachhead by the noble dog General Spot.  The heroic dog forces would then follow up and do all the real work.  As usual.  Fucking Cats.
           
            “I will see you on the beach” screamed Captain Tiddles as the landing craft sped the final few hundred yards towards a beach pockmarked with obstacles.  He knew it would soon be littered with dead cats.

            The landing craft struck with great force and slid up the beach a few yards, the door slamming down and removing the final barrier between hot lead and soft cat.  Immediately Scruffykins flew back, part of his skull flying back past Fluffles and Whiskers.  A thick spray of cat brain got into their fur and they knew that, even if they survived, they’d never get it all out.
            Even as they were sprinting from the boat Private Wiffles, a young farm cat from Wyoming, had all four paws shot clean off by a withering burst of fire.  His furry torso hit the sand and slid a few yards before coming to a halt, his black and white fur now stained a dark red.  His meow for help was soon cut off as another burst severed his head from his shoulders.  As Whiskers ran past he saw nothing but a stump with a collar, the little bell jangling from the shock.

            Binkybonk, the kitten named by a four year old retard, was the first to tread on a landmine, evaporating into a rich bloodsoup with piquant organ chunks.  Captain Tiddles, the heroic tabby, leapt straight through the spray in a misguided attempt to show his kittens that he was not afraid.  Blinded by bloodsoup he staggered through the chaos.  Kidney chunks had lodged in his ears and rendered the world a soundless void.
            “MEDIC…” he shouted “WET-WIPE.”
            “Here sir” said young medic Corporal Catface, pressing a wet-wipe to Tiddles’ face.  
            Tiddles gratefully wiped the gore from his eyes.
            “Pardon?” said Tiddles blankly to the young cat mouthing something
            “Sir, I’ve just been cut in half” said Catface and fell, neatly bisected, into a puddle of his own guts.
            “Pardon?” asked Tiddles again, pulling the worst of the kidneys from his ears.
            He looked around at the strange and alien world whose population appeared to be made up entirely of death and bullets.  Tiddles watched as Private Whitepaws was shredded by machine gun fire.  His remains drifted lazily on the breeze before falling as gore-rain upon his comrades.
He watched as Private Gingerbiscuit hobbled about in confusion clutching his severed paw in his mouth before finally taking a mortar shell right in the whiskers.  A grenade spread Private Bumblebonk’s digestive tract into gutbunting along the length of the barbed wire.  It dripped thick chunks of digestive snow onto the once white sand.

            Finally Tiddles reached the relative safety of the shingle.  He looked along the line of the small ridge and saw only a handful of the cats who’d first set out on the deadly stroll.  Looking back towards the sea he was reminded of a charnel house.  A thick bubbling innard-froth coated everything and was still occasionally raked with bullets to make sure nothing survived.
            “Sappercats” shouted Captain Tiddles.
            A pair of sappercats ran up to him.  Even as he turned to address them they were turned into so much goreslaw by the remorseless badger defenders.  Captain Tiddles snatched up their bags of explosives and quickly set them in place under the wire. 
            “Fire in the hole” he shouted and crammed some kidney chunks into his ears.
            The huge explosion tore a hole in the wire and in the aptly name Private Fatcat who burst like balloon filled with guts, blood and shit. 

            “Cat Beach is open” screamed Captain Tiddles into the radio.
            Cats began streaming through the breach and up the hill towards the badger bunkers.  They were the first to be engulfed by the badgers’ flamethrowers.  They ran about, meowing, as their fur smouldered.  One of the charred carcases fell at the feet of Captain Tiddles.  It smelt like bacon and the twitching corpse still played with a burned toy mouse.
            “What do we do Captain?” asked Whiskers as he and Fluffles joined Tiddles. 
            “I’ll run out there and draw them out of cover.  Then you shoot them” said Tiddles.
            “I haven’t got any trigger fingers left” said Whiskers holding up two bloody paw stumps.
            “Well, you get to draw them out of cover then” said Tiddles with thinly-veiled relief.
            “Do I have to Captain?” asked Whiskers.
            “Yes” said Tiddles.
            “Oh.”
            “Off you go lad” said Tiddles and gave him a shove.
            Even before Tiddles had taken five steps the onslaught began.  Snipers shot off his ears, flamethrowers burned his fur, machine guns cut him in half and a tank ran over him.

            “Let’s go round the other way” suggested Tiddles and they quietly shuffled up the a side-road.
            Soon they reached the badger bunkers and the surviving cat force huddled behind a wall.  Only half their original numbers, several hundred kittens were now so much fleshpulp for the crabs to fight over come the next tide.  Tiddles was horrified at the cost, but also quite amused.
            “CHARGE” screamed Colonel Catka over the radio from the safety of his basket on a battleship nine miles away.
            “Charge” Tiddles sighed.
            The cats flung themselves over the wall and began running towards the trenches and bunkers.  As they ran across the flat ground their numbers were further reduced, blood eruptions flying into the air and severed tails, paws, and ears were being left in their wake.  One really small, especially cute kitten, called Private Patches McCute, received a rocket up the anus and ran about squeaking in terror for five minutes until eventually exploding as if it were Gut Fawkes Night.

            Finally they reached the trenches and the vicious hand to hand fighting began.  Fluffles was the first to die.  His head was severed by a vicious swipe and then the brave badger spat down his neck and pissed into his headholes.  Tiddles eventually hit the badger in the face with a pickaxe.
            The badgers began to fall back, many through boredom.  Plus there was so much cat offal everywhere that flies were starting to settle in great numbers.  Most of them couldn’t stop laughing and some of their number were falling the hernias.
            Tiddles plunged a bayonet into a likeable badger who did a lot for charity.  The wonderful badger died leaving fifteen children to starve.  Cats are utter fucking bastards.       
            “We’ve got to take out their command bunker” shouted Tiddles to the remnants of his platoon.
            “We’re with you sir” shouted the blood-drenched cats.
            “Not for long I fear” Tiddles said quietly to himself.
            The bunker was very heavily defended.  The first rank of badger defenders were armed with claws and samurai swords.  The wave of cats struck them and soon the blood-level reached two feet.  Individual battles were forced to take place upon floating tables and pedallos as the catblood waters began to lap at the top of the trenches.

            “Ow” yelped Tiddles as he lost an ear to the same sword blow that split Private Sniffles in half like a lobster in a Chinese restaurant.  The corpse was quickly dragged away by a badger, hollowed out, the flesh minced and mixed with vegetables and seasoning, put back into the cat-halves, topped with cheese, and grilled.
            Tiddles cut down the badger eventually with an utterly unfair kick to the groin followed by pushing two pencils into the noble creature’s eye sockets.  He then snatched up the badger’s sword and began childishly stabbing the other badgers in the back as they napped or when they were on the toilet.
            The second rank of badgers were armed with chainsaws and lawnmowers.  Tiddles watched in horror as his young kittens were turned into mince… very slowly… starting at the tail.  Many of them had cuter names than he could bear to remember and yet they were quickly reduced to just so much taco meat.
            Tiddles pathetic crotch-stabbing finally gained him access to the bunker.  Inside he found himself face to face with the psychotic Colonel Kurtzsten.  Kurtzsten’s insanity was legendary.  The Colonel was known to wring cats like a damp dishtowel while screaming “I love you so very much”.  The Colonel would also hug them until their eyes flew out and their guts squirted out their anus like a frog’s tongue.  The Colonel would also stroke them so hard their spine snapped and suffered an irresistible urge to chew on their little noses.

            “KITTY” screamed the babbling Kurtzsten. 
            Tiddles could smell that the Colonel’s underwear had taken the full strain of the excitement.
            “I’ve come to rescue Primate Brian” said Tiddles stoically.
            “KITTY.”
            “Which… now that I think about it… seems odd…” Tiddles continued.  “Why would I be rescuing a monkey when the war’s between dogs and cats and the evil badger coalition?”
            “KITTY.”
            “One second” Tiddles said and fished his orders from his pocket and studied them more closely.  “Ah…” he said as he realised that most proper orders didn’t end in “and I hope you fucking die screaming.”
            “KITTY.”
            Hands closed around Tiddles’ mid-section before he could react.  He felt his hips being rotated three-hundred and sixty degrees.  Tiddles felt his eyes straining at their sockets and his organs straining at his ring.
            “KITTY.”

            He must fight back somehow… if only to have the dignity of dying with his lunch still inside.  He reached with his paw, trying to reach for The Colonel’s carotid artery.  Yet the Colonel only wrung harder.
            “I LOVE KITTY” screamed The Colonel.
            Tiddles felt a cool breeze on his lower intestine.  It would soon be too late… by the time his pancreas popped out it would be too late to cram everything back in.  He redoubled his efforts and yet found himself groping only at air.

            “KITTY.”
            Suddenly he felt his paw touch something.  Without thinking twice he closed his paw around it and swung.  The machete embedded itself in The Colonel’s skull.  Tiddles found himself falling to the ground.
            “Ow” mewed Tiddles as he stared down and looked at his back legs pointing in entirely the wrong direction.  “Ow” he said again as he tentatively reached down with his paw and began pushing his digestive tract back into his anus.
            “The Kitty…” whispered the dying Colonel Kurtzsten, “The Kitty…”
            “That was all rather pointless” said Tiddles and died because he’d not washed his paw before he’d put his innards back in.  Then he was run over by a tank.

            Fifty years later they finally built a monument to the nine thousand cats that died that day.  It’s down a back alley behind a chip shop.  It’s a small plaque, mounted three inches off the ground behind a bin.  It simply reads “Cats Are Shitty Fuckers ” and tramps piss on it.

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