MR 3

[KingSize]

‘All right, all right! Hands off . . . well, you lot wouldn’t be able
to find ‘em . . .
and on with socks! Hup hup hi ho hup hup . . .’
Bodies were suddenly springing up or falling over all round Polly.
Their muscles
must have been obeying the voice directly, because no brain could have
got into gear
that quickly. Corporal Strappi, in obedience to the law of non-
commissioned officers,
responded by making the confusion more confusing.
‘Good grief, a lot of old women could shift better’n you!’ he shouted
with
satisfaction as people flailed around looking for coats and boots.
Tall in! Get shaved!
Every man in the regiment to be clean shaven, by order! Get dressed!
Wazzer, I’ve
got my eye on you! Move! Move! Breakfast in five minutes! Last one
there doesn’t
get a sausage! Oh deary me, what a bloody shower!’
The four lesser horsemen of Panic, Bewilderment, Ignorance and
Shouting took
control of the room, to Corporal Strappi’s obscene glee. Polly,
though, ducked out of
the door, pulled a small tin mug out of her pack, dipped it into a
water butt, balanced
it on an old barrel behind the inn, and started to shave.
She’d practised this, too. The secret was in the old cut-throat razor
that she’d
carefully blunted. After that, it was all in the shaving brush and
soap. Get a lot of
lather on, shave a lot of lather off, and you’d had a shave, hadn’t
you? Must have
done, sir, feel how smooth the skin is . . .
She was halfway through when a voice by her ear screamed: ‘What d’you
think
you’re doing, Private Parts?’
It was just as well the blade was blunt.
‘Perks, sir!’ she said, rubbing her nose. ‘I’m shaving, sir! It’s
Perks, sir!’
‘Sir? Sir? I’m not a sir, Parts, I’m a bloody corporal, Parts. That
means you calls
me “corporal”, Parts. And you are shaving in an official regimental
mug,” Parts, what
you have not been issued with, right? You a deserter, Parts?’
‘No, s— corporal!’
‘A thief, then?’
‘No, corporal!’
‘Then how come you got a bloody mug, Parts?’
‘Got it off a dead man, sir— corporal!’
Strappi’s voice, pitched to a scream in any case, became a screech of
rage. ‘You’re
a looter?’
‘No, corporal! The soldier . . .’
. . . had died almost in her arms, on the floor of the inn.
There had been half a dozen men in that party of returning heroes.
They must have
been trekking with grey-faced patience for days, making their way back
to little
villages in the mountains. Polly counted nine arms and ten legs
between them, and ten
eyes.
But it was the apparently whole who were worse, in a way. They kept
their
stinking coats buttoned tight, in lieu of bandages, over whatever
unspeakable mess lay
beneath, and they had the smell of death about them. The inn’s
regulars made space
for them, and talked quietly, like people in a sacred place. Her
father, not usually a
man given to sentiment, quietly put a generous tot of brandy into each
mug of ale, and
refused all payment. Then it turned out that they were carrying
letters from soldiers
still fighting, and one of them had brought the letter from Paul. He
pushed it across
the table to Polly as she served them stew and then, with very little
fuss, he died.
The rest of the men moved unsteadily on later that day, taking with
them, to give to
his parents, the pot-metal medal that had been in the soldier’s coat
pocket and the
official commendation from the Duchy that went with it. Polly had
taken a look at it.
It was printed, including the Duchess’s signature, and the man’s name
had been filled
in, rather cramped, because it was longer than average. The last few
letters were
rammed up tight together.
It’s little details like that which get remembered, as undirected
white-hot rage fills
the mind. Apart from the letter and the medal, all the man left behind
was a tin mug
and, on the floor, a stain which wouldn’t scrub out.
Corporal Strappi listened impatiently to a slightly adjusted version.
Polly could see
his mind working. The mug had belonged to a soldier; now it belonged
to another
soldier. Those were the facts of the matter, and there wasn’t much he
could do about
it. He resorted, instead, to the safer ground of general abuse.
‘So you think you’re smart, Parts?’ he said.
‘No, corporal.’
‘Oh? So you’re stupid, are you?’
‘Well, I did enlist, corporal,’ said Polly meekly. Somewhere behind
Strappi,
someone sniggered.
‘I’ve got my eye on you, Parts,’ growled Strappi, temporarily
defeated. ‘Just you
put a foot wrong, that’s all.’ He strode off.
‘Um . . .’ said a voice beside Polly. She turned to see another youth,
wearing
secondhand clothes and an air of nervousness that didn’t quite conceal
some bubbling
anger. He was big and red-haired, but it was cut so close that it was
just head fuzz.
‘You’re Tonker, right?’ she said.
‘Yeah, and, er . . . could I have a borrow of your shaving gear,
right?’
Polly looked at a chin as free of hair as a billiard ball. The boy
blushed.
‘Got to start sometime, right?’ he said defiantly.
‘The razor’ll need sharpening,’ said Polly.
‘That’s all right, I know how to do that,’ said Tonker.
Polly wordlessly handed over the mug and razor, and took the
opportunity to duck
into the privy while everyone else was occupied. It was the work of a
moment to put
the socks in place. Anchoring them was a problem, which she solved by
unwinding
part of one sock and tucking it up under her belt. They felt odd, and
strangely heavy
for a little package of wool. Walking a little awkwardly, Polly went
in to see what
horrors breakfast would bring.
It brought stale horse-bread and sausage and very weak beer. She
grabbed a
sausage and a slab of bread and sat down.
You had to concentrate to eat horse-bread. There was a lot more about
these days,
a bread made from flour ground up with dried pease and beans and
vegetable
scrapings. It used to be made just for horses, to put them in fine
condition. Now you
hardly ever saw anything else on the table, and there tended to be
less and less of it,
too. You needed time and good teeth to work your way through a slice
of horse-bread,
just as you needed a complete lack of imagination to eat a modern
sausage. Polly sat
and concentrated on chewing.
The only other area of calm was around Private Maladict, who was
drinking coffee
like a young man relaxing in a pavement cafe, with the air of someone
who has life
thoroughly worked out. He nodded at Polly.
Was that him in the privy? she wondered. I got back in just as Strappi
started
yelling and everyone started running around and rushing in and out. It
could have
been anyone. Do vampires use the privy? Well, do they? Has anyone ever
dared ask?
‘Sleep well?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. Did you?’ said Polly.
‘I couldn’t stand that shed, but Mr Eyebrow kindly allowed me to use
his cellar,’
said Maladict. ‘Old habits die hard, you know? At least,’ he added,
‘old acceptable
habits. I’ve never felt happy not hanging down.’
‘And you got coffee?’
‘I carry my own supply,’ said Maladict, indicating an exquisite little
silver and gilt
coffee-making engine on the table by his cup, ‘and Mr Eyebrow kindly
boiled some
water for me.’ He grinned, showing two long canine teeth. ‘It’s
amazing what you can
achieve with a smile, Oliver.’
Polly nodded. ‘Er . . . is Igor a friend of yours?’ she said. At the
next table Igor had
obtained a sausage, presumably raw, from the kitchen, and was watching
it intently. A
couple of wires ran from the sausage to a mug of the horrible vinegary
beer, which
was bubbling.
‘Never seen him before in my life,’ said the vampire. ‘Of course, if
you’ve met one
you have in a sense met them all. We had an Igor at home. Wonderful
workers. Very
reliable. Very trustworthy. And, of course, so good at stitching
things together, if you
know what I mean.’
‘Those stitches round his head don’t look very professional,’ said
Polly, who was
beginning to object to Maladict’s permanent expression of effortless
superiority.
‘Oh, that? It’s an Igor thing,’ said Maladict. ‘It’s a Look.
Like . . . tribal markings,
you know? They like them to show. Ha, we had a servant once who had
stitches all
the way round his neck, and he was extremely proud of them.’
‘Really?’ said Polly weakly.
‘Yes, and the droll part of it all was that it wasn’t even his head!’
Now Igor had a syringe in his hand, and was watching the sausage with
an air of
satisfaction. For a moment, Polly thought that the sausage moved . . .
‘All right, all right, time’s up, you horrible lot!’ barked Corporal
Strappi, strutting
into the room. ‘Fall in! That means line up, you shower! That means
you too, Parts!
And you, Mr Vampire, sir, will you be joining us for a morning’s light
soldiering? On
your feet! And where’s that bloody Igor?’
‘Here, thur,’ said Igor, from three inches behind Strappi’s backbone.
The corporal
spun round.
‘How did you get there?’ he bellowed.
‘It’th a gift, thur,’ said Igor.
‘Don’t you ever get behind me again! Fall in with the rest of them!
Now . . .
Attention!’ Strappi sighed theatrically. ‘That means “stand up
straight”. Got it? Once
more with feeling! Attention! Ah, I see the problem! You’ve got
trousers that are
permanently at ease! I think I shall have to write to the Duchess and
tell her she
should ask for her money back! What are you smiling about, Mr Vampire
sir?’
Strappi positioned himself in front of Maladict, who stood faultlessly
to attention.
‘Happy to be in the regiment, corporal!’
‘Yeah, right,’ mumbled Strappi. ‘Well, you won’t be so—’
‘Everything all right, corporal?’ asked Sergeant Jackrum, appearing in
the
doorway.
‘Best we could expect, sergeant,’ sighed the corporal. ‘We ought to
throw ‘em
back, oh dear me, yes. Useless, useless, useless . . .’
‘Okay, lads. Stand easy,’ said Jackrum, glancing at Strappi in a less
than friendly
way. ‘Today we’re heading on down towards Plotz, where we’ll meet up
with the
other recruiting parties and you’ll be issued with your uniforms and
weapons, you
lucky lads. Any of you ever used a weapon? You have, Perks?’
Polly lowered her hand. ‘A bit, sarge. My brother taught me a bit when
he was
home on leave, and some of the old men in the bar where I worked gave
me some, er,
tips.’ They had, too. It was funny to watch a girl waving a sword
around, and they’d
been kind enough when they weren’t laughing. She was a quick learner,
but she’d
made a point of staying clumsy long after she’d got the feel for the
blade, because
using a sword was also ‘the work of an Man’ and a woman doing it was
an
Abomination unto Nuggan. Old soldiers, on the whole, were on the
easygoing side
when it came to Abominations. She’d be funny just as long as she was
useless, and
safe as long as she was funny.
‘Expert, are yer?’ said Strappi, grinning nastily. ‘A real fencin’
genius, are yer?’
‘No, corporal,’ said Polly meekly.
‘All right,’ said Jackrum. ‘Anyone else—’
‘Hang on, sarge, I reckon we’d all like a bit of instruction from
swordmeister
Parts,’ said Strappi. ‘Ain’t that right, lads?’ There was a general
murmuring and
shrugging from the squad, who recognized a right little bullying
bastard when they
saw one but, treacherously, were glad he hadn’t picked on them.
Strappi drew his own sword. ‘Lend him one of yours, sarge,’ he said.
‘Go on. Just
a little bit of fun, eh?’
Jackrum hesitated, and glanced at Polly. ‘How about it, lad? You don’t
have to,’ he
said.
I’ll have to sooner or later, Polly thought. The world was full of
Strappies. If you
backed away from them, they only kept on coming. You had to stop them
at the start.
She sighed. ‘Okay, sarge.’
Jackrum pulled one of his cutlasses out of his sash and handed it to
Polly. It looked
amazingly sharp.
‘He won’t hurt you, Perks,’ he said, while looking at the smirking
Strappi.
‘I’ll try not to hurt him either, sir,’ said Polly, and then cursed
herself for the idiot
bravado. It must have been the socks talking.
‘Oh, good,’ said Strappi, stepping back. ‘We’ll just see what you’re
made of,
Parts.’
Flesh, thought Polly. Blood. Easily cut things. Oh, well . . .
Strappi waved his sabre like the old boys had done, down low, in case
she was one
of those people who thought the whole idea was to hit the other man’s
sword. She
ignored it, and watched his eyes, which was no great treat. He
wouldn’t stick her, not
mortally, not with Jackrum watching. He’d try for something that’d
hurt and make
everyone laugh at her. That was the Strappi type through and through.
Every inn
counted one or two amongst its regulars.
The corporal tested her more aggressively a couple of times, and
twice, by luck,
she managed to knock the blade out of the way. Luck would run out,
though, and if
she looked like putting up a decent show Strappi would sort her out
good and proper.
Then she remembered the cackled advice of old Gummy Abbens, a retired
sergeant
who’d lost his left arm to a broadsword and all his teeth to cider: ‘A
good swordsman
‘ates comin’ up against a newbie, gel! The reason bein’, he don’t know
what the
bugger’s gonna do!’
She swung the cutlass wildly. Strappi had to block it, and for a
moment the swords
locked.
That the best you can do, Parts?’ the corporal jeered.
Polly reached out and grabbed his shirt. ‘No, corporal,’ she said,
‘but this is.’ She
pulled hard and lowered her head.
The collision hurt more than she’d hoped, but she heard something
crunch and it
didn’t belong to her. She stepped back quickly, slightly dizzy, “with
the cutlass at the
ready.
Strappi had sunk to his knees, blood gushing from his nose. When he
got up,
someone was going to die . . .
Panting, Polly appealed wordlessly to Sergeant Jackrum, who had folded
his arms
and was looking innocently at the ceiling.
‘I bet you didn’t learn that from your brother, Perks,’ he said.
‘No, sarge. Got that from Gummy Abbens, sarge.’
Jackrum suddenly looked down at her, grinning. ‘What, old Sergeant
Abbens?’
‘Yes, sarge!’
‘There’s a name from the past! He’s still alive? How is the evil old
sot?’
‘Er . . . well preserved, sarge,’ said Polly, still trying to get her
breath.
Jackrum laughed. ‘Yeah, I’ll bet. Did his best fighting in bars, he
did. And I’ll bet
that’s not the only trick he told you about, eh?’
‘No, sir.’ And the other men had scolded the old boy for telling her,
and Gummy
had chuckled into his cider mug, and anyway it had taken Polly a long
time to find out
what ‘family jewels’ meant.
‘Hear that, Strappi?’ said the sergeant to the cursing man dribbling
blood on to the
floor. ‘Looks like you was lucky. But there’s no prizes for fighting
fair in a melee,
lads, as you will learn. All right, fun over. Go and put some cold
water on that,
corporal. It always looks worse than it is. And that’s an end of it,
the pair of you. That
is an order. A word to the wise. Understood?’
‘Yes, sarge,’ said Polly meekly. Strappi grunted.
Jackrum looked at the rest of the recruits. ‘Okay. Any of the rest of
you boys ever
held a stick? Right. I can see we’re going to have to start slow and
work up . . .’
There was another grunt from Strappi. You had to admire the man. On
his knees,
with blood bubbling through the hand cupping his injured nose, he
could find time to
make life difficult for someone in some small way.
‘Private Bloodfnucker hnas a fnord, fnargeant,’ he said accusingly.
‘Any good with it?’ said the sergeant to Maladict.
‘Not really, sir,’ said Maladict. ‘Never had training. I carry it for
protection, sir.’
‘How can you protect yourself by carrying a sword if you don’t know
how to use
it?’
‘Not me, sir. Other people. They see the sword and don’t attack me,’
said Maladict
patiently.
‘Yes, but if they did, lad, you wouldn’t be any good with it,’ said
the sergeant.
‘No, sir. I’d probably settle for just ripping their heads off, sir.
That’s what I mean
by protection, sir. Theirs, not mine. And I’d get hell from the League
if I did that, sir.’
The sergeant stared at him for a while. ‘Well thought out,’ he
mumbled.
There was a thud behind them and a table overturned. Carborundum the
troll sat
up, groaned, and crashed back down again. At the second attempt, he
managed to stay
upright, both hands clutching his head.
Corporal Strappi, now on his feet, must have been made fearless by
fury. He
headed for the troll in a high-speed strut and stood in front of him,
vibrating with rage
and still oozing blood in sticky strings.
‘You ‘orrible little man!’ he screamed. ‘You—’
Carborundum reached down and, with care and no apparent effort, picked
the
corporal up by his head. He brought him to one crusted eye and turned
him this way
and that.
‘Did I join th’ army?’ he rumbled. ‘Oh, coprolite . . .’
‘This is affnault on a fnuperior officer!’ screamed the muffled voice
of the
corporal.
‘Put Corporal Strappi down, please,’ said Sergeant Jackrum. The troll
grunted, and
lowered the man to the floor.
‘Sorry about dat,’ he said. ‘Thought you was a dwarf.’
‘I dnemand this man is affrested for—’ Strappi began.
‘No you don’t, corporal, no you don’t,’ said the sergeant. ‘This is
not the time. On
your feet, Carborundum, and get in line. Upon my oath, you try that
little trick one
more time and there will be trouble, understand?’
‘Yes, sergeant,’ growled the troll, and knuckled himself to his feet.
‘Right, then,’ said the sergeant, stepping back. ‘Now today, my lucky
lads, we’re
goin’ to learn about something we call marching . . .’
They left Plün to the wind and rain. About an hour after they’d
vanished round a
bend in the valley, the shed they’d slept in mysteriously burned down.
There have been better attempts at marching, and they have been made
by
penguins. Sergeant Jackrum brought up the rear in the cart, shouting
instructions, but
the recruits moved as if they’d never before had to get from place to
place. The
sergeant yelled the swagger out of their steps, stopped the cart and
for a few of them
held an impromptu lesson in the concepts of ‘right’ and ‘left’ and, by
degrees, they
left the mountains.
Polly remembered those first days with mixed feelings. All they did
was march,
but she was used to long walks and her boots were good. The trousers
ceased to chafe.
A watery sun took the trouble to shine. It wasn’t cold. It would have
been fine, if it
hadn’t been for the corporal.
She’d wondered how Strappi, whose nose was now about the same colour
as a
plum, was going to handle the situation between them. It turned out
that he intended
to deal with it by pretending it hadn’t happened, and also by having
as little as
possible to do with Polly.
He didn’t spare the others, although he was selective. Maladict was
left strictly
alone, as was Carborundum; whatever else Strappi was, he wasn’t
suicidal. And he
was bewildered by Igor. The little man did whatever stupid chore
Strappi found for
him, and he did it quickly, competently, and giving every impression
of someone
happy in his work, and that left the corporal completely mystified.
He’d pick on the others for no reason at all, harangue them until they
made some
trivial mistake, and then bawl them out. His target of choice was
Private Goom, better
known as Wazzer, who was stick-thin and round-eyed and nervous and
said grace
loudly before meals. By the end of the first day, Strappi could make
him throw up just
by shouting. And then he’d laugh.
Only he never really laughed, Polly noted. What you got instead was a
sort of
harsh gargling of spit at the back of the throat, a noise like
ghnssssh.
The presence of the man cast a damper on everything. Jackrum seldom
interfered.
He often watched Strappi, though, and once when Polly caught his eye,
he winked.
On the first night a tent was shouted off the cart by Strappi and
shouted up and,
after a supper of stale bread and sausage, they were shouted in front
of a blackboard
to be shouted at. Across the top of the board Strappi had written WHAT
WE ARE
FIGHTING FOR and down the side he had written 1, 2, 3.
‘Right, pay attention!’ he said, slapping the board with a stick.
There’s some who
think that you boys ought to know why we are fighting this war, okay?
Well, here it
comes. Point One, remember the town of Lipz? It was viciously attacked
by
Zlobenian troops a year ago! They—’
‘Sorry, but I thought we attacked Lipz, didn’t we, corporal? Last year
they said—’
said Shufti.
‘Are you trying to be smart, Private Manickle?’ Strappi demanded,
naming the
biggest sin in his personal list.
‘Just want to know corporal,’ said Shufti. He was stocky, running to
plump, and
one of those people who bustle about being helpful in a mildly
annoying way, taking
over small jobs that you wouldn’t have minded doing for yourself.
There was
something odd about him, although you had to bear in mind he was
currently sitting
next to Wazzer, who had enough odd for everybody and was probably
contagious . . .
. . . and had caught Strappi’s eye. There was no fun in having a go at
Shufti, but
Wazzer, now, Wazzer was always worth a shout.
‘Are you listening, Private Goom?’ he screamed.
Wazzer, who had been sitting and looking up with his eyes closed,
jerked awake.
‘Corporal?’ he quavered, as Strappi advanced.
‘I said, are you listening, Goom?’
‘Yes, corporal!’
‘Really? And what did you hear, may I ask?’ said Strappi, in a voice
of treacle and
acid.
‘Nothing, corporal. She’s not speaking.’
Strappi took a deep, delighted breath of evil air. ‘You are a useless,
worthless pile
of—’
There was a sound. It was a small, nondescript sound, one that you
heard every
day, a noise that did its job but never expected to be, for example,
whistled or part of
an interesting sonata. It was simply the sound of stone scraping on
metal.
On the other side of the fire Jackrum lowered his cutlass. He had a
sharpening
stone in his other hand. He returned their group gaze.
‘What? Oh. Just maintaining the edge,’ he said innocently. ‘Sorry if I
interrupted
your flow there, corporal. Carry on.’
A basic animal survival instinct came to the corporal’s aid. He left
the trembling
Wazzer alone, and turned back to Shufti.
‘Yes, yes, we attacked Lipz, too—’ said Strappi.
‘Was that before the Zlobenians did?’ said Maladict.
‘Will you listen?’ Strappi demanded. ‘We valiantly attacked Lipz to
reclaim what
is Borogravian territory! And then the treacherous swede-eaters stole
it back . . .’
Polly tuned out a little at this point, now that there was no
immediate prospect of
seeing Strappi decapitated. She knew about Lipz. Half the old men who
came and
drank with her father had attacked the place. But no one had expected
them to want to
do it. Someone had just shouted, ‘Attack!’
The trouble was the Kneck River. It wandered across the wide, rich,
silty plain like
a piece of dropped string, but sometimes a flash flood or even a big
fallen tree would
cause it to crack like a whip, throwing coils of river round areas of
land miles from its
previous bed. And the river was the international border . . .
She surfaced to hear: ‘. . . but this time everyone’s on their side,
the bastards! And
you know why? It’s ‘cos of Ankh-Morpork! Because we stopped the mail
coaches
going over our country and tore down their clacks towers, which are an
Abomination
unto Nuggan. Ankh-Morpork is a godless city—’
‘I thought it had more than three hundred places of worship?’ said
Maladict.
Strappi stared at him in a rage that was incoherent until he managed
to touch
bottom again. ‘Ankh-Morpork is a godawful city,’ he recovered.
‘Poisonous, just like
its river. Barely fit for humans now. They let everything in -
zombies, werewolves,
dwarfs, vampires, trolls . . .’ He remembered his audience, faltered
and recovered. ‘. .
. which in some cases can be a good thing, of course. But it is a
foul, lewd, lawless,
overcrowded mess of a place, which is why Prince Heinrich loves it so
much! He’s
been taken over by it, bought by cheap toys, because that’s the way
Ankh-Morpork
plays it, men. They buy you, they will you stop interrupting! What’s
the good of me
trying to teach you stuff if you’re going to keep on asking
questions?’
‘I was just wondering why it’s so crowded, corp,’ said Tonker. ‘If
it’s so bad, I
mean.’
‘That’s because they are a degraded people, private! And they’ve sent
a regiment
up here to help Heinrich take over our beloved Motherland. He has
turned aside from
the ways of Nuggan and embraced Ankh-Morpork’s godlessn— godawful-
ness.’
Strappi looked pleased at having spotted that one, and went on, ‘Point
Two: in
addition to its soldiers, Ankh-Morpork has sent Vimes the Butcher, the
most evil man
in that evil city. They are bent on nothing less than our
destruction!’
‘I heard that Ankh-Morpork was just angry that we cut the clacks
towers down,’
said Polly.
‘They were on our sovereign territory!’
‘Well, it was Zlobenian until—’ Polly began.
Strappi waved an angry finger at her. ‘You listen to me, Parts! You
can’t get to be
a great country like Borogravia without making enemies! Which leads me
on to Point
Three, Parts, who’s sitting there thinking he’s so smart. You all are.
I can see it. Well,
be smart about this: you might not like everything about your country,
eh? It might
not be the perfect place, but it’s ours. You might think we don’t have
the best laws,
but they’re ours. The mountains might not be the prettiest ones or the
tallest ones, but
they’re ours. We’re fighting for what’s ours, men!’ Strappi slammed
his hand over his
heart.
‘Awake, ye sons of the Motherland!
Taste no more the wine of the sour apples . . .’
They joined in, at various levels of drone. You had to. Even if you
just opened and
shut your mouth, you had to. Even if you just went ‘ner, ner, ner’,
you had to. Polly,
who was exactly the kind of person who looks around surreptitiously at
times like
these, saw that Shufti was singing it word-perfectly and Strappi
actually did have tears
in his eyes. Wazzer wasn’t singing at all. He was praying. That was a
good wheeze,
said one of the more treacherous areas at the back of Polly’s mind.
To the bewilderment of all, Strappi continued - alone - all through
the second
verse, which nobody ever remembered, and then gave them a smug, I’m-
morepatriotic-
than-you smile.
Afterwards, they tried to sleep on as much softness as two blankets
could provide.
They lay there in silence for some time. Jackrum and Strappi had tents
of their own,
but instinctively they knew that Strappi at least would be a sneaker
and a listener at
tent flaps.
After about an hour, when rain was drumming on the canvas, Carborundum
said:
‘Okay, den, I fink I’ve worked it out. If people are groophar stupid,
then we’ll fight
for groophar stupidity, ‘cos it’s our stupidity. And dat’s good,
yeah?’
Several of the squad sat up in the darkness, amazed at this.
‘I realize I ought to know these things, but what does “groophar”
mean?’ said the
voice of Maladict in the damp darkness.
‘Ah, well . . . when, right, a daddy troll an’ a mummy troll—’
‘Good, right, yes, I think I’ve got it, thank you,’ said Maladict.
‘And what you’ve
got there, my friend, is patriotism. My country, right or wrong.’
‘You should love your country,’ said Shufti.
‘Okay, what part?’ the voice of Tonker demanded, from the far corner
of the tent.
‘The morning sunlight on the mountains? The horrible food? The damn
mad
Abominations? All of my country except whatever bit Strappi is
standing on?’
‘But we are at war!’
‘Yes, that’s where they’ve got you,’ sighed Polly.
‘Well, I’m not buying into it. It’s all trickery. They keep you down
and when they
piss off some other country, you have to fight for them! It’s only
your country when
they want you to get killed!’ said Tonker.
‘All the good bits in this country are in this tent,’ said the voice
of Wazzer.
Embarrassed silence descended.
The rain settled in. After a while, the tent began to leak. Eventually
someone said,
‘What happens, um, if you join up but then you decide you don’t want
to?’