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 sabre 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 onto 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 dem
anded, 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 stare.
“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 said. “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-more-patriotic-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?”
That was Shufti.
“I think it’s called deserting and they cut your head off,” said the voice of Maladict. “In my case that would be a drawback but you, dear Shufti, would find it puts a crimp in your social life.”
“I never kissed their damn picture,” said Tonker. “I swivelled it round when Strappi wasn’t lo
oking and kissed it on the back!”
“They’ll still say you kissed the Duchess, though,” said Maladict.
“You k-kissed the D-Duchess on the b-bottom?” said Wazzer, horrified.
“It was the back of the picture, okay?” said Tonker. “It wasn’t her real backside. Huh, wouldn’t have kissed it if it was!” There was some unidentified sniggering from various corners and just a hint of giggle.
“That was w-wicked!” hissed Wazzer. “Nuggan in heaven saw you d-do that!”
“It was just a picture, all right?” muttered Tonker. “Anyway, what’s the difference? Front or back, we’re all here together and I don’t see any steak and bacon!”
Something rumbled overhead. “I joined t’ see exciting forrin places and meet erotic people,” said Carborundum.
That caused a moment’s thought. “I think you mean exotic?” said Igor.
“Yeah, that kind of stuff,” agreed the troll.
“But they always lie,” said someone, and then Polly realized it was her. “They lie all the time. About everything.”
“Amen to that,” said Tonker. “We fight for liars.”
“Ah, they may be liars,” snapped Polly, in a passable imitation of Strappi’s yap, “but they’re our liars!”
“Now, now, children,” said Maladict. “Let’s try to get some sleep, shall we? But here’s a happy little dream from your Uncle Maladict. Dream that when we go into battle, Corporal Strappi is leading us. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
After a while, Tonker said: “In front of us, you mean?”
“Oh, yes. I can see you’re with me, Tonk. Right in front of you. On the noisy, frantic, confusing battlefield, where oh so much can go wrong.”
“And we’ll have weapons?” said Shufti wistfully.
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