Terry Pratchett - Monstrous Regiment

And, now, it wasn’t that good things were happening, it was just that bad things had stopped. The old women still grumbled, but they were left to grumble. No one had any directions, no one had a map, no one was quite certain who was in charge. There were arguments and debates on every street corner. It was frightening and exhilarating. Every day was an exploration. Polly had worn a pair of Paul’s old trousers to clean the floor of the big bar, and had got barely a “hurrumph” from anyone.

Oh, and the Girls’ Working School had burned down, and on the same day two slim masked figures had robbed a bank. Polly had grinned when she heard that, and hoped that Tonker and Lofty would one day find a way to eat chocolates in a great big room where the world was a different place.

Shufti, who’d somehow always be Shufti to Polly even if the rest of the world now called her Betty again, had moved into The Duchess. Her baby was called Jack. Paul doted on it.

And now…

Someone had been drawing in the gents’ privy again. Polly couldn’t wash it off, so she contented herself with correcting the anatomy. Then she swooshed the place clean—at least, clean by pub urinal standards—with a couple of buckets, and ticked off the chore, just as she did every morning.

When she arrived back in the bar, there were a group of worried men there, talking to her father. They looked mildly frightened when she strode in.

“What’s happening?” she said.

Her father nodded to Gummy Abbens, and everyone stepped back a little. What with the spittle and the bad breach, you never wanted a conversation with Gummy to be particularly intimate.

“The swede-eatersh is at it again!” he said. “They’re gonna invade ’cos the Prince saysh we belong to him now!”

“It’s all down to him being the Duchess’s distant cousin,” said Polly’s father.

“But I heard it still wasn’t settled!” said Polly. “Anyway, there’s still a truce!”

“Sheems like he’s shettling it,” said Gummy.

The rest of the day passed at an accelerated pace. There were groups of people talking urgently in the streets, and a crowd around the gates to the town hall. Every so often a clerk would come out and nail another communique on the gates; the crowd would close over it like a hand, open again like a flower.

Polly elbowed her way to the front, ignoring the mutterings around her, and scanned the sheets.

The same old stuff. They were recruiting again. The same old words. The same old croakings of long dead soldiers, inviting the living to join them. General Froc might be female, but he was also, as Blouse would have said, “a bit of an old woman”. Either that or the heaviness of those epaulettes had weighed her down.

Kissing don’t last. Oh, the Duchess had come alive before them and turned the world upside down for a space and maybe they had all decided to be better people, and out of certain oblivion had come a space to breathe.

But then… had it really happened? Even Polly sometimes wondered, and she had been there. Was it just a voice in their heads, some kind of hallucination? Weren’t soldiers in desperate straits famous for seeing visions of gods and angels? And somewhere in the course of the long winter the miracle had faded, and people had said “yes, but we’ve got to be practical.”

All we were given was a chance, thought Polly. No miracle, no rescue, no magic. Just a chance.

She walked back to the inn, her mind buzzing. When she got there, a package was waiting. It was quite long, and heavy.

“It came all the way from Scritz on the cart,” said Shufti excitedly. She’d been working in the kitchen. It had become, now, her kitchen. “I wonder what it can be?” she said pointedly.

Polly levered the lid off the rough wooden crate, and found that it was full of straw with an envelope lying on top of it. She opened it.

Inside was an iconograph. It looked expensively done, a stiff family group with curtains and a potted palm in the background to give everything a bit of style. On the left was a middle-aged man looking proud; on the right was a woman of about the same age, looking rather puzzled but nevertheless pleased because her husband was happy; and here and there, staring at the viewer with variations of smile and squint, and expressions extending from interest to a sudden recollection that they should have gone to the toilet before posing, were children ranging from tall and gangly to small and smugly sweet.

And sitting on a chair in the middle, the focus of it all, was Sergeant-major Jackrum, shining like the sun.

Polly stared, and then turned the picture over. On the back was written, in big black letters: “SM Jackrum’s Last Stand!” and, underneath, “Don’t need these.”

She smiled, and pulled aside the straw. In the middle of the box, wrapped in cloth, were a couple of cutlasses.

“Is that old Jackrum?” said Shufti, picking up the picture.

“Yes. He’s found his son,” said Polly, unwinding a blade. Shufti shuddered when she saw it.

“Evil things,” she said.

“Things, anyway,” said Polly. She laid both the cutlasses on the table, and was about to lift the box out of the way when she saw something small in the straw at the bottom. It was oblong, and wrapped in thin leather.

It was a notebook, with a cheap binding and musty yellowing pages.

“What’s that?” said Shufti.

“I think it’s his address book,” said Polly, flicking through the pages.

This is it, she thought. It’s all here. Generals and majors and captains, oh my. There must be… hundreds. Maybe a thousand! Names, real names, promotions, dates… everything…

She pulled out a white pasteboard rectangle that had been inserted like a bookmark. It showed a rather florid coat of arms and bore the printed legend:

Someone had crossed out the “p” in “frep” and pencilled in an “e” above it.

It was a sudden strange fancy…

How many ways can you fight a war? Polly wondered. We have the clacks now. I know a man who writes things down. The world turns. Plucky little countries seeking self-determination… could be useful to big countries with plans of their own.

Time to grab the cheese.

Polly’s expression as she stared at the wall would have frightened a number of important people.

They would have been even more concerned at the fact that she spent the next several hours writing things down, because it occurred to Polly that General Froc had not got where she was today by being stupid, and therefore she could profit from following her example. She copied out the entire notebook, and sealed it in an old jam jar, which she hid in the roof of the stables. She wrote a few letters. And she got her uniform out of the wardrobe and inspected it critically.

The uniforms that had been made for them had a special, additional quality that could only be called… girlie. They had more braid, they were better tailored, and they had a long skirt with a bustle rather than trousers. The shakos had plumes, too.

Her tunic had a sergeant’s stripes. It had been a joke . A sergeant of women. The world had been turned upside down, after all.

They’d been mascots, good-luck charms… And, perhaps, on the march to PrinceMarmadukePiotreAlbertHansJosephBernhardtWilhelmsberg a joke was what everyone needed. But, maybe, when the world turns upside down, you can turn a joke upside down too. Thank you, Gummy, even though you didn’t know what it was you were teaching me. When they’re laughing at you, their guard is down. When their guard is down, you can kick them in the fracas.

She examined herself in the mirror. Her hair, now, was just long enough to be a nuisance without being long enough to be attractive, so she brushed it and left it at that. She put the uniform on, but with the skirt over her trousers, and tried to put aside the nagging feeling that she was dressing up as a woman.