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dank shed with ‘Tonker’ Halter, ‘Shufti’
Manickle, ‘Wazzer’ Goom and ‘Lofty’ Tewt. Maladict and Igor didn’t seem to have acquired
repeatable nicknames. She’d become Ozzer by general agreement.
Slightly to Polly’s surprise the boy now known as Wazzer had taken a small picture of the
Duchess out of his pack and had nervously hung it on an old nail. No one else said anything
as he prayed to it. It was what you were supposed to do.

They said the Duchess was dead . . .
Polly had been washing up when she’d heard the men talking late one night, and it’s a poor
woman who can’t eavesdrop while making a noise at the same time.
Dead, they said, but the people up at PrinceMarmadukePiotreAlbertHansJosephBernhardt-
Wilhelmsberg weren’t admitting it. That was ‘cos what with there being no children, and with
royalty marrying one another’s cousins and grannies all the time, the ducal throne would go
to Prince Heinrich of Zlobenia! There! Can you believe that? That’s why we never see her,
right? And there hasn’t been a new picture all these years? Makes you think, eh? Oh, they say
she’s been in mourning ‘cos of the young Duke, but that was more’n seventy years ago! They
say she was buried in secret and—
At which point her father had stopped the speaker dead. There are some conversations
where you don’t even want people to remember you were in the same room.
Dead or alive, the Duchess watched over you.

The recruits tried to sleep.
Occasionally, someone belched or expelled wind noisily, and Polly responded with a few
fake eructations of her own. That seemed to inspire greater effort on the part of the other
    Discworld 30 - Monstrous Regiment
    Discworld 30 - Monstrous Regiment
     
 
  
sleepers, to the point where the roof rattled and dust fell down, before everyone subsided.
Once or twice she heard people stagger out into the windy darkness, in theory for the privy
but probably, given male impatience in these matters, to aim much closer to home. Once,
coasting in and out of a troubled dream, she thought she heard someone sobbing.
Taking care not to rustle too much, Polly pulled out the much-folded, much-read, much-
stained last letter from her brother, and read it by the light of the solitary, guttering candle. It
had been opened and heavily mangled by the censors, and bore the stamp of the Duchy. It
read:

Dear all,
We are in ••••• which is ••• with a ••big thing with knobs. On ••••we will ••••• which is just
as well because ••• out of. I am keeping well. The food is ••••. ••• we’ll •• at the ••• but my
mate ••er says not to worry, it’ll be all over by •••• and we shall all have medals.
Chins up! Paul

It was in a careful hand, the excessively clear and well-shaped writing of someone who has
to think about every letter. She slowly folded it up again. Paul had wanted medals, because
they were shiny. That’d been almost a year ago, when any recruiting party that came past
went away with the best part of a battalion, and there had been people waving them off with
flags and music. Sometimes, now, smaller parties of men came back. The lucky ones were
missing only one arm or one leg. There were no flags.
She unfolded another piece of paper. It was a pamphlet. It was headed ‘From the Mothers
of Borogravia!’ The mothers of Borogravia were very definite about wanting to send their
sons off to war against the Zlobenian Aggressor and used a great many exclamation marks to
say so. And this was odd, because the mothers in Munz had not seemed keen on the idea of
their sons going off to war, and positively tried to drag them back. Several copies of the
pamphlet seemed to have reached every home, even so. It was very patriotic. That is, it talked
about killing foreigners.
Polly had learned to read and write after a fashion because the inn was big and it was a
business and