…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 looking 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.