Night Watch

eat it?”
    “Soap, Nobby. Remember the word.”
    “Right, Sarge. Then I’m gonna carve a—”
    “Where have the barricades gone, Nobby?”
    “That’ll cost—”
    “I am your sergeant, Nobby. We are not in a financial relationship. Tell me where the bloody barricades are!”
    “Um…prob’ly nearly to Short Street, Sarge. It’s all got a bit…metaphysical, Sarge.”

    Major Clive Mountjoy-Standfast stared blankly at the map in front of him, trying to find some comfort. He was, tonight, the senior officer in the field. The commanders had gone to the palace for some party or other. And he was in charge.
    Vimes had conceded that the city’s regiments had quite a few officers who weren’t fools. Admittedly, they got fewer the higher you went, but by accident or design every army needs, in key if unglamorous posts, men who can reason and make lists and arrange for provisions and baggage wagons and, in general, have an attention span greater than that of a duck. It’s their job to actually run things, leaving the commanding officer free to concentrate on higher matters.
    And the major was, indeed, not a fool, even though he looked like one. He was idealistic, and thought of his men as “jolly good chaps” despite the occasional evidence to the contrary, and on the whole did the best he could with the moderate intelligence at his disposal. When he was a boy, he’d read books about great military campaigns, and visited the museums and had looked with patriotic pride at the paintings of famous cavalry charges, last stands, and glorious victories. It had come as rather a shock, when he later began to participate in some of these, to find that the painters had unaccountably left out the intestines. Perhaps they just weren’t very good at them.
    The major hated the map. It was the map of a city. A city wasn’t a place for cavalry, for heaven’s sake! Of course, there had been casualties among the men. Three of them had been deaths. Even a cavalry helmet is not a lot of use against a ballistic cobblestone. And a trooper had been pulled off his horse in Dolly Sisters and, bluntly, mobbed to death. And that was tragic and terrible and, unfortunately, inevitable, once fools had decided to use cavalry in a city with as many alleys as Ankh-Morpork.
    The major didn’t think of his superiors as fools, of course, since that would follow that everyone who obeyed them were fools. He used the term “unwise,” and felt worried when he used it.
    As for the rest of the casualties, three of them had been men knocked senseless by riding into hanging shop signs while pursuing…well, people, when it came down to it, because with the smoke and darkness who could tell who the real enemy was? The idiots had apparently assumed that anyone running away was the enemy. And they’d been the luckier idiots, because men who rode their horses into dark alleys, which twisted this way and that and got narrower and narrower, and then realized that it had all gone quiet and their horse couldn’t turn around, well, they were men who learned how fast a man could run in cavalry boots.
    He totted up the reports. Broken bones, bruises, one man suffering from “friendly stab” by a comrade’s saber…
    He looked across the makeshift table at Captain Tom Wrangle of Lord Selachii’s Light Infantry, who glanced up from his own paperwork and gave him a weak smile. They’d been at school together, and Wrangle, the major knew, was a lot brighter than him.
    “What’s it look like to you, Tom?” said the major.
    “We’ve lost nearly eighty men,” said the captain.
    “What? That’s terrible!”
    “Oh, about sixty of them are deserters, as far as I can see. You tend to get that in this sort of mess. Some have probably just popped home to see dear ol’ mum.”
    “Oh, deserters. We’ve had some of those, too. In the cavalry! What would you call a man who leaves his horse behind?”
    “An infantryman? As for the rest, well, as far as I can see only six or seven of them went down to definite enemy action. Three men got stabbed in alleyways, for example.”
    “Sounds like enemy action to me. ”
    “Yes, Clive. But you were born in Quirm.”
    “Only because my mother was visiting her aunt and the coach was late!” said the major, going red. “If you cut me in half, you’d find Ankh-Morpork written on my heart!”
    “Really? Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Tom. “Anyway, getting murdered in alleyways is just