So early next morning she softly arose

[sovay]

I am eight pages into Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment* and already I can see that I may have to keep a sharp ballad lookout. Our heroine Polly has cut her hair, dressed in her brother's clothes, and enlisted as a soldier (in the Borogravian Army) under the name Oliver:

"Age?"

"Seventeen come Sunday, sir."

"Yeah, right," said the sergeant.

*I am convalescing on all the Terry Pratchett I've missed in the last several years. Yesterday was The Fifth Elephant, Thief of Time, and Night Watch. Today, I will be out of new Terry Pratchett. I may re-read Going Postal and Thud! anyway.

Comments

[skotodes.livejournal.com]

I was most upset about the sergeant, myself. (Was he Janet or Mildred?) There were a lot of strange things about him. He was very old, and seemed to have been a sergeant to everyone in the army. He always wore red. He loved war. At one point they sang a song with a line like "And the devil will be my sergeant".

And it turns out he was...a woman. Which doesn't explain any of the things that made him interesting. Maybe the foreshadowing of him being some kind of Small God of War was too obvious, and only there as a red herring. But that was still a pretty lame secret.

[sovay]

Janet and Mildred were two of the generals. I had figured from about the midpoint of the story (where everybody's gender had been revealed except Maladict's) that Jackrum would also turn out to be a woman, but I was still expecting some kind of supernatural revelation: when it didn't happen, I figured that was just me, because my default for mysteries is myth.

At one point they sang a song with a line like "And the devil will be my sergeant".

I want to see if that song exists or if Terry Pratchett made it up.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_jb/]

I thought the Sergeant and the Generals were great, but I thought the vampire was too much. He had enough going on with the coffee.