Talk:Book:Monstrous Regiment/Annotations

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In fact The Lincolnshire Poacher seems to have been the official march of the 10th Foot of Lincolnshire, but why can't I search out any reference to the novelty hit of the fifties that used the tune to tell how "you'll never get rid of the bomp-bomp-bomp, no matter what you do"? OK, it was The Thing, by Phil Harris. It's always in there somewhere. --Old Dickens 15:12, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

The website of the American contingent of the Tenth of Foot (Bostonian Peeled Nuts) includes a wonderful page of songs of the era, including Polly Oliver - a rather different story from our Polly/Oliver's. --Old Dickens 17:59, 30 June 2008 (UTC)


Eternal Soldiers?

I've still got it in my head that Polly and the girls are also a re-imagining of the "eternal soldier" types most famously used by Sven Hassel in his series of pulp-fictions about the 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment in WW2. Although the first book in the series, Legion of the Damned, is itself a homage reworking of Erich-Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, updating the action to WW2 Nazi Germany and still using Remarque's original characters. A direct link back to Remarque's clasic anti-war novel - not to mention the classic film made from it - might be wholly in keeping with Pratchett's intentions here.

  • Sergeant Jackrum - Oberfeldwebel Willi Bauer, "The Old Man"
  • Corporal Strappi - Sergeant Heide, the die-hard Nazi, snoop, and informer
  • Maladict - Corporal "By The Grace of God" Josef Porta

I also wouldn't be surprised if a bit of Hašek’s classic satire Good Soldier Svejk[1] creeps in there as well... in fact, there are odd echoes.

The idiot-savant Svejk, a peasant who hides cunning under a stupid-seeming exterior, is assigned as batman to the officer Lieutenant Lukaš and at one point has to shave him (cf Polly and Blouse). The company cook is a mystic who claims to receive spiritualist messages from long-dead monarchs. The regiment belongs to an Army serving a dying empire (Austro-Hungary, which fits the central European vibe of "Borogravia") and in fact crumbles into defeat in its first serious engagement. Svejk spends a long time detached from his unit trying to find his way back to it evading capture and the enemy on both sides (he is nearly shot for spying and/or desertion)


--AgProv 08:55, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

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