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.

  • Lieutenant Blouse - Lieutenant Lowe
  • 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,narrowly evades arrest by the secret policeman Corporal Bretschneider (Strappi?) and on enlistment into the 91st, 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 and 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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