“SERGEANT SHAFTOE REPORTING as ordered, sir,” came a voice from the dark.

“I have got a letter addressed to you, Shaftoe,” answered a different voice from the dark—a college-cultivated voice. “As a training exercise, I thought we might sally forth in search of some source of light, so that I could do something other than run my fingers over it.”

“Captain Jenkins’s company gathered some brush on their ‘training exercise’ this afternoon, and are burning it yonder.”

“Ah, I phant’sied I smelled smoke. Where the devil did they find something to burn?”

“A wee sand-bar in the Meuse, three miles upstream. We’ve had our eye on it for several weeks. The French had not got to it yet, lacking swimmers. But Captain Jenkins’s company has a man who can dog-paddle, when he has to. Today, he had to. He got over to this sand-bar with a line, and stripped it bare while the French watched shivering, and threw stones, from the opposite bank.”

“That is the sort of initiative I look for in the Black Torrent Guards!” exclaimed Colonel Barnes. “’Twill serve them well in the years to come!”

The conversation to this point had been transacted through a wall of mildewy canvas, for Colonel Barnes was on the inside, and Sergeant Shaftoe the outside, of a tent. The sentences of Barnes were punctuated by thumping and clanking as he got sword, boot, peg-leg, and topcoat on. The tent was a ghostly cloud under starlight. It bulged at one end as Barnes pushed his way out through the flaps; then he became perfectly invisible. “Where are you?”

“Here.”

“Can’t see a bloody thing,” Barnes exclaimed, “it is an excellent training exercise.”

“You could be living in a house, with candles,” said Bob Shaftoe, not for the first time.

Indeed, Barnes had passed most of the winter in a house up the road from this, the winter camp of his regiment; but some piece of news from England, recently received and digested, had prompted him to vacate, to take up lodgings in a tent among his men, and to begin referring to everything they did as a training exercise. The change had been much noted but little understood. They’d not taken part in anything like a military engagement since half a year ago, when they had participated in King William’s successful siege of Namur. Since, they’d done naught but live on the land, like field-mice. And since the trees and brush had all long since been cut down and burnt, and the farms trampled to unproductive mud-flats, and the animals hunted and eaten, living on this land required some ingenuity.

The brush-fire was, as both men knew, on the opposite side of a swell in the earth, where Captain Jenkins’s company had made its camp. To get there, they had to walk through the camp of Captain Fletcher’s company, which in daylight would have taken all of thirty seconds. With a lanthorn it might have taken a minute or two. But the Black Torrent Guards’ last candle had vanished several days previously, and in the most ignominious way possible, viz. nicked from Colonel Barnes’s coat-pocket by rats when he ventured out to use the latrine, and carried away to be eaten. And so the passage through Captain Fletcher’s company’s camp was, as both men knew, to be an infinitely gradual shuffling and sliding through a three-dimensional labyrinth of tent-ropes and clotheslines. It seemed an opportune time to speak of difficult matters—for there was no way, in darkness, to look someone in the eye.

“Err…it is my duty to inform you,” said Bob, “that private soldiers James and Daniel Shaftoe are absent without leave.”

“Since how long?” asked Barnes, sounding interested, but not surprised.

“That might be debated. Three days ago, they claimed they had come upon the spoor and tracks of a feral pig, and requested leave to hunt it down. They vanished over the horizon, in the direction of Germany, not long after permission was granted.”

“Very good—an excellent training exercise.”

“When they did not return after one, then two days, yet their sergeant was disinclined to think the worst of them—”

“The expectation of bacon for breakfast had impaired his judgment. As my own mouth is almost too full of saliva for me to speak, I must say that I understand.”

“Now still Jimmy and Danny are not back. I must assume that they have deserted.”

“They trained only too well, and learned the lesson too soon,” Barnes reflected. “Now their lives shall be forfeit, if they are caught.”

“Oh, they shan’t be caught,” Bob assured him. “You forget that before I taught them to be English soldiers, Teague Partry taught them to be rapparees.”

“Do you want leave to hunt them down? It would be an excellent—”

“No, sir,” said Bob, “and would you please explain your incessant jesting about everything we do being a training exercise?”

“I have a soft spot in my heart for the men of my regiment—most of them, anyway,” said Barnes, “and would see as many of them as possible survive what is to come.”

“What, then, is to come?” Bob asked, “and how does brush-gathering and pig-chasing make us more fit for it?”

“This war is over, Bob. Ssh! Don’t tell the men. But you may be assured there’ll be no fighting in the year to come. We shall occupy this ground, as a bargaining-chit for diplomats to shove to and fro on a polished tabletop somewhere. But there’ll be no more fighting.”

“That is what is always claimed,” said Bob, “until a new front is opened, and a campaign launched.”

“True enough—in your boyhood,” said Barnes. “But you must adjust your thinking now, and take into account that the money is all gone. England has ninety thousand men under arms. She can afford perhaps nine thousand; and she is willing to pay for many fewer than that—especially if the Tories throw down the Juncto, as seems likely.”

“The Black Torrent Guards are an elite regiment—”

“You really must fucking listen to me, Shaftoe…”

Barnes’s voice was getting fainter and falling away aft.

“I am listening sir,” said Bob, “but mind you don’t stand still and declaim for too long in one place, lest mud swallow up your peg.”

“Shut up, Shaftoe!” said Barnes; but renewed sucking and squelching noises told that he had heard Bob’s counsel too late. There was a long grunt of effort terminated by a succulent pop as he drew his prosthesis out of the mire.

“Yes, sir.”

“It is all going away, man! Every bit of it. An elite regiment, you say? Then some draughty chamber in the Tower of London may be set aside, and a sign nailed to the door reading ‘King’s Own Black Torrent Guards,’ and if I am very fortunate, and if my lord Marlborough intercedes, and fights hard for us, I may be allowed to go behind that door from time to time and push a quill about. On frightfully important occasions of state, I may be prevailed upon to rake together a skeleton Company and dress them up in uniforms so that they may parade before a visiting Embassy, or some such. But I say to you, Bob, that a year from now everyone in this regiment, with a very few lucky exceptions, shall be a Vagabond. If Jimmy and Danny have deserted, and taken to the road, it is only because they have had the wit to anticipate this.”

“Mmph. I have oft wondered over the amount of time you spent in yonder house, over the winter, reading letters from London.”

“I know you have from the queer looks you sent my way.”

“Since the Year of Our Lord 1689,” said Bob, “I have spent all of about three weeks in England. As I cannot read, all that I know of the place now consists of rumors. Your predictions seem unlikely to me—if you are correct, it means England has gone mad. But I do not have knowledge of my own to set against yours, in a debate; and in any case I do not have the standing to over-rule you, sir, if you have made up your mind to turn your Regiment’s winter quarters into a training-ground for Vagabonds.”

“It is more than that, Shaftoe. For their own sakes, I would that these men would survive the coming lean years. And for England’s sake I would conserve this Regiment. Even if we be disbanded for some years, yet the day shall come when we are mustered again, and on that day I’d fain re-constitute the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards from this lot, and not, as is customary, from some random collection of criminals, shake-rags, and Irishmen.”

“You want them to stay alive—if possible honestly,” Bob translated, “and you want me to know where they are to be found, so that we can call them up again, if there is a need, and if there be money to pay them.”

“That is correct,” said Barnes. “Of course, we can’t tell them any of this!”

“Of course not, sir,” said Bob. “They’ll have to work it out for themselves.”

“As did Jimmy and Danny. Now! It is time to read your letter. Fetch me a burning bush and I shall play Jehovah to your Moses.”

Bizarre witticisms such as this were the price Bob Shaftoe had to pay for having a colonel who’d trained as a churchman. He trudged over to the feeble campfire that Captain Jenkins’s company had made in the midst of their encampment, requisitioned one uprooted shrub from their brush-pile, and shoved it into the coals until it began to burn. Then he hastened back to Barnes and held it up like a candelabra, from time to time waving it about to make it blaze up. Smoldering leaves snowed down upon the page and on the epaulets and the three-cornered hat of Barnes, and he shrugged or blew them off as he read.

“It is from your lovely Duchess,” said Barnes.

“I had guessed as much.”

Barnes read for a bit and blinked and sighed.

“Am I allowed to know that it says, sir?”

“It concerns your woman.”

“Abigail?”

“She is in a house not thirty miles from here…a house that is for the time being unguarded, as the proprietor has been locked up in the Tower of London. How fortuitous, Sergeant!”

“What is fortuitous, sir?”

“Don’t play the fool. Just at the moment when you must lay plans for a new life as an unemployed civilian, your two chief sources of distraction and gratuitous complications—Jimmy and Danny—have absented themselves, and you are presented with an opportunity to take a wife!”

“Take is an apt word in this case, sir, as she is the legal property of Count Sheerness.”

“Why should that trouble us? If Jimmy and Danny can run off in quest of a feral pig, cannot we steal you a wife?”

“What d’you mean we, sir?”

“I am altogether decided on it!” Barnes proclaimed, and thrust the corner of the page into the bush, setting it ablaze. “To establish you in a stable and happy domestic arrangement is to be a linch-pin of my strategy for keeping the Black Torrent Guards together! Besides which, it shall be an excellent training exercise.”