//------------------------------// // Chapter 1 // Story: The Blueblood Papers: Bound By Blood // by Raleigh //------------------------------// The Blueblood Papers: BOUND BY BLOOD Prince Blueblood and Operation Sunburn Explanatory note: The following extract is from what is now commonly referred to in our circle of memorialists by the somewhat unimaginative name of ‘The Blueblood Papers’. The rather more dramatic names proposed by my sister with a peculiar focus on the word ‘blood’, more befitting the sort of picaresque adventures that my nephew’s life had inspired and he later despised, has not gone unnoticed, and appear to have been adopted by the more casual readers of this work who I suspect are reading this extracts for the purposes of light entertainment than serious scholarly study. While it was not my intention upon finding and compiling these extracts, this behaviour leads me to consider the possibility of heavily editing these texts further to be suitable for wider publication within the next two hundred years after all living, mortal memory of these events has expired. This fifth extract concerns his involvement in Operation Sunburn, another one of Queen Chrysalis’ ambitious secret plots to conquer Equestria. It follows on directly from the previous extract, which described the passing of the Twilight Sparkle Reforms, the Battle of Virion Hive, his short-lived role as the military governor of that place, and the exposing of a war crime committed by Equestrian soldiers. The present instalment will be of historical importance as it provides a unique perspective into a variety of fascinating topics that have only just recently become of interest to historians, and perhaps offers one convincing answer to a question that has been debated heavily since the end of the conflict: was Operation Sunburn merely a half-baked idea by an ambitious Purestrain, or a genuine attempt to knock Equestria out of the war with a single, devastating strike? As with the previous extracts I have done my utmost to maintain the integrity of Prince Blueblood’s original text. Editing has been limited to correcting his occasional lapses in spelling, punctuation, and grammar in order to ensure that the text is readable, though I have restrained myself from touching his fondness for the semi-colon. As a memorialist, though his powers of recollection have resulted in a startlingly accurate and vivid description of the historical events he had personally witnessed, his tendency to ignore a great deal of what happened elsewhere that did not directly affect him can be frustrating to those readers unfamiliar with the historical context. Therefore, I have continued to provide explanatory comments in the text where appropriate, which will be in parenthesis, italicised, and in red ink. Where even further elucidation has been necessary, I have included extracts from additional sources. H.R.H. Princess Celestia *** Our maps referred to it simply as ‘Hill 70’. I am all but certain that the local heathens who lived in its shadow had a rather more eloquent name for it (one that evoked exotic images of a desolate but hauntingly beautiful landscape and of the primitive herds of noble savages who had fiercely defended their independence from Changeling oppression for centuries, but was really only the native word for ‘hill’), but thanks to me having had the great misfortune to make a last stand upon its barren summit it will always be remembered by ponies everywhere merely as ‘Hill 70’. As I think back on the events that had led to this famous last stand (one of several I’ve had to endure, and to think most ponies only get one) and my subsequent capture by the enemy, I cannot help but feel a peculiar sense of sadness at that tiny, trivial thing, as though some minor part of a rich, albeit primitive, culture had been unwittingly erased by my bumbling attempts at mere survival. I like to imagine that some wizened old crone, skin turned to leather by age and the sun, remembers what it was called before Yours Truly set hoof upon the hill and ruined everything, as usual. The immediate events that had led to one hundred ponies of the Night Guards and me huddled on that hill are likely well-known enough to all ponies, and Faust knows that I’ve spent enough time re-telling the heavily abridged version at parties and in private members’ clubs as though it was a fun anecdote to tell and not six of the most miserable days and nights I’ve had to endure in my entire life. A not-insignificant section of that appalling motion picture allegedly based on my life is dedicated to what happened on that bloody hill, most of it as utterly divorced from reality as Fleur-de-Lis’ attempts to prove her fidelity with Fancy Pants. Some popular rock group even wrote a song about it decades later, and to this day I still wince in embarrassment whenever I spot a young fan wearing one of their T-shirts with a grotesque, muscle-bound caricature of my younger self printed beneath a very pointy logo. [Prince Blueblood is likely referring to the song ‘Prince in Black’ by the heavy metal band Barding, who write songs about military history. At the time of writing, they have released three songs directly about me and two about Luna (the ones about Nightmare Moon don’t count).] I sometimes wonder how, out of all of the misadventures that I have suffered through over those long unhappy years spent in service to Princesses and Country, that it is this one in particular that seems to endure the most in the Equestrian public imagination, at least enough for the modern equivalent of travelling minstrels to sing triumphant songs about what was, in effect, a defeat. Ponies seem to love a good last stand, the more hopeless the odds the better, and if one has never had the opportunity to partake in one it might be easy to see why -- the image of the doomed hero and his plucky little band of loyal soldiers, all motivated by a sense of duty and honour that transcends their own lives, spitting in the eye of an overwhelming force is a powerful, inspiring one. More simply, however, it might be the case that this myth allows ponies to turn such a defeat into a glorious victory of sorts; one that is not of the purely material sort, had gained no ground and had accomplished nothing to aid in our cause, but only in that irrational, emotive sense that tends to drive ponies more than they like to admit. Needless to say, I hated every second that I spent on that bloody hill, but if a foolish sense of uncharacteristic generosity on my part hadn’t placed me on the summit of that geological protuberance at precisely the wrong time then perhaps we might have lost this war. Readers of my previous memoirs, whoever they are, and indeed those ponies who know me enough to look past the myths bolstered by my self-serving lies might be shocked that I think so much of myself as to actually have an effect on the grand events of history, but I implore you, dear reader, not to mistake this for misplaced ego on my part, for I merely found myself in a position to be able to encourage other ponies to do such things on my behalf while others heaped the credit upon me instead. I shall start, as ever, by putting these events in their correct order and starting from the beginning, as it were. That mess in Virion Hive was over, as far as my own involvement was concerned, of course, but a scandal of such magnitude would take a great deal of time for other ponies to unpack, and its legacy would linger on like a cake icing stain on an ivory dinner jacket. I know that Princess Celestia had to take numerous breaks from being Warmistress of the mightiest armies the world had seen to go and placate the local native Badlands ponies each time Earthshaker threatened to withdraw from the Treaty of Dodge Junction, and what further concessions that irate little cuckold and the other heathens managed to squeeze out of her I dreaded to think. [I made a public apology to the ponies of Virion Hive, made a donation of bits from the Royal Treasury, and reaffirmed Equestria’s commitment to fighting for the safety and Harmony of all ponies everywhere. However, the Medusita Massacre continued, and still continues in some way, to be an obstacle in Equestrian-Badlands relations. Maintaining the support of the local tribes was a major concern for the remainder of the war, especially as Changeling propagandists exploited the tragedy.] Fearing that I might be implicated somehow by overzealous bureaucrats eager to add another scalp to the growing pile, I had taken the unusual step of requesting a transfer back to frontline duties with my old regiment, where I would be much too busy to answer summons for inquiries and such. It was not a decision that I had taken lightly, as one would imagine, but I was reasonably certain that the continuing upward trajectory of my reputation would be sufficient as to keep me out of the way once General Market Garden started drawing arrows on her maps again, which, as it happened, was much sooner than I had felt comfortable with. For once, it seemed that Lady Luck had taken a look at the old accounts book and realised that I was very much in arrears. A rare, golden opportunity fell right into my lap when I was offered the position of an independent commissar attached to the Two Sisters Brigade, which I practically seized at with both hooves with all the desperation of a drowning pony to a life-preserver. That is to say, I made my decision the instant I had finished reading the letter from Princess Luna, but then waited a couple of days before responding to give everypony else the impression that this was a very difficult decision that I had positively agonised over before conceding to my aunt’s wisdom. You see, the Virion Hive business had caused yet another shake-up in the halls of the Ministry of War and the Royal Commissariat, not just the firing of Iron Hoof and Second Fiddle making everypony else look fearfully at the safety of their own careers. The answer to the question of who stops commissars from misbehaving again had turned out to be ‘even more commissars’, according to Princess Luna, and the concept of the ‘independent’ commissar was born. If anypony dared to ask me if I’d much rather be with my old regiment I merely had to look solemn and explain the importance of proper administration, and trust that Colonel Sunshine Smiles was quite capable of running his own regiment by now without me poking my nose in. Besides, I’d still be close enough to make the sorts of unexpected visits that officers just love, so it was not as though I was abandoning them forever. As it happened, that proved to be a non-issue, but I’ll get to that. The idea behind the independent commissar, as far as I could work it out once I had Cannon Fodder distil the lengthy articles sent to me into a few terse sentences, was that they would monitor their fellows in black uniforms for incompetence, cowardice, corruption, and so on, just as they were supposed to supervise officers and the enlisted. Just who was supposed to watch them in turn had apparently yet to be decided, and I pondered this question until I then realised that this was an eternal problem with equine society as a whole, and I was unlikely to succeed where brainier ponies had failed. I imagined Princess Luna assumed that she would be monitoring them, which left a further question that came dangerously close to heresy. At any rate, the job seemed ideal for my purposes, at least on paper, as it would keep me close enough to the action that ponies would not start thinking that I was suffering from its absence, without actually putting me on the field directly in the way of Changeling fangs. Reality has a tendency to set fire to that paper and then dance a merry jig upon the still-smoking ashes. I barely had the time to unpack my pencils at my shiny new desk at Brigade Headquarters when the news came that we would be on the march once again. Over the course of the years I discovered that it was possible to define generals according to two axes: the energetic/lazy and the competent/incompetent spectrums. This Hardscrabble fellow turned out to be reasonably competent, but most worrying to me was his place high up on the ‘energetic’ side of the scale (nowhere near as bad as the worst possible combination of energetic and incompetent, but Twilight Sparkle’s bureaucratic axe had done away with enough of those for me to safely dismiss from thought). I expect ponies reading this might desire an appraisal of this divisive individual, at once the pony who won us the war, as if the hundreds of thousands of ponies-at-arms executing his orders in the field had nothing to do with it, with his relentless drive and keen understanding of the requirements of modern warfare, and an appalling butcher whose lack of finesse in strategy led to unnecessarily high casualties. Those ponies will have to be disappointed, I’m afraid, for military historians and the like - the sorts whose nether regions become all warm and tingly with the mere mentions of flanking manoeuvres and encirclements - are far more qualified than I to dispense such judgements. I will instead provide merely what I had made of the pony named Hardscrabble who happened to wear the stars of a field marshal on his strained uniform. My first impressions of the stallion were less than encouraging; when I first laid eyes on the chap as he visited his generals at the front I merely saw a small, slight earth pony stallion with a rather scruffy little beard and a well lived-in uniform that he hadn’t bothered to button up all the buttons for. I recall feeling rather put-out standing there in my neatly-pressed uniform, with polished buttons, medals, and horseshoes glistening in the bright, hot sun, but in his defence, there were a lot of buttons on service dress uniforms in those days. If he did not exactly look like the sort of pony who would break the back of Chrysalis’ swarms then he certainly did not sound like it either; his voice was a soft midwestern Equestrian accent, the sort that gave one the impression of white picket fences and smiling neighbours waving at you as you walked down the street, thus imparting a certain uneasy sense of overt friendliness that simply had to be an affectation masking something sinister. This turned out to be his infamous drinking habit, which, while I am unsuited to pass judgement considering my own fondness for alcohol, has been very greatly exaggerated over the years. I can only recall a hoof-full of occasions where he had gotten drunk, and I must make plain and clear that he was never inebriated while he was actually engaged in the business of commanding the largest army Equestria has ever fielded. The first time I saw it was partially my fault, however, as I had encouraged him; he matched me drink for drink, certainly, but whereas my constitution with regards to alcohol was considerable, his was not. I’d decided to host a small, private gathering to welcome the new Field Marshal to his new prestigious command in one of the function rooms of the officer’s mess in Virion Hive, but it was mostly to commiserate that its luxuries would no longer be available to me once Hardscrabble started ordering Market Garden to stop counting cans of beans here and take the fight to the enemy. Naturally, I served whisky from my own private collection, aiming to impress him with my generosity, of course. So there he was, a rather shy and quiet stallion who seemed to be embarrassed by the attention I, a prince of the realm, was heaping upon him, who stumbled through small talk and, mercifully I might add, was reluctant to drone on about the war in the manner that certain other generals would. Nevertheless, he listened attentively as I spoke some nonsense about hot summers in Coltcutta in comparison to the climate here with Colonel Sunshine Smiles. He had initially refused my offer of a drink, saying, “That’s very kind of you, sir, but I’m afraid I must decline.” “Oh come now!” I said, loud enough that the other officers in the room stopped to turn and look at us. I held out the glass of golden liquor in my magic. “This is a fifty year old Dalwhinny. Imagine that; fifty years it’s spent waiting in a barrel for you, Field Marshal, so it’d be a shame to disappoint it.” I felt Sunshine Smiles kick me gently in the hindleg with his. I looked at him, mildly insulted, but I saw the grave look on his mutilated face. As he shook his head at me, with only the tiniest of motions in the horizontal plane, I wondered if I’d overstepped my mark and those rumours I’d heard were not as exaggerated as I’d first thought. It was too late, and Hardscrabble had already downed it with enthusiasm. Sunshine Smiles raised an eyebrow and I grinned inanely when my guest of honour announced that it was delicious and asked for another. The evening then proceeded promisingly enough, but as we carried on discussing the best curry houses in Canterlot, two drinks turned into three, then four, and so on, and very quickly Hardscrabble had become insensible with it while I remained merely pleasantly tipsy. Drink affects ponies in different ways, of course; one might become the most fascinating raconteur in the room, another might simply fall asleep, or one might become angry and belligerent. Through inebriation one can glimpse into another pony’s true nature, which is why I tend to encourage it when I meet a new pony for the first time, and thus far it has been a reliable if crude indicator of such things -- alcomancy, if you will. However, Hardscrabble had turned into a babbling, drooling wreck of a stallion. So, we sat him in a chair in the corner of the room with a glass of magically-chilled water as he muttered incoherencies about missing his wife and the multitudes of failures he had endured in civilian life; hardly the most encouraging results of that test. The party atmosphere evaporated like spilt water in the desert outside after that, and failed to return after Hardscrabble’s adjutant turned up to drag him off to bed, giving me the dirtiest of looks possible in the process. Perhaps I was just not meant to enjoy parties anymore, I thought. The following morning I found a little note on a coaster in my dinner jacket’s pocket; written in Sunshine Smiles’ neat and elegant mouth-writing, it suggested that I ought to go and say ‘sorry’ to Field Marshal Hardscrabble at my earliest convenience. It occurred to me that goading a recovering alcoholic into relapsing might not be a particularly good look for Yours Truly, especially when I was under a great deal more scrutiny than usual, so I thought I ought to go and apologise to him just in case. In my defence, I thought that such things were exaggerated, as rumours always are. He already had a reputation for it, but as I hadn’t been paying much attention to this stallion until the path of his life had unfortunately bisected mine, I really thought it couldn’t have been quite that bad. However, the Changelings would seize upon this little incident and run a very successful little smear campaign, which was so enduring that it’s all common ponies who aren’t interested in the finer points of strategy remember about him these days. It’s impossible to know for certain, but I do hope that the party I’d attempted to host was not the main contributing factor to that myth. I found Hardscrabble in his new office in the castle in Virion Hive pouring over a map table, adopting that peculiar stance generals like, with their forehooves spread wide on the surface so that they might hover over it like a crane. As I saw him there, I could not help but wonder if they believed that stooping over their maps in such a manner helped them plan battles better. His adjutant, the stern-faced, thoroughly humourless unicorn who carried him away the previous night, had asked me to hoof over my hipflask before allowing me inside. Most of his things were still packed up in boxes even after a week of living here, indicating to me that he hadn’t intended on staying for very long and that he was planning on yet another merry excursion into Changeling territory in the near future. Stealing a glance at the maps, as though I could discern anything from the arcane scribblings and multitudes of arrows, I could make an assumption that he was simply going to throw everything at his disposal at the enemy until they or we were all dead. As it happened, I wasn’t too far off the mark there. “Good Morning, sir,” he said, cheerily enough as I approached. Hardscrabble didn’t seem to have suffered much, and I assumed that was down to the work of his adjutant, who continued to linger by the door to keep a wary eye on me. Perhaps I was not alone in having Cannon Fodder, and every good officer out there is only remembered as such because they have their own aide behind them whom history will forget. “Good Morning,” I replied, taking off that rather ugly cap of mine. The following took a considerable amount of effort, but somehow I scraped together the necessary courage to look him in the eye and say, “I’m sorry about that last night. I didn’t know.” Hardscrabble looked up from his precious maps and cast an analytical eye over me, during which I had affected to look as contrite as I could possibly manage with a mild hangover. “I thought everypony knew,” he said. “Iron Hoof does, at least. He never fails to bring it up at every given opportunity - the command of this entire theatre has been given to a drunkard. I hadn’t touched the stuff in months until last night, but when a prince insists on it, it’s very difficult to say ‘no’.” He didn’t need that much encouragement, I thought, but I held my tongue. “Iron Hoof is a tired, old fool desperate to hold onto his failing career,” I said with a shrug, “and I don’t pay attention to gossip. As I said, I am sorry.” That was only a partial lie; I certainly keep an ear out for gossip, but only when it involves me or ponies important enough to warrant my attention. Until he suddenly soared into the limelight, I simply hadn’t had cause to even think about him. [It is very unlikely that Blueblood was completely unaware of Hardscrabble’s problems with alcohol, indeed this contradicts what he wrote just a page earlier. Hardscrabble’s unfortunate reputation was already entrenched by this point in the war, spread by Changeling propaganda, and was very frequently brought up against him. Knowing my nephew, he might have felt some guilt about this or saw a possible reflection of his own problems with alcohol, and chose to try to deny it even in his own private memoirs.] “I accept your apology, sir. Let us speak no more of it.” With that, he turned his attention back to the set of maps arrayed out before him on the oversized table, the size of which I theorised was proportional to an officer’s rank and ego. I think he expected me to leave, and ordinarily I’d have been perfectly happy to let him get on with the rather tedious business of planning an offensive, which, as I had the misfortune to find out over the course of my career, tended to involve a lot more than simply drawing large arrows all over maps. However, to say that the two of us had gotten off on the wrong hoof was something of an understatement, so it couldn’t hurt to put on a bit of the old Prince Blueblood charm and try and ingratiate myself into the Field Marshal’s good books again. “Already planning the next offensive?” I asked, having struggled and failed to come up with anything else to say besides commenting on the weather; Hardscrabble’s preference to listen rather than pontificate, a trait most certainly not shared by his colleagues, made small talk not directly related to the one thing in common we shared, being soldiers of Equestria, rather difficult. Hardscrabble lifted his head up again, and gave me a look that implied that he was exerting an inordinate amount of effort to hold back on a sarcastic comment about what else he could possibly be doing with all of these maps. “We’ve squandered far too much time sitting pretty in Virion Hive, sir. We must retake the initiative and advance.” “Of course, and about time too,” I lied; sitting pretty in Virion Hive for the rest of the war was precisely what I had wanted to do before Second Fiddle had lost what remained of his sanity and honour. “If you don’t mind me asking, Field Marshal, but just what is your plan?” “It’s quite simple enough,” he said, with a little self-satisfied smile. “We fight, and we keep on fighting until we win.” “That…” I trailed off, trying to think of a way to put it delicately, but my wit failed me and I gave up. “That sounds rather too simple.” Hardscrabble hopped down off the table and trotted around it to approach me. He was rather short for an earth pony, so the top of his head roughly came up to my chin, and that, I pondered, might have explained the failure of his farm to produce anything of worth. “The art of war isn’t as complicated as ponies pretend it is,” he said, “you must find your enemy, hit them as hard as you can, as fast as you can, again and again until they submit.” I wagered that there were a great many ponies in the Royal Academy, writers of countless volumes on tactics and strategy, who would strongly disagree with that distillation of the art of war down into a single maxim. I, as an amateur on the subject who had picked up a few bits and pieces by mere osmosis thanks to this awful job, was in no position to pass judgement, but I did it anyway: “Doesn’t that also sound a little too simple?” “I don’t think so.” Hardscrabble shook his head. “That’s what it all comes down to. The only problem with the Changelings is that they’re reluctant to fight us in a straight-on battle. Market Garden had the right idea, just her method was too slow and costly. We must therefore be bold and strike directly into the Changeling heartlands; Chrysalis will not be able to ignore three Equestrian armies running rampant in her own backyard, and she’ll have no time for her secret plans before we take her last Hive.” So that was that, apparently; there was a paradox emerging, in which in order to hasten the end of this horrid war and secure the peace Equestria had apparently descended into the depths of barbarism to preserve (already its own little paradox), we must accelerate the escalation of violence and bloodshed to a degree not seen by ponies since the darkest nights of the Nightmare Heresy. That if I was to return home to the life of indolent, decadent luxury that I sorely missed sooner rather than later, I must accept the even greater risk that I might not even live to see it again. The thought of it made me feel quite unwell, and I was glad that I had at least managed to tilt the odds further in favour of my survival by securing that coveted position as an independent commissar, but of course that bubble just had to be burst, too. With that, however, I wished him good luck in his planning and made my leave, remembering to collect my hipflask from his waiting adjutant as I was damned certain I would require the illicit comfort it brought sooner rather than later. Unlike other generals I’ve met - Market Garden in particular - Hardscrabble seemed to feel awkward about rambling on at length about his war-winning plans in detail to just any pony willing to stop and listen (which must have made the ponies in S.M.I.L.E. a little more relieved, for the main source of leaks to the enemy turned out to be simply their infiltrators overhearing gossip). I didn’t feel like pressing him further, and he certainly didn’t look as though he was about to divulge his entire plan right there and then, so all that was left was for me to slink back to my quarters and stew in anxiety, awaiting the inevitable call to arms once more. [Eavesdropping on conversations proved to be a cheap and invaluable source of intelligence for the Changelings during the war, which prompted the Ministry of Information to launch a campaign to put an end to this. These have gone on to be emblematic of the paranoia around Changeling infiltration at the time, with such posters as the now iconic ‘Keep it sub rosa’ showing a pony’s mouth plugged with a bouquet of roses. S.M.I.L.E. would also use this to feed false intelligence to the Changelings, as Chrysalis and her high command tended to trust everything their spies overheard. We have confirmed but classified reports that Market Garden was heavily involved in this.] As it turned out, I only had a few days’ grace before we were on the march again; not as much as I’d have liked, certainly, but given the atmosphere of the army as a whole then it was a miracle that they had managed to stretch it out as far as that. Everypony else was positively pulling at the lead to ‘have a go’ at the Changelings again, and the entire camp at Virion Hive was filled with a tremendous sense of anticipation, just like the lead-up to Celestia’s birthday celebrations. The arrival of a new general has that effect, and indeed I felt a strong sense of deja vu, as it was much of the same feeling as when General Market Garden took command of the 1st Army in what felt like aeons ago. I was almost looking forward to seeing how this one would disappoint everypony. In that time, I had done my very best to try and think of another way to get out of this offensive, fearing that the position of an independent commissar at Brigade HQ was not sufficient to keep me safely ensconced behind a desk. Ponies seemed to think that I was just as eager as they were, if not more so, to go and carve up the Changelings again, and as ever my protests to the contrary were taken in entirely the wrong way and garnered a great deal of unwanted sympathy. My attempts to explain the importance of having experienced commissars to guide the neophytes in their solemn duties of making sure their officers don’t get funny ideas about running away and watching out for signs of infiltration in the ranks were taken as false modesty, and I was assured, multiple times, that I’ll have my chance to once more bring the Princesses’ fury down upon the hated enemy soon enough. Trying to deflect that sort of talk with more lies about how I agreed with them, but I had to consider how I could do more good enabling other ponies to seize glory for Equestria, only had the opposite effect and I was soon inundated with offers to accompany their units for the next Big Push. It was only a matter of time before somepony that I couldn’t dismiss with an empty platitude came along and ruined it by granting what they thought was a favour, and it happened to be the pony I had least suspected. We had been marching south for a day, starting early in the morning, stopping at noon when it became far too hot for the ponies in armour to march, then starting again in the early evening, and finally stopping for camp late at night. After months of living in the relative luxury of a small office in Virion Hive, I would have to get used to living in a tent again for the foreseeable future, though at least Cannon Fodder could still carry my all-important drinks cabinet with us. Compared to the rest of the army, who bivouacked under a stunning night sky that I liked to believe Auntie Luna had made just for them, the tent still provided me with a modicum of privacy that was otherwise denied to the common soldiery. Therefore, I exploited the security of four walls and a roof of thin canvas to indulge in reading some of my personal mail; even out here, thrusting deeper into Chrysalis’ lands, Corporal Derpy Hooves made sure that the mail always got through. There was the usual array of nonsense - Ministry of Information pamphlets and yet another edition of the Equestrian Infantrypony’s Uplifting Primer - which I’d skim-read and then tossed aside to be better used as kindling for campfires later. A rather touching bit of fan mail sent from a mare, I hoped, detailing the very interesting and strenuous things she’d like to do to me, was kept for those particularly lonely nights out in the field. There was a letter from the Cutie Mark Crusaders, who had written to tell me that Saguaro was settling in quite well in ‘civilised’ Ponyville, despite the odd bit of culture shock when he became outraged at watching a villager wasting precious water on her flowers. He had even received his cutie mark, a cactus standing proud and alone in the empty desert, when he had discovered a source of freshwater when they had gotten lost in the Everfree Forest again. Quite what they were doing in that last untamed wilderness in the Equestrian heartland was not expounded upon. Odonata too, had sent a letter, which was so heavily redacted by the censor that I wondered why he had even bothered sending it anyway. As far as I could make out, for sometimes they get rather sloppy with the black marker pen and one can make out the hidden words if the letter is held up to the light of a candle in just the right way, she had been meeting with Celestia quite frequently, now that the Princess was Warmistress of Equestria, to discuss what she thought Chrysalis might do now. The answer seemed to be merely ‘accelerate her increasingly desperate schemes to end the war favourably’, now that Equestria seemed to be taking this war with the seriousness it deserved. Other than that, she mentioned that she had been confined to a comfortable apartment in the castle, albeit under very heavy guard as to be expected. She also mentioned that she had tried to organise a playdate between Elytra and Flurry Heart, Cadance and Shining Armour’s new daughter and my first cousin once removed, but the rulers of the Crystal Empire had ignored her letters. And that was how I found out that my cousin Cadance, perhaps my only true foalhood friend, was pregnant and had given birth -- a letter from a captured Changeling general. It was as I was reading this, with only a few guttering candles and the remainder of that bottle of the fifty-year-old Dalwhinny for company, when Sergeant Major Square Basher slipped into my tent. The big mare had to duck under the awning pole, as I had to lest I catch my horn on it, and she immediately pulled an apologetic and guilty expression when I looked up at her from the letters on my desk. She removed her cap, and pressed it against her chest tightly, crushing the wool fabric as she wrung it with her hoof in that peculiar manner the working classes do when meeting a pony on precisely the opposite end of the social spectrum. I was rather surprised to see her come into my tent uninvited and of her own accord, it was not like her, nor any of the enlisted ponies at all for that matter, to simply wander into an officer’s quarters unannounced and without a prior appointment. Indeed, it was only because I knew Square Basher, had worked, fought, and suffered on the gas-soaked hills overlooking Virion Hive with her, that I did not angrily demand that she leave me to my ‘work’. As a career soldier, whose entire adult life had been the old Royal Guard, I knew that she would not have intruded unless she felt that she had a very good reason to, and even then only if she had completely exhausted every other possible option. For her to come directly to me for something, it had to be serious. Square Basher stood there, with her front half in my tent and her rear out of it, and with the tent flap draped over her back like a stained cloak. Being in the camp and off-duty, she wore the simple uniform of a plain tunic made of undyed wool and the cap she was now squeezing against her broad chest. “I’m very sorry to disturb you, sir,” she said. Her entire demeanour was in stark contrast to the Sergeant Major routine she presented so perfectly well to the enlisted ponies of her company, now being of that same deferential nervousness the common pony tends to feel when in the company of a prince. “Not at all,” I said. “Please, sit down.” Square Basher hesitated, then apparently took my invitation as an order, and marched herself inside and sat on the faded old cushion opposite my desk, still with her cap pressed to her chest. “Thank you, sir.” As she sat there, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Square Basher at all since the hospital, where that Doctor Breathe Easy had, through whatever arcane and unnatural means she had devised, somehow repaired most of the damage to our lungs after the gas attack. I remembered seeing her tell heavily-sanitised stories about her lengthy career in the Royal Guard to the Cutie Mark Crusaders when they had unexpectedly broken into the military hospital, but after that there was that horrid slaughter in the breach and the business of running Virion Hive. Neither of us had the time or opportunity to catch up, as it were. Life in the military tended to leave very little time for socialising (unless one took a cavalier approach to one’s job as I did), especially across that social vast gulf between the officers and the enlisted ponies, for all manner of things could get in the way of any blossoming friendship, such as it was. Nevertheless, I did feel a little guilty about having unwittingly ignored her, especially since Captain Red Coat fell in battle, so I did the polite thing and asked her how she was. “I’m doing alright, sir,” she said in a manner that was clearly rehearsed. “And how’s the company?” I asked. Square Basher sucked in a deep, hissing breath through her teeth. “I’ve got a new officer to look after, sir. Captain Frostbite’s taken over the company from Captain Red Coat, and that’s what I’ve come to talk to you about.” I had a bad feeling about this already; when one has been in this sort of game for as long as I have, which I later sat down and worked out was only two years and three months, one develops a certain instinct for when a carefully-charted course for self-preservation was about to be run aground on the rocks, and usually without any particular malice intended at all. Perhaps I should have told her then that I was in fact too busy after all, but it was much too late for that. “Is he not settling in?” I asked, hoping that this was merely a matter of boosting the morale and confidence of a newly-promoted officer with a few choice platitudes. “He has a set of very large boots to fill. It can be daunting for a new officer to take the place of one who has fallen in battle, and for the stallions and mares to accept him.” “He’s fine, sir,” said Square Basher. “I’ll look after him, that’s what a sergeant does. But…” She trailed off, and stared into space as she tried to consider her next words. “We’re going into battle again soon, I can feel it. The soldiers all know what’s expected of them, to follow their orders and to fight like timberwolves when the time comes, and I keep them all in line for Captain Frostbite. I just thought, sir - if you wouldn’t mind, that is - it would do the Captain and the company some good if you were there too. You were there with us right at the beginning, in Black Venom Pass, then Fort Nowhere, and then Virion Hive.” There it was, I was being asked to once again put myself in mortal danger to be little more than a good luck charm to satisfy the vulgar superstitions of soldiers. I could have told her where she could take that ludicrous request, and perhaps the course of this war would have taken a very different turn if I had, but the big mare, appropriately nicknamed ‘Marezilla’ by the ponies she had made certain feared her more than the enemy, sat there before me with that damned puppy-dog expression on her scarred face. Nevertheless, despite the knowledge that such a request would be far more dangerous than anything Brigade HQ could possibly dream up for me (I was still a little more naive back then), I felt a peculiar sense of obligation towards Square Basher and the memory of Captain Red Coat; it is said that a soldier does not fight for the sort of lofty ideals poets and writers like to romanticise, such as Harmony, or country, or the Princesses, but for their friends. I personally never saw much point in wanting to fight in the first place, it all seemed like a tremendous waste, but there and then I began to have some inkling of the notion of fighting for friendship. “Of course,” I said, and I could feel my soul die a little inside with each word. “I would be honoured to.” Square Basher looked instantly relieved, and I feared that there might be more to it than merely giving a new officer an encouraging word or two just before the bullets started flying again. Had I known what was to follow, I’d have made up some excuse about Market Garden wanting me elsewhere and reassure her that this Captain Frostbite fellow was in perfectly safe hooves with her anyway, but how many times must one say that when looking back on one’s own life? Yet I felt compelled to indulge her in this little favour, and as she said an awkward goodbye and slipped out of my tent, I tried to reassure myself that the Equestrian war machine was now well-oiled, well-maintained, and running smoothly thanks to the tinkering of its bureaucratic mechanic Twilight Sparkle. It was not the same broken system that had placed the likes of Crimson Arrow, Scarlet Letter, Iron Hoof, and Second Fiddle in positions of power and authority -- nothing, now, could possibly go wrong.