"That's Corporal, thank you!"
"I apologize for the lapse. Now... go on..." Clogston opened his bag and produced a pair of half-moon spectacles, which he put on, and took out a pencil and something white and square. "Whenever you're ready?" he added.
"Sir, are you really going to write on a jam sandwich?" said Polly.
"What?" The major looked down, and laughed. "Oh. No. Excuse me. I really mustn't miss meals. Blood sugar, you know..."
"Only it's oozing, sir. Don't mind us. We've eaten."
It took an hour, with many interruptions and corrections, and two more sandwiches. The major used up quite a lot of notebook, and occasionally had to stop and stare at the ceiling.
"...and then we were thrown in here," said Polly, sitting back.
"Pushed, really," said Igorina. "Nudged."
"Mmm," said Clogston. "You say Corporal Strappi, as you knew him, was... suddenly very ill at the thought of going into battle?"
"Yessir."
"And in the tavern in Pl¨¹n you really kneed Prince Heinrich in the fracas?"
"In or about the fracas, sir. And I didn't know it was him at the time, sir."
"I see you haven't mentioned the attack on the hilltop where, according to Lieutenant Blouse, your prompt action got the enemy code book..."
"Not really worth mentioning, sir. We didn't do much with it."
"Oh, I don't know. Because of you and that nice man from the newspaper the Alliance has had two regiments trotting around in the mountains after some guerrilla leader called 'Tiger'. Prince Heinrich insisted, and is in fact in command. He is, you could say, a sore loser. Very sore, according to rumour."
"The newspaper writer believed all that stuff?" said Polly, amazed.
"I don't know, but he certainly wrote it down. You say Lord Rust offered to let you all go home quietly?"
"Yessir."
"And the consensus was that he could..."
"Stick it up his jumper, sir."
"Oh, yes. I couldn't read my own writing. J... U... M..." Clogston carefully wrote the word in capital letters, and then said: "I am not saying this, I am not here, but some... senior... people on our side are wondering if you would just quietly go...?"
The question hung in the air like a corpse from a beam.
"I'll put that down as 'jumper' too, then, shall I?" said Clogston.
"Some of us have got nowhere to go to," said Tonker.
"Or no one to go with," said Shufti.
"We haven't done anything wrong," said Polly.
"Jumper it is, then," said the major. He folded up his little spectacles and sighed. "They won't even tell me what charges are going to be made."
"Being Bad Girls," said Tonker. "Who are we fooling, sir? The enemy wanted just to be quietly rid of us, and the general wants the same thing. That's the trouble about the good guys and the bad guys. They're all guys!"
"Would we have got a medal, sir, if we'd been men?" Shufti demanded.
"Yep. Certainly. And Blouse would have been promoted on the spot, I imagine. But right now we're at war, and this might not be the time - "