Hunchmausen's Column!

We are standing, dear readers, beside a fine cobbled road, somewhere near the coast of Rotenburg. Two locals are deep in conversation. Their talk has ranged across the wide panoply of topics usual for locals in this part of Mittelheim: current affairs (who in the village currently is trying to tumble with Anya the barmaid); politics (who in the village has fallen out over the affections of Anya the barmaid); economics (apparently, in relation to Anya the barmaid, one rarely gets so many of them to the pound); science (if there were really such a thing as gravity, how does one explain the shape of Anya the barmaid's cleavage?); and philosophy (if there were no one else there in the forest with Anya the barmaid, could her cleavage really then be said to exist?) These weighty ruminations are interrupted by the sound of an approaching horde. The smell suggests some herd of beasts; the shouted orders suggests perhaps soldiers of some description; the shambling of the feet suggests an afternoon walk by a crowd of local alcoholics with only the very haziest conception of the relationship between right and left.

(Below) In a few moments the conundrum is resolved - this is a clearly a column of soldiers! Sadly, the cheering of the Rotenburg locals turns to boos when they realise that this is not a force of Burberry pirates come to liberate them by taking them into slavery, but a unit of landgravial troops that has come to try and restore the normal order of things.

As the Rotenburg force comes closer, a casual observer who was less wise to the ways of Mittelheim might be tricked by the uniforms into thinking that this was a formation of professional soldiers from the Age of Reason. Those in the know, of course, would understand that the words 'professional' and 'soldier' in Mittelheim are an oxymoron; though this wouldn't help most Mittleheimers who would no doubt think that an 'oxymoron' was simply a cow with numeracy problems. One might more accurately describe these troops as unprofessional soldiers from the Age of Reason; but this might, as others could fairly say, be deeply offensive to those European troops of the Seven Years War that were merely unprofessional. A separate scale of measurement would probably be required for the accurate assessment of these Rotenburg musketeers: a scale in which such descriptors as 'unprofessional' would simply be taken as read (though not by the soldiers themselves who, of course, can't read); and in which the  metrics would instead run at one end from such words as 'shambolic', 'bandy-legged', and 'priapic' for the better quality of men, through to words such as such as 'floppy', 'sticky' and 'necrotic' at the other. As to being from the Age of Reason, anyone with the smallest knowledge of the states of Mittelheim could say with some certainty that, if Reason had ever reached the frontiers of this region, then he or she would certainly have been stopped at the border and prevented from entering, on the grounds that they were bringing into Mittelheim qualities largely irrelevant to the normal functioning of things here.

(Above) At the head of the column of troops is our friend, Baron Hieronymous Karl Friedrich von Munchhausen. The baron is in Mittelheim incognito, and is hiding his identity by passing himself of as Baron Hunchmausen. Like any self-respecting military gentleman of the time, the baron has changed sides and is now in command of a force of Rotenberg troops destined for the coast to do battle with heathen pirates. He leads a weak battalion of three companies of militia, and a company of jager.  In theory, this should certainly be an adequate force for the task at hand. However, the baron has, over the past few days, had the opportunity to weigh up the strengths and weaknesses of his men, and the results weigh quite heavily towards the latter. The baron has concluded that what he has been given aren't so much the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. Rather, the metaphorical barrel has been turned over, and a considerable quantity of scraping has been done from the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. His troops are gurning loons: feral creatures; not intelligent in the normal sense, but equipped with the sort of low cunning exhibited by very short rats. Feeling at some risk from his own men, who might conceivably pillage and ravage the baron if he mistakenly dropped some honey on himself, Hunchmausen is now sure that, mercifully, action against the pirate enemy seems imminent ....