General Wellesley's Command

I was technically standing on what was a battle field but the battle had lagged recently so I wasn’t in any danger. Only the occasional stray bullet flew over my head and I paid them no mind. This might strike you as an odd place to have a meeting but I was used to it. As of yet though my appointment hadn’t shown up yet, so I lay down and got ready to take a nap. My regiment was fairly relaxed about discipline, mostly because we were never together long enough to get offended with one another. We answered to no one, worked with no one, carried out our orders and got new ones; it was very rare for us to meet like I was about to. I followed my orders to the letter however; it was the only way to stay alive. I had been ordered to meet Alice on this spot, at this time, on this day and that was what I was going to do.

“Let your guard down,” said Alice, standing up from among the bodies lying on the field. I wanted to kick myself but I didn’t give her the satisfaction of changing my facial expression. I should have looked for her more carefully; I should have seen her among the bodies. We were on a battlefield, our regiment was not immortal, had she honestly been lying there dead I might have walked past her. She might have been carrying around documents that would then fall into enemy hands.

“When did you get here?” I asked her, as she sat next to me, still gloating about her small triumph.

“Last night, during the battle, I fought my way here and then lay down with the dead. I wasn’t sure if the battle was going to slow down before we were supposed to meet so I figured I’d get here early just in case.” She stuck a bloody knife into the ground next to her; it looked like it had received a lot of hard use in the recent past. It was Alice’s weapon of choice and she could beat a man with a revolver with it. I nodded, she had been logical; it was what I would have done in her place as well. I had been too far away when I had received the order to attend the meeting to show up early. It had been marching double time that I had reached here when I did.

“So what are we supposed to do?” I asked, getting right to the point. Our regiment is full of loners and people who work best alone. Not all unsocial, just people who don’t like others getting in their way. We are good at what we do so we are given special privileges and a certain amount of leeway. On a few occasions however there were jobs that one of us couldn’t do and then they would make us a group again. If I had to work with Alice then something big was going to go down.

“My orders said that we were to go talk to General Wellesley after we had met up.”

“Where is he?” I asked, hoping it was close.

“He’s the one in charge of the troops in this battle,” Alice told me, making it clear that I was being stupid. I sighed, I was willing to fight for my country, and my king, with vicious loyalty, and it should be enough. Instead people seemed to think that I would care about army officers. My policy with army officers was that so long as they didn’t bother me I wouldn’t bother then, there was a reason I hadn’t done well in the conventional army.

To be continued...