How do they rise up

[regshoe]

I re-read Night Watch over the weekend. It's one of my favourite Discworld books, and I felt like commemorating the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May.

It is as good and heart-wrenching as ever. I don't have a huge amount to say about it, but I appreciate it a lot. <3

The occupants of these graves had died for something. In the sunset glow, in the rising of the moon, in the taste of the cigar, in the warmth that comes from sheer exhaustion, Vimes saw it.

History finds a way. The nature of events changed, but the nature of the dead had not. It had been a mean, shameful little fight that ended them, a flyspecked footnote of history, but they hadn't been mean or shameful men. They hadn't run, and they could have run with honour. They'd stayed, and he wondered if the path had seemed as clear to them then as it did to him now. They'd stayed not because they wanted to be heroes, but because they chose to think of it as their job, and it was in front of them—

And now I'm thinking about time travel, and the possibility of time travel as applied to Flight of the Heron (could 'history find a way' if one went back and changed the events of the Jacobite rising??? Who knows).

Comments

[luzula]

I am actually just now writing an epic Flight of the Heron alternate history fic where the war goes another way. The branching point is that both of the ships Charles Edward Stuart came on got through, instead of the second ship (which was carrying 700 soldiers and lots of arms) being attacked by a Royal Navy ship. No time travel, though. : )