My Favorite Shards is the 1632 (Assiti Shards) part of My Favorite Things, a parody of My Favorite Things from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The Sound of Music, dedicated to all the fen who appreciate filk. It has references to these stories:
Verses 1, 5–8, 15–17, and 19–22 refer to Eric Flint’s novel 1632. The West Virginia town of Grantvile has been tranported, by means unknown, to the middle of Thuringia in the year 1631.
While investigating the inexplicable changes in landscape, a party from Grantville sees a group of oddly dressed men raping a woman and torturing a man at a farmhouse. They intervene, and bring the couple to town for medical care.
Mike Stearns and his men who plant them six feet under refers
to the mass grave left behind after Grantville’s people kill the
marauders. They bury the dead with a placard bearing a
stern warning:
We don’t know who these murdering raping bastards are that
we put here. Don’t much care either. If there are any more
of you out there, be warned. This area is now under the
protection of the UMWA. If you try to harm or rob anybody we
will kill you. There will be no further warning. We will not
negotiate. We will not arrest you. You will simply be dead. We
guarantee it. Go ahead. Try us.
Anna Braun (her name appears only in Anna’s Story, not in 1632 itself), a teenage girl who escaped from the raid, inadvertently bowling over Police Chief Dan Frost, seeks refuge in the barn of George Blanton, who mistakes her for a German tourist. She is wary of him, but he convinces her to eat macaroni and cheese, which he assumes all teenagers like. Despite the language barrier, he takes her in and later takes her parents in once they are well enough.
The residents of Grantville have organized a makeshift army with plans to destroy an invading Catholic mercenary army. In addition, they intend to lure out Protestant mercenaries lead by Ernst Hoffman, who have occupied the nearby town of Badenburg and are abusing the townsfolk under the guise of protecting them.
Gretchen Richter is a teenage camp follower, kidnaped by mercenaries after they murdered her parents. Gretchen has a surviving brother Hans, a surviving sister Annalise, a surviving grandmother Veronica, a baby Wilhelm, and a group of fellow victims whom she has taken under her wing. While Gretchen is a kind girl, she will do anything to protect those whom she has taken under her wing.
During the Battle of the Crapper
, Gretchen hides women and
children under a deserted outhouse. Jeff Higgins, is
one of four teenaged motorcycle riders Mike Stearns sends to warn
off Hoffman’s mercenaries:
Okay, Jeff. You and your buddies get over there. Right now. If
you can, warn off Hoffman’s men. But they probably won’t
listen to you, and I don’t want you taking any chances.
Don’t do anything else until the reinforcements arrive.
When Jeff sees
Gretchen threatened (Over my fucking dead body!
) by the mercenaries,
he ignores his orders and intervenes, followed in short order by
his friends.
After the battle, the town folks take the camp followers for hot
showers and meals. Jeff is convinced that while Gretchen now has
options, she will not believe it in time, and he resolves to marry
her as the only way to save her from a life of prostitution.
Since Gretchen’s English is minimal and Jeff has less
German, he resorts to using a dictionary to propose, to the
amusement of his friends. Gretchen offers to be his mistress,
telling him that he doesn’t have to do it, but Jeff insists
(Ja, ich muss.
). They eventually come to love each other.
Julie Sims, a Grantville cheerleader and champion
marksman, is first deployed as a sniper in an ambush of a
mercenary column threatening the university town of Jena, not long
after the Battle of the Crapper (around the same time Gretchen
Richter, in Jena herself, begins organizing the Committees of
Correspondence). Mike tests her resolve before she opens fire:
This isn’t target shooting, Julie. Or deer hunting…
One shot, one kill — and you’re killing men, not
animals. Men with faces you can see.
Her answer is not denial
but a story: she recalls crying like a baby over her first deer
(The deer was so pretty. And it had never done me any
harm.
). Turning to
her observer, Karen: Hey, Karen! Those guys look pretty to
you?
“Nope,” Karen answers. “Ugly bastards.
Mean looking, too. Look more like wild dogs than cute little
deer.” Julie, baring her teeth: That’s what I
thought. Hey, Karen! Watcha think they’ll do — to you
and me, I mean — if they get their hands on us?
“Won’t be trying to sweet-talk us into the backseat of
a car,” Karen mutters. Julie, solemnly: That’s the
whole problem with allowing men into combat. You guys are just too
emotional about the whole thing.
Then she drops one mercenary
after another without hesitation. When a shot goes wide, Uncle
Frank talks her through it (Just buck fever… you
aren’t wide, just off your elevation
), then scolds her
for her language — and gets mocked for his own hypocrisy in
return: You? Foul-mouth Frank himself? Ha!
Tilly holds the far bank of the Lech from a position his own side considers nearly impregnable — flanks anchored on fortifications, batteries massed in the center, the river and a marsh in front of it. Gustav II Adolf borrows Julie’s scoped rifle to study the ground for a way across anyway, then hands it back complaining of a distracting flaw: two black lines meeting in the center of the eyepiece — the reticle itself. Insulted (“royal temper be damned”), Julie takes the rifle back and drops one Bavarian officer after another at five hundred yards, on the king’s own order. She then glares at Gustav “with grotesque disregard for all proper etiquette in the presence of royalty” over his teasing — until he wins her over, and the two trade grins. Watching, his bodyguard Anders thinks of “a chipmunk and a bear beaming in mutual approval.”
Lapp and Finnish scouts riding with Gustav II Adolf spot a large cavalry column cutting cross-country through the Thuringenwald. He works out the target himself before anyone at Grantville has the slightest idea: too small a force for Suhl, wrong route for Saalfeld — a raid meant to destroy Grantville outright. Outnumbered five to one, he decides to pursue anyway, adopting the field alias “Captain Gars” along the way — unlike at the Lech, where Julie already knew exactly who he was. “Kind healers” is bitter irony: his Finnish cavalry were known for aggression, brutality, and sheer terror, driven home with grim determination — mercy and prisoners of war were not concepts they dealt in. That is the cure Grantville needs: the Finnish cavalry rout the surviving Croat raiders once they reach the school.
Much later, Croat cavalry — sent to destroy Grantville
outright — besiege Grantville High School. James Nichols
arms Julie Sims with one of the school’s two hunting rifles:
Can you handle a .30-06 semiautomatic? We’ve got two of
them, but they’re the only rifles in the whole damned
school.
Julie: Is that a joke? I can shoot anything!
Later, mid-battle, reloading, she needles him with his own
question thrown back in a mocking singsong: ‘Can you
handle a .30-06 semiautomatic, Ju-lie?’
Nichols, grinning,
offers his own rifle instead: Why don’t you do the
shooting and let me reload for you?
“Good idea,”
she growls. Relief arrives in the form of Finnish cavalry led by a
mysterious “Captain Gars” — who turns out to be
the same Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, Julie already knows
well from the Lech, still riding incognito.
To the Croats under fire, Julie is not a girl but a horror: “A few of the Croats, by now, understood that the murder was being rained upon them by a demon. A monster taking the form of a girl. A pretty one, too, to make the horror worse.” The joke is the mismatch: a cheerful show tune describing a body count that, played straight, is flatly NSFW. Measured against that reality, “demon” still grossly understates the case. She is closer kin to Ate come hot from hell, to the Furies, to Nemesis, and to the Norns — ruin, vengeance, retribution, and an inexorable, already-woven fate, all wearing a pretty girl’s face. The narration repeatedly calls her “the angel of death,” reaping the field with her rifle as a scythe; “those Croats who were foolish enough to spend time studying the window usually died within seconds.”
Once that siege is broken, Julie throws herself on the wounded king — “much like a chipmunk might embrace a bear,” the second time that simile is used of the two of them — fully aware exactly who he is, and loudly chewing him out for endangering himself.
Verses 2–4, 9–14, 18, and 23–28 refer back to 1632 and its sequels, filling in material added to the song after the verses above were first documented: Hans Richter’s full arc, a wider Becky Abrabanel and Gretchen Richter thread, and a closing tribute verse.
Pressed into soldiering, tormented, haunted refers to Hans Richter, Gretchen’s younger brother, forcibly conscripted into the mercenary Ludwig’s band after their family is destroyed and their printer father killed at Badenburg; he survives by staying too drunk to take part in the worst of it. Hired for a print shop, the trade that he wanted refers to his rescue and recovery after Grantville’s arrival: newspaper publisher Mr. Kindred hires him to help rebuild a print shop the old way, his own father’s trade.
Drove every pickup as if in a panic refers to Hans falling instantly and permanently in love with the up-timers’ motor vehicles. Jesse Wood recalls that “if Hans hadn’t been driving like a maniac to begin with, the pickup would never have fishtailed — even if the kid had pulled out of it with style and verve,” while James Nichols privately has doubts about “the young German’s recklessness” behind the wheel. Racing a laboring mother to the hospital, Hans gets her there “in record time” — the pickup needing “extensive body work” afterward, and the baby already born by the time they arrive.
Paladin wings, and a kiss, and some crying refers to Hans, now a trained pilot, formally betrothed to Sharon Nichols — a legally binding German custom, which is why she has him move in with her that same night. Pinning his wings on him, she is already fighting tears. Jesse will later call him the only paladin he ever met; Sharon claims the word for him too. Flights with her angel, no more to be flying refers to Sharon often flying with Hans as his observer; he once mistook her, waking from near-fatal wounds, for “an angel of death” who turned out to be “an angel of life” instead.
Avenging his friends with a fury undying refers to the Battle of Wismar Bay, where Hans watches two friends, Eddie and Larry, die when their speedboat is destroyed, then presses a furious solo rocket attack on the Danish ship responsible. Hit and bleeding out, one rocket jammed, he waves off Jesse Wood’s attempt to help and finishes the attack himself. Two airfields afterward carry his name: Richter Field at Wismar, and another named for him elsewhere.
Square for his statue, a name for a nation refers to a mass rally in Magdeburg where Mike Stearns commissions a monument on the spot — “can’t have a Hans Richter Square without a Hans Richter monument” — openly using Hans’s memory to force the Confederated Principalities of Europe toward real, unified government. Vengeance to triumph, in waves of elation refers to the crowd’s genuine rage at the princes dissolving into “triumph in full flood” when the Belle II flies over the square at exactly the right moment — “impromptu theater,” Jesse calls it, “of course. Mike’s specialty.” Mike’s private tears, though a triumph it brings refers to Mike stopping to weep, if only briefly, even as he stage-manages the day, for “young men he had once known and would always treasure” — the blood of heroes which had made it all possible.
Guardsmen deserting, a father is dying returns to the very start of the story: Rebecca Abrabanel’s hired Landsknecht escort abandons her and her ailing father Balthazar the instant Tilly’s mercenaries are spotted (“We’re not getting paid enough for this!”), while Balthazar — a physician, philosopher, and translator of Galen — is already in the grip of a heart attack. Gentleman’s English, no Spaniard replying refers to the tall, blue-eyed stranger at the carriage window: every mark of a Spanish hidalgo to Rebecca’s eyes, except that no hidalgo would ever speak English, “a tongue for pirates and traders.” He is Mike Stearns, not a hidalgo at all — blunt-nosed and plainly featured next to the raptor beauty of Sepharad’s legends — though Rebecca won’t fully register the mismatch until well after the shooting stops. No blood on his sleeve, the comfort it brings refers to Stearns walking out alone to draw the mercenaries’ fire from the carriage, borrowing James Nichols’s pistol; when it’s over, only his sleeve is torn (“No blood. No blood.”), and Rebecca collapses into his arms — a moment she will spend years turning over, and one she says never brought quite such a glow to her heart again.
Gretchen thinks Becky looks terribly worried, Annalise snaps
back, serenely unhurried refers to Grantville’s first
television broadcast since the Ring of Fire, September 10:
Gretchen, watching with her new husband Hans and the rest of the
family, thinks Becky looks nervous on screen with Mike. Her sister
Annalise: That’s nonsense. Becky is never nervous.
How she looks naked is all they’ll be thinking, bringing
Jeff also, since he can’t be shaken refers to Gretchen
recruiting Jena’s male students to the newly-named Committees
of Correspondence: Stupid boys. They’ll think of nothing
but what I look like naked… I will bring my husband with
me… He’s an intellectual himself, which I most
certainly am not. The students will understand him better.
Inga: They’ll be so scared of him, too.
Sweet,
ruthless Gretchen, the fear that it brings refers to the
calculation beneath the joke: privately pleased that Jeff will
hear how frightening he seemed, Gretchen lets none of it show,
her eyes going cold and grim (Yes, they will. Sehr gut!
).
In the same visit she decrees literacy lessons for the illiterate
women of the household, and takes fifteen-year-old Gertrude back
to Grantville to be schooled rather than sold.
Jungers approaches with menace and dagger, Gretchen stands
still, quite unmoved by his swagger refers to Max Jungers, who,
warned off harassing another woman days earlier, makes himself a
silent promise to settle the matter alone. He finds Gretchen on a
Jena street, hand resting on his dirk, and swaggers toward her,
grinning — unaware that a 9mm automatic sits in her shoulder
holster, hidden by deliberately oversized garments. One shot,
and garbage is all that it brings refers to the outcome:
Jungers never recognizes the pistol for what it is, not even when
the first shot fires. Mathilde, standing ten feet from the body:
Come. He was nothing but garbage… Just another street
killing.
When Jeff returns from relieving Jena with the
victorious American relief force, he doesn’t bother
investigating his own wife’s kill.
Drunkenly challenges Mackay to battle, chases him through the crowd, pool tables rattle refers to Chip, Julie Sims’s jealous former boyfriend, challenging Scottish cavalry officer Alexander Mackay to a duel at the Thuringen Gardens after Mackay impresses Julie by dropping a charging boar with a shotgun. Too much beer later, Chip punches Mackay first, without ever asking his choice of weapons; Mackay, outraged, draws his saber and politely chases him through the packed tavern, asking onlookers to step aside as he goes. An off-duty deputy, deep in his cups, rules the duel legal and orders Chip be given a saber too, though he has no idea how to use one. Steel meets a pool cue, and loudly it rings refers to Chip, cornered among the pool tables, swinging a cue at Mackay; it is “transformed into toothpicks in a matter of seconds.” Mackay, ever the gentleman, then offers to switch to pistols at Chip’s choice of range. Dan Frost finally halts the duel as illegal; Mike Stearns bans dueling outright, anywhere in American territory.
Germs never pause to consider your nation, to consider your
nation, Twenty-five million, a Black Death migration refers to
James Nichols exploding at Quentin Underwood over “Dutch
disease” and a supposed “United States immune
system”: The bacteria and viruses which carry epidemics
don’t give a flying fuck about your precious borders and your
fine political distinctions… Do you think a germ stops when
it gets to your nose and says: ‘Oh, no! Mustn’t infect
this man. He’s a fine and respectable
Murikun’… I’ll just have to find me a scruffy
no-good Dutchman or Kraut or Frog or Dago’?
The Black
Death started in China, killing an estimated twenty-five million
there before reaching Europe through India and the Middle East,
then killing another twenty-five million, a third of the
continent, within two years of reaching Paris. No passport
checked, and no mercy it brings refers to his closing point:
The bacterium’s invisible to the human eye…
Ain’t no border guard checking papers gonna spot it.
James’s real argument is that the only lasting protection is
spreading sanitary and medical knowledge across all of Europe, not
hoarding a limited stock of antibiotics.
Becky’s own word for him: highest of praises, Sharon’s own word for him: one of the phrases compares two independent tributes. Rebecca, watching Mike walk out alone to draw the mercenaries’ fire, is certain he must be a hidalgo — even though he is “not quite in the hidalgo way,” blunt-nosed and plainly featured next to the raptor beauty of Sepharad’s legends. Despite the savagery of the Inquisition and the expulsion by Spain’s actual hidalgos, Sepharad’s exiled Jews still called it “the highest praise, amongst them, to call a man hidalgo.” Jesse Wood will later call Hans “the only paladin he ever met” — a rescued, forcibly-conscripted refugee turned mechanic, about as far from storybook chivalry as a man can be — and Sharon “claims the word for him too” the night she pins his pilot’s wings on, already fighting tears. Different words, and the same praise it brings is the point: one drawn from Sepharad’s Hebrew and Spanish literary tradition, the other from American chivalric romance, both reaching independently for a word that means the same thing — the finest kind of man, regardless of how ordinary he looks.
Seven years old, just a puppet commander refers to Amsterdam, deep in its siege, where the CoC disbands the old city council and militia officer corps and replaces both with its own members — while carefully electing the prince of Orange’s actual seven-year-old son as the city’s official military commander. “No one except possibly the boy himself was fooled by the formality; certainly not Fredrik Hendrik”; it lets the prince of Orange keep up the necessary public image. While Gretchen’s own power grows ever grander refers to the reality behind the fiction: not even the prince of Orange still pretends otherwise, and eight of the new council’s ten seats, and nine of the militia’s ten officers, went to CoC members. Once just a captive, a legend it brings closes the loop back to Gretchen’s introduction earlier in this song, as a camp-follower held captive in Ludwig’s mercenary band. Her footprints, the narration adds, “would stamp Amsterdam for at least two generations, and probably forever.”