What? How did I come to learn how to toss people off of battlements? There had been several attempts on the life of the duke of Fossex. The king was rather fond of him and I was sent to provide him with additional protection for a few weeks and to look on the security arrangements at Fossex castle. One evening I climbed a tower to the battlements to supervise security arrangements, er... well actually it was to evade the dutchess' rather leaden pastries.
I happened to open the door just in time to see three assassins creeping over the wall with intent to murder my man from behind. They didn't see me, so one by one, I crept up behind the rear assassin, thought for a moment, and picked him up and hurled him over the wall. It proved quite effective so I threw the other two over the wall and saved my man. I immediately ordered more men to the wall but no one else appeared that night.
One of my lads is quite clever about this sort of thing so he and I set about to devising a variety of techniques for throwing a man off of the battlements, from the front, from behind, from the side, with a sword, with a musket etc. We a built wooden platform in the courtyard and drilled the men until we were quite proficient. It came in handy on two other nights. But then the duke discovered who was trying to kill him and er...remedied the problem and I moved on to other missions.
His Majesty's armed forces weren't too interested really. There's not really much call for it, and most sentries just shoot the intruder. Too bad really. Just imagine how exciting it would have been to have this method during the great sieges of old, with hooks, and ladders and plenty of boiling oil and ....
Eh what?
Listener:
I said, how is it that the second and third didn't hear the first man
scream when you threw him off the wall? They would had to have been
very stoic, magically silenced or something.
Major:
[raps his pipe on the table and re-lights it]
Ehhhh? Er... yes, quite.
By Mike Johns, a.k.a Major Algernon Edward Wetherby