You know, I've been searching for just that right amount of creepy in a gift for a certain someone, and thanks to this picture, I now have an acceptable gift!
Those are lovely, Carvel - did you get those whilst you were in Germany? That's a very acceptable gift - must be a Celt! Perhaps he's a Cymric* knight ... ? Most of my interest as a child was in WW2, as my grandfather had some old "pictoral history" books printed shortly after the war which fascinated me, though they weren't really "kid's" books. But I did enjoy two quite old books as a teenager which I found in the library in town, Conan-Doyle's "Sir Nigel" and "The White Company". I just enjoyed them for the war stuff, read them voraciously, but when re-reading them only a few years ago (not the originals, they'll be long gone), I was fascinated by the level of detail they contain. The White Company is particularly good as a description of a private "company" in the HYW (IMHO - others might disagree, but it's a cracking read). No pictures to speak of in my new Penguin version, though I don't doubt there's an illustrated copy somewhere in the world! *How do you spell this ... ????
Ooops, wrong translation. Snail, not snake. (Must have been the TV docu that was running at the background. Outback fauna in Australia)
They trained a lot of crazy looking moves. Altdorfer's phantastic painting of the Issos battle show a Landsknecht unit that do the snail. The end of a columns is passing the allready engaged front. It looked like a snail shell in training. It was also used to get a column into a round anti cavalry formation.
But I guess your book is simply showing a group marching to the tune of the flute. The marketender is a good indication for that. And the mouse leeding???? But a nice book.