The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. It describes the actual military implications of a last stand situation, or as he put it 'being on deadly ground'. Specifically, it states that this should be discouraged if you're the attacking Army. An enemy that is cornered will always go into a last stand and inflict disproportionate losses on the attacker, so it is better to give them an illusion of escape, which would allow them to be defeated with relative ease. It also (very subtly) implies that a Commander who has got his force stuck in a Last Stand is incompetent rather than brave (with exceptions, of course). Thus the discouragement of such tactics.
Commissar Ciaphas Cain, Hero of the Imperium, is unusually privileged in having had two official Last Stands, and at the same place! It really bugs him that people keep calling them that, too. Just to make it more ridiculous the local name for the area is Cain's Last Stand, so in the novel Cain's Last Stand Cain's Last Stand is at Cain's Last Stand, famous site of Cain's Last Stand.
At the end of Ben Counter's Horus Heresy novel Galaxy in Flames, the betrayed Space Marines know they can not escape the planet on which they had been virus-bombed. So they set out to make defeating them as costly as possible. Loken and Torgaddon leave the rest because they have a chance to kill the other members of the Mournival, which would hurt Horus; when Tarvitz says they may not meet again, Loken is certain that there is no "may" about it. And when the Dies Irae comes into play, Tarvitz tells Vipes to kill Space Marines, because they can not damage that machine.
In the novel Grey Knights, Justicar Alaric and a small team of his Grey Knights were about to face one of the most terrible daemons in the galaxy. In fact, it was one so terrible that it once massacred over 300 Grey Knights in one battle. To inspire his men:
We do not know what our chances of survival are, so we fight as if they were zero. We do not know what we are facing, so we fight as if it was the dark gods themselves. No one will remember us now and we may never be buried beneath Titan, so we will build our own memorial here. The Chapter might lose us and the Imperium might never know we existed, but the Enemy — the Enemy will know. The Enemy will remember. We will hurt it so badly that it will never forget us until the stars burn out and the Emperor vanquishes it at the end of time. When Chaos is dying, its last thought will be of us. That is our memorial — carved into the heart of Chaos. We cannot lose, Grey Knights. We have already won.
In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Sabbat Martyr, one squad of Ghosts return too late and see the gates closing on them. Their leader gives order to fight. They kill over a hundred enemy before their deaths, even though no one will ever know.
Nineteenth [Platoon] lasted seventeen minutes from the time the gates closed. They accounted for one-hundred and eighty-nine enemy casualties. No one witnessed their heroism.
In Only In Death, when they are running out of ammunition, Rawne gives the order to fight with knives and takes as many as they can.
In Necropolis, the entire defense of Vervunhive is based around this trope - even the civilians get in on it, digging in and generally wreaking havoc among the attacking Ferrozoicans. Only a last-ditch counterattack, which manages to killHeritor Asphodel, stops the Zoicans from winning, although not long after that the Imperial Navy, several squads of Space Marines, some Titans, and a massive reinforcement army of Imperial Guard arrive. In the end, the hive is stilltoo badly damaged, with too many dead, to stay intact, and is officially decommissioned.
In James Swallow's novel Deus Encarmine, in the opening, the Blood Angels are convinced after the death of their captain that they are fighting a last stand. A brief surcease is followed by an even more devastating attack; they must give up the port they were defending, and one is so dispirited that only the suggestion that he kill himself stiffens his resolve to fight on.
Later, Iskavan learns that his forces were thrown away as The Bait. He sets out to slaughter as many as he can before death (starting withwomen, children, and the wounded). Unusually, he goes to aggressive attack. Then, he knows a way to destroy the planet if he had succeeded.
Dawn of War: In Chris Roberson's Dawn of War II, the defense against the Tyranids looks like a Last Stand by the end and to nearly the very end when The Cavalry arrives.
In Ben Counter's story "Words of Blood", Athellenas orders repeated retreats and has to threaten Valerian who objects to the dishonor, preferring a Last Stand. Turns about that Athellenas had worked out how to provoke an Enemy Civil War.
In the Imperial Guard novel Cadian Blood, the Cadian forces are unimpressed by the Last Stand of some New Meat: they can tell by where the bodies fell. Later, Seth makes a more impressive Last Stand in the Battle in the Center of the Mind, and though the daemon kills him, he dies laughing and saying the look at the daemon's face made the fight worth it.
In Henry Zhou's novel The Emperor's Mercy, Imperial Guardsmen are surrounded by Chaos forces and are fighting on, despite dying of hunger and disease. Roth tells Celemine that they had no choice but to stay with them. The commander hears and instantly wants to fight a last charge: they can get them to their ship and hold off the enemy — and that way, they can be remembered. (They are. In fact, their eighteen minutes defense of the ship is immortalized in a mural on Terra.)
The first book of Watchers of the Throne ends with Aleya, Valerian and a number of their fellow Sisters and Custodians set up around a shard of necrolith that the enemy intends to drop on the planet Vorlese to cut Terra off from the rest of the galaxy, intending to keep the enemy from it for as long as they can. Some even survive.
In Chris Roberson's novel Sons of Dorn, Captain Taelos starts to tell the surviving Scouts and sergeant that he is So Proud of You in preparation for a force they can not overcome — when The Cavalry arrives.
In Legion of the Damned a half-strength company of Space Marines is making a desperate Last Stand against an entire Chaos Blood Crusade. They are supported by a few units of the local planetary defense force and a few thousand untrained civilians. The attacking force consists of an army of crazed cultists, mercenary units led by Chaos Space Marines, and horrifying warp demons. However, this Last Stand is really a Thanatos Gambit. Once the defenders are all dead, the Chaos army might leave the planet before discovering where the women and children are hiding.
The Acoma warriors in The Riftwar Cycle (specifically, XXX of the Empire) say this a lot.
The Serpentwar Saga opens with a last stand of the beaten Saaur race as they try to hold the rift long enough for their young to escape the unstoppable demon forces in Shadow of the Dark Queen.
The Fellowship discovers a journal in Moria written by one of the final survivors of Balin's company. While the actual last stand is not described, the journal ends with the sentence "They are coming", and the room is full of skeletons, both dwarves and orcs, indicating how vicious the fighting was.
At the very beginning of The Two Towers,Boromir has a last stand. A variation, in that it takes place off-screen: the fight itself is left entirely to the reader's imagination.
...Aragorn saw that he was pierced with many black-feathered arrows; his sword was still in his hand, but it was broken near the hilt; his horn cloven in two was at his side. Many Orcs lay slain, piled all about him and at his feet...
Later in The Two Towers, Aragorn convinces Théoden and the last remaining Rohirrim defending Helm's Deep to ride out with him against thousands of Uruk-hai in a glorious last charge. They are saved by Gandalf and either Erkenbrand (book) or Éomer (movie) leading The Cavalry.
Théoden: "If this is to be our end, let us make such an end that they quake at night at our memory!"
In The Return of the King,after the ships of the Corsairs of Umbar arrive and the battle seems to turn in favor of the forces of Sauron Eomer clearly intends this to be his, and his soldiers, final action.
He let blow the horns to rally all men to his banner that could come thither; for he thought to make a great shield-wall at the last, and stand, and fight there on foot till all fell, and do deeds of song on the fields of Pelennor, though no man should be left in the West to remember the last King of the Mark.
Later in The Return of the King, the Mouth of Sauron's claim that Frodo and Sam have been captured leads Aragorn and his army to firmly believe themselves to be fighting a last stand.
In The Children of Húrin, Húrin makes his Last Stand at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. Out of the bodyguard of Gothmog, Lord of the Balrogs, 70 trolls were killed by Húrin before he was overborne by an endless supply of cheaper orcs and taken away to a Fate Worse than Death.
Húrin: "DAY SHALL COME AGAIN!"
The Fall of Gondolin: Double subversion when the last defenders of Gondolin gather around the King's Tower as their city is being demolished by Morgoth's troops. Since Gondolin has fallen, and bursting through the enemy lines and fleeing through the burning fields seems impossible, some men suggest to stand there and die fighting. However, Tuor is unwilling to let the city's women and children die -never mind his own wife and son-, and reveals the existence of a secret escape tunnel. King Turgon approves of his plan, but he announces he will not leave, preferring to burn with his city; and their closest retainers gather around the base of the tower, determined to stay there and perish there.
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son recounts the efforts of some characters to locate the lord's body among his slaughtered guard. Based on an Old English fragment about the Battle of Maldon, recounting how the guard had refused to retreat when their lord died.
The Iron Tower trilogy gives us the Battle of Challerain Keep, the ripoff of the Battle of Pelennor Fields from The Lord of the Rings, in which almost all of the good guys are massacred trying to hold the city built up on a hill. About four important characters escape to make the Sauron-ripoff regret messing with them.
Black Fleet Crisis: The Yevetha refuse to surrender. Instead, they all fight to the death at N'Zoth, even when it's clear they can't win. General A'baht, commander of the New Republic fleet facing them, is shaken by this, saying he never before had encountered an enemy doing this before. Previously, their leader Nil Spaar warned the New Republic they would do this.
Ganner Rhysode in Traitor: Holding off an entire army of the Yuuzhan Vong single-handedly with nothing but Anakin Solo's lightsaber to aid him — and finally pulling down the building around him to take out the rest of the army, including their tank. This earned him a statue among the Yuuzhan Vong that was placed next to the statues of their gods, and he became immortalized in their mythology as "The Ganner", a guardian of the dead who kept the spirits from returning to life. This statue, though it belonged to the Vong, bore an inscription in Basic that simply read "NONE SHALL PASS".
Princess Leia gets a speech like this in Star by Star, though admittedly it's an entire galaxy she's encouraging to fight back against the evil invaders and not "just" the human race.
Quoth Wedge Antilles: "While I don't think I can hold Borleias, I might be able to make it a name that causes little Vong children to whimper." And then he can. And for his next trick, he actually evacuates the majority of the Borleias garrison before things finish going to hell.
In John Hemry's The Lost Fleet novel Invincible, the bear-cows when the Marines take their ship.
David Gemmell's novel Legend features an army of 10,000 half-trained peasants and outlaws attempting to hold a six-walled city while being attacked by a professional army of 500,000. If they can hold out for three months, the kingdom may be saved from the enemy. The names of the six walls pretty much tells the tale: "Exultation", "Despair", "Renewed Hope", "Desperation", "Serenity", and "Death".
In The Last Battle, the protagonists prefer this to the Calormene offer of slavery for some and Human Sacrifice for others.
In The Horse and His Boy, when the Narnians discuss escaping the city, the raven says that these sound all very well in story but in reality, after the first attacks are repulsed, the enemy sets fire to the house.
The revolutionaries have a pretty impressive one in Les Misérables.
The defense of the Russian embassy from a huge angry mob in The Death of the Vazir Mukhtar. CMoAs for all (except for the guy who lives).
In the Andrew Vachss Burke book Terminal, the Prof, badly injured by a sniper, prepares to do one of these. However, Burke's crew manages to get him out of there before anything happens.
This is almost the standard operating procedure of Bolos. Any force strong enough to threaten one is overwhelmingly strong in comparison to a human; the Bolos are programmed to protect human beings, so they are often left to cover the meatbag's retreat, and a 32000-tonne moving mountain of metal armed with multi-megaton nuclear beam cannons is as much of a target as it is a threat.
Bjakamál, last stand of Rolf Krake's hird is a stirring poem based on an unknown 5th-6th century struggle in Denmark, it was recited by Olav Haraldssons (Digre/Fat) Skjald before the Battle of Stiklestad (1030) where he fell and became Olav the Holy to strengthen the resolve of the Royalist army. The Song of the Battle at Maeldon could be added here as well, though that is definitely a RL event.
Malazan Book of the Fallen: In Memories of Ice, the third book, there is one during the Siege of Capustan. Gruntle and his 'troops' (recruited from pissed off/scared citizens and routed soldiers) hold out on top of a multi-story apartment building until point where the building itself begins breaking apart from all of the bodies and blood bloating inside of it, and the Tenescowri become able to make a ramp of their dead to get to the top.
A chilling example in A Practical Guide to Evil: the Lone Swordsman, together with half of his party and a good chunk of his rebel army, comes after a patrol of the Legions of Terror (the army he fights to get out of his home country). The patrol, seeing they are vastly overwhelmed, form tight ranks, sing a sort of funeral song for themselves, and then fight the rebels tooth and nail. They still all get slaughtered.
In the backstory of Steve Perry's The Man Who Never Missed, Lord Thomas Reserve Shamba replied to a surrender demand with the message: "To the Commander, Confederation Jumptroopers. Sir: Fuck you. We stand until the last man falls."
When the title unit of John Dalmas' The Regiment faces this situation, the captain who's now in acting command gives the trumpeters the order, "Sound the dirge, then the attack."
The trumpet call was something Varlik had never heard before. Not mournful. Not even solemn. Not like any dirge he'd heard or imagined. More like a fanfare—a fanfare on two trumpets, an announcement of death without regret. Then abruptly it changed, became an exultant battlecry, quick-paced, and the T'swa nearby rose up, rifles in hand, bayonets fixed, the captain vaulting over the fallen tree. The trumpets were almost drowned out by the sudden shattering roar of gunfire.
The guards were fully armed and drawn up in a square, but there were only five hundred of them. They took a heavy toll before they were cut down, but there could be only one conclusion to such a battle.
In Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest, Rupert goes to join his king in hopes of helping him, and if it fails, for this trope.
Quite a few people have done or attempted this sort of thing in the course of the BattleTech series. Famous examples include Khan Natasha Kerensky holding off the Jade Falcons on Twycross (invoked deliberately—as a Khan of their hated rivals, Clan Wolf, she had made herself into a high priority target to get the rest of her force away), and Aidan Pryde decimating the Com Guards on Tukayyid (more traditionally, he held the line to allow his unit to escape the battle, and for his only recently revealed daughter to be rescued).
The Kandori defenders all along the Blight when the Shadowspawn flood south.
And a ton of successful ones where the "stander" survives: Loial in the Stone, the people of Emonds Field, the Malkieri at the start of Tarmon Gaidon, the whole forces of the Light at Merrilor and a couple more.
When the Toralii board the Beijing in Lacuna, Liao has her sailors stage a last stand in the Operations room.
At the very beginning of "They Were Expendable" the author explains what that word means. Your commander gives you a machine gun and tells you to hold off the people chasing them. You ask how long and he says, it's not how long, just do it. The machine gun, and the soldier, are being sacrificed to give the others a chance to escape.
Subverted in The Goblin Corps: the protagonists are sent away on a mission deep within enemy territory, and return to find their entire kingdom lost. However, this was the Charnel King's plan all along - his "last stand" had an escape clause no one else knew about.
In John Hemry's The Lost Stars novel Tarnished Knight, the ISS forces always do this rather than face the people they tormented. One who attempts surrender is "accidentally" killed.
Hile Troy's army puts up a series of them, finally taking a stand against a far superior force with their backs to a sentient forest that eats anyone who enters.
Lord Mhoram attempts to break a siege by riding out alone to try to reach and kill the Raver leading the enemy army.
In Andrey Livadny's The History of the Galaxy series, several novels end with this. Some result in the deaths of protagonists. The novel Dabog is particularly notable as it involves a group of volunteers jacking into the titular planet's missile defense network instead of boarding evacuation ships in order to buy time for said ships to run the Earth Alliance blockade, knowing that their eventual fate is to be nuked by the angry admiral whose attempts to take the planet failed. Given that the colonists are the ones who eventually win the drawn-out war, the memory of Dabog (which even centuries later remains uninhabitable) and those who fell defending it is still strong. In the novel Black Moon, one of the frozen defenders of Dabog is revived and arrives to a battle between two Confederate fleets. He announces himself over radio as belonging to the Dabog defense forces... and the battle stops on the spot.
In the Star Trek Expanded Universe novel appropriately titled The Last Stand, the Enterprise encounters a pre-warp race descended from the survivors the Lethanta who have fled their homeworld after it was nuked by their neighbors the Kreen (the Lethanta previous enslaved the Kreen who revolted but were then nearly wiped out by a plague for which they blamed the Lethanta). After centuries of fleeing in modified asteroids, the Lethanta have settled on a world they called Nem Ma'ak Bratuna ("the last stand" in their language). At the same time as the Enterprise, the Kreen arrive in a large sublight fleet having been following their enemies and building up their forces for a final strike. However, the Lethanta have prepared a doomsday device that will cause a nova-level event wiping out everything in the system (they have previously sent a group of their people away in those same asteroids).
From Fred Saberhagen's Berserker universe: "When they came, you [humans] were waiting and dug in on a hundred worlds. Because you were, some of you and some of us are now alive." The alien narrator also comments on his race's perception that humanity had suffered war for its entire history, against the day when nothing less would serve for the survival of all life.
In the novel Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, it's not so much that the humans can't be made to surrender — it's that they won't stay surrendered, which confuses and freaks out the alien invaders.
The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells, especially the attack of the torpedo ram HMS Thunder Child against the Martian machines. The 1953 movie version had the following lines: "The redoubtable Finnish and Turkish armies, Chinese battalions and Bolivians worked and fought furiously... The people of Britain met the invaders magnificently, but it was unavailing."
Redwall has one really good example in "Long Patrol"
Rockjaw Grang one of the eponymous hares is speared through the middle when he's trying to buy time for his comrades Tammo and Midge Manycoats to escape the Rapscallions. What does he do? Why rip it out and take as many vermin with him as he can.
The last line Brian Jacques wrote about him is as follows.
"He bought the time for his friends to escape safely, for even within sight of Dark Forest gates, Rockjaw Grang was a perilous hare."
Animorphs has several examples of this throughout the series, and it could be said that the entire premise was at least partly based on this trope.
Indeed, even the aliens acknowledge this: one major difference between Yeerks and humans is that Yeerks will give up if they know they're going to lose, while humans won't. Some, like the Yeerk that controlled Jake or Visser Three, think this is basically pointless, but Visser One was smart enough to realize this would make conquering humans a harder task to accomplish.
Visser One: They run right into the bullets, again and again! They attack against insane odds, they defend what cannot be defended! Outnumbered, outmatched, and outgunned, they will still fight, fight, fight until each and every one of them is dead! A human faced with death can be brave to the point of madness...
Stated almost flat-out by one of Visser One's hosts:
Allison: "You think you know us. You know nothing. You’ve seen the world through the eyes of a defeated soldier and a junkie bimbo. You know nothing. We’ll defeat you, Edriss."
From Ax's "Earth Diary": "Give me liberty, or give me death. A human named Patrick Henry said that. I wonder if, when the Yeerks invaded, they knew humans said things like that. I wonder if they truly knew what they were getting into."
E.E. Knight's The Vampire Earth series has a heavy dose of this, at least when it comes to the humans that aren't Quislings.
This is on a smaller scale, but still significant, in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Over and over, individuals and small groups figured out what was going on. Over and over, they were captured and replaced. Yet more keep cluing in and trying to sabotage the invasion, until the aliens eventually give up and go home as the protagonist quotes Churchill. Sadly, the movie replaces it with a Downer Ending.
In Lois McMaster Bujold's Memory, Miles repeats a joke about his ancestors: that when they were invaded, they tried to surrender, but were so backwards they couldn't find anyone who could read the terms of the treaty, so they kept fighting and eventually won. This also sparks an epiphany as to which of his dual identities is the true him; because Admiral Naismith strove for victory, but Lord Vorkosigan could not surrender, so in the end, Lord Vorkosigan was the persona he chose.
The president of a planet that has just discovered a possible world-ending catastrophe is approaching, gives a speech about perseverance that ends with "And if our world should endure for a hundred million years, it will always be known that this was our finest hour." Alex Benedict is an archeologist/treasure hunter and is the only member of the cast familiar enough with history to realize that he is cribbing, and who from.
Earlier in the same book, the main characters had found a copy of Churchill's speeches in the president's personal library among ordinary books and had commented it was a disgrace to see something so valuable sitting there unappreciated.
Academ's Fury: Amara, Bernard, and other heroes are trapped by a powerful zerg-like creature called the Vord Queen. They have little in means of weapons and food. Their magic can be countered by those humans who were taken and now are zombie-like forces. Even with all the odds against them, they choose to make one final attack because they need to kill the Queen. If the Queen escapes, she can make two more in a short time and will not stop until all of the world is under their domain. The fact they, sentient beings, would willingly choose death just to see her dead confounds the Queen, who has no such understanding. She can see the action but fails to understand why. This distraction is enough to finally kill her.
Princeps' Fury: The Vord have returned and have continued towards the capital of the nation. Gaius Sextus watches the battle from his castle tower before ordering the withdrawal of the men. He gives his aide, Ehren, two letters and his will, before he personally enters the battle. He awakens the ancient volcano under this mountain city, destroying it, a secret weapon which if it fell into their hands would secure their victory, transforms into a metal version of himself, and flies into battle. The horde of Vord is reduced to a mear tithe of its former numbers, and allows the surviving soldiers and civilians to regroup.
In the series' Grand Finale, First Lord's Fury the combined forces of Alera's military are facing down an even larger Vord army, and after months of defeats and slowly surrendering ground, they've been boxed into their final fortress, with nowhere left to go, and millions of Vord drones barreling down on them. They decide to go down fighting to the last man which gives a separate force enough time to track down the last Vord Queen and kill her, disorganizing the horde enough for the Alerans to win.
In Leviathan Geary goes into the final battle with the AI warship fleet knowing he's massively outgunned, and soon realizing he's trapped because the Hypernet gate has been set to prevent his ships from fleeing the star system. Knowing there's no way to win and no way to escape the fleet and their allies, the Dancers, have a single goal: destroy all the AI support infrastructure and take as many of them as they can, fighting to the last ship, so the Black Fleet will be weakened and can be taken out by allied forces if they appear again. But then the Heroic Sacrifice of a civilian allows Geary to get all his surviving ships out and destroy the Black Fleet all at once by blowing the gate up.
Half's Saga: Half and his warriors manage to break out of the Asmund's burning hall and hold out against the overwhelming numbers of Asmund's warriors for an entire day before being cut down.
In Cthulhu Armageddon, Gamma Squadron gets one of these, combined with Doomed Moral Victor. Having managed to defeat a small army of Cthulhu cultists, they find all of them have been pre-dosed with Herbert West's Re-Animator formula and rise as indestructible zombies. They still manage to hold the line far better than any other protagonists should in a Cosmic Horror Story.
The Stormlight Archive: It's mentioned that at the Last Desolation Talenel'Elin, Herald of War, managed to win an impossible battle by holding an important waterway at the cost of his own life. Due to the fact that he always resurrected along with the rest of the Heralds at the next Desolation, he got to do this a lot, and none of the other Heralds are particularly surprised. Unfortunately, all the other Heralds were so exhausted from millennia of fighting and torture that they decided to abandon Taln in Damnation in order to save themselves from the same fate. They told the people that the war had finally been won and that there would be no more Desolations. Four and a half thousand years later, at the end of the book, Taln appears at the gates of Kholinar.
Guy Sajer's The Forgotten Soldier is perhaps an embellished autobiography of a French-born soldier conscripted into the Wehrmacht owing to his mother being German. One of the episodes involves an older soldier, one who has survived in the German Army since 1939, realising, as the Russians break into German territory in 1945, that it's completely hopeless and he's tired of fighting for a lost cause. He elects to stay behind and hold off the Russians for as long as it takes for the boy soldiers, including Sajer, to get to safety. Sajer recollects getting to safety and realising the fighting behind them goes on for a long time until - the shooting abruptly ends.
Desperate Last Stand is a well-used trope in the Aeon 14 shared universe of M. D. Cooper et al. Notably Tanis and her Desperate Last Stand on Pyra. The Marines with her, her pilot, and finally ISF Marine Commandant General Brandt give their lives to save Tanis, expounding large numbers of tropes such as It Can't End Like This and Give Me the Grenades, followed by We'll Come Back. Finally Tanis is brought to bay, out of allies, out of ammo, out of nanites, out of formation material, out of power, and her armor is failing. The Cavalry is too late. Tanis merges with her AI Angela, ascends to a higher plane, gathers all the non-living matter around her, and expels it against her enemies in a plasma bolt which rivals the sun and is visible from orbit. Then, and only then, her rescue assured, does she pass out.
In The Well of Ascension, Luthadel is besieged by several different armies. The siege eventually becomes this trope when the city is attacked by an army of Koloss, who outnumber and overpower the city's undertrained defenders. Luthadel is saved when Vin returns and takes control of the army of Koloss, but not before Clubs, Dockson, and Tindwyl are killed by koloss.
In The Hero of Ages, the heroes are once again besieged by Koloss, this time in the Kandra Homeland. Elend and all of the "mistfallen" atium misting soldiers except for Captain Demoux are killed, but they manage to destroy the atium supply before Ruin can gain control of it.
Discworld: Discussed during Monstrous Regiment by Jackrum, who'd rather avoid them, not least because in his career he's seen a few, and thinks the fighting there is the worst. At the end of the book, he makes a metaphorical last stand against the insane Borogravian High Command, blackmailing them with the fact so many of them are women in disguise to get Perks and the others out of trouble before retiring.
