by J. T. Marsh
After the night has passed and the new day has dawned, Valeri takes stock of what’s left. Among the remaining residents in the buildings under his stewardship, there’s enough canned food to keep them all alive for a few days, perhaps a week or so, if rationed carefully. The electricity’s still off. The water still runs, more or less, but the foul smell means no one will drink it; Valeri orders coffee filters used, assuring the others they’ll make the water drinkable. They’re out of coffee, anyways. Until the provisional government can restore service, they know they’ll have to survive with what they have. But when Valeri meets with Roger and Tonya in the lobby, theirs is a conversation short and to the point. “We can’t survive much longer,” Roger says. “And the others are going to figure it out pretty quickly,” Tonya says. “That doesn’t matter,” Valeri says, first looking Roger, then Tonya in the eyes with a steely glare of determination, “we tell the others whatever they need to hear. So long as they continue to believe there’s hope, there is.” Tonya and Roger nod. For now, it’s all they can do. This is not what Valeri would’ve wanted, but if it’s the way to the future then he pledges to embrace it with open arms, no matter the hardships it’ll bring. And so we look to the future no longer with fear but with a mounting anticipation. Even among the still falling-apart ruins of the old way, there’s hope.
Novel among our heroes is the determination not to be deified by the passage of so much time, the rebel and the working man alike knowing theirs is struggle born out of greatness and is not yet won. As the government teeters on the brink of its inevitable collapse, its apparatchiks offer the working man and his natural allies the student and the parishioner a concession; they offer to outlaw foreigners from owning homes and promising a basket of measures to prevent wealthy foreigners from absconding with their ill-gotten capital beyond the country’s borders once the war has ended. But it’s too late for reconciliation. At the church repurposed as an ad-hoc headquarters, Valeri receives this news on his screen but then promptly discards it. The fires of liberation, once lit, can’t be extinguished by half-measures. But as this provisional government forms, the working man fulminates, Valeri already pledging himself that this is not the end of his struggle.
29. Behind the Scenes
In the night, it’s always in the night, the Popular Front’s attacks subside, his guerrillas remaining in place dotted around the city. They occupy parcels of land, in places no bigger than a street corner, in other places whole neighbourhoods under their control. They’ve seized spots of territory, here and there, and in anticipation of the enemy’s counterattack they dig in, turning apartment blocks into ramparts, storefronts into bunkers, roofs into lookouts. The rebels have given Valeri and the other residents of Dominion Courts a few rifles, some ammunition, but no food or water; there’s none to be given. As Valeri watches through binoculars from the rooftops, looking out for any sign of troopers, he looks upon a street with two armoured cars parked blocking the road, the troopers using them as makeshift fortifications. “They’re sealing us in,” he says, “they’re going to starve us out.” As if to accentuate this moment of realization, his stomach growls. He takes a drink of water from his bottle, forcing it down despite the bitter taste. (There’s a ruptured pipe somewhere, but he doesn’t know that.) Overhead, an air force bomber flies low enough to make its point but still high enough to pass cleanly over the tallest buildings. At this critical moment, all seems to teeter on the edge of collapse, with hunger in the streets and with the bodies of the dead still lying wherever they’d fallen. Still the sound of gunfire rattles out through the night, leaving Valeri, Tonya, Roger, and the other remaining residents of Dominion Courts to look ahead to an uncertain future, one governed not by the whims of the wealthy man’s greed but by forces of nature unleashed in this, the beginning of our history’s end. No more are they slaves in their own homes; now comes the hard part, the part where they must overcome the divisions within. But in an office overlooking the floor of a still-operating warehouse across the city, there takes place on this very day a meeting taking place between a very wealthy businessman and a mid-level officer in the army, a meeting that’ll have grave repercussions for us all.
Looking out over the floor, the owner of the warehouse stands at a panel of windows and watches the day’s work. Every day fewer workers show up, what’s left the skeleton crew needed to keep operations running. The owner, a man named Nathan Williams, has chosen this day to meet with Douglas Schlager, a colonel in the army recently returned from the front after being wounded. As Williams sips on a glass of single-malt scotch, Schlager stands aside. “You should indulge in the finer things in life,” Williams says, “war can be a rather thirsty endeavour, I find.” He offers Schlager a drink. “No thank you,” Schlager says. “So be it,” Williams says, then turns back to the floor, then says, “how many brigades can you call on to support us?” “Six,” Schlager says. “Only six?” Williams asks. “The rest will follow once we eliminate High Command,” Schlager says. “I suppose that’ll have to do,” Williams says, before turning back to look out over the warehouse’s floor. He doesn’t sip on his drink, but tilts the glass around a little to hear the clinking of the ice cubes. At this particular warehouse, only one of many Williams owns, the product shipped is ammunition, bullets for small arms used by the army. Factories elsewhere produce the ammunition, then ship it here where it’s sorted and forwarded to the army’s own supply chain. War can be profitable business, but with so few workers still reporting for work it’s becoming harder and harder every day for men like Williams to fill their quotas and make good on their deliveries. But this is by design. As the workers from one shift make way for those of the next, the warehouse floor quiets, leaving Williams and Schlager to stand in a momentarily awkward silence, this budding alliance between wealth and power now almost ready to coalesce around these men. These men have a knowledge that comes from an open secret; though Britain is consumed by war, at home and on the continent, they see the neutral Chinese, on the other side of the world, as the real enemy. They’re at least half right.
“I assure you,” Schlager says, “six is more than enough for us to carry out the plan.” “I hope so,” Williams says. “If you’ve never served then you can’t know what even one man is capable of,” Schlager says, an edge in his voice. “I see what men are capable of all the time,” Williams says, turning back and looking Schlager right in the eye, “I see the screens filled with news from the front of our army’s latest humiliation. I see troops on the street who’ve become afraid to confront a small number of untrained and poorly armed malcontents. It was not always this way.” “Our troops may be humiliated but it’s not their fault,” Schlager says. Williams raises an eyebrow and says, “is it yours?” A moment passes, then Williams turns back to the floor. He raises his glass of scotch to take another sip, and looks out at the workers from the next shift making their way in. But Williams does not own only the warehouses across the country that feed munitions to the army; he owns the factories that produce those very munitions. And he sells to all sides, through his own complex network of intermediaries and subsidiaries held at arms’ length selling even to the armies of the countries his is at war with. He didn’t start this war; men like him don’t start wars through conspiracies whether elaborate or simple. In fact, Williams personally would prefer this war to end. War is only profitable for men like him if this country merely watches from the sidelines while he quietly ships his armaments to all countries involved in the fighting. With an embargo in place and with much of the country a shambles, Williams can only watch as his once-bustling factories, warehouses, and rail yards languish in a state of near-total disuse. Although Williams is already a man of some importance, he’s about to become a man so much more. But he is only a man, and history is not made by men. It’s not who Williams is or what he’s about to do that’s important. If not him, then someone else would be there to take the steps he’s in the midst of taking.
“You politicians are all ali
ke,” Schlager says. “Oh?” Williams asks, eyeing the colonel’s reflection in the office’s window. “You all love to talk about yourselves,” Schlager says, “you all think you have all the answers.” “Doug, I would think we’d have known each other better than that by now,” Williams said, giving the workers one last look before turning and walking past Schlager to sit in his chair behind his desk. “This isn’t about me,” Williams says, “nor is it about you. Once we take control of the provisional government, we’ll restore order, and we’ll marshal the nation’s strength against our enemies. Is this not what you want?” Schlager doesn’t answer right away, instead standing firm. Then, he asks, “And then you will have your profits higher than ever?” Williams chuckles, for even he, on some level, knows there can never be altruism in his heart. Although they’ve known each other for years, theirs has never been a relationship quite amicable. Nevertheless, they need each other, now, for theirs is a conspiracy born out of the greed, whether greed for power or greed for prestige. Williams is not only the chief executive of the nation’s largest supplier of munitions to the army, but a former Armaments Minister in government. And Schlager was his attaché in the army, the man to whom he submitted his requests for briefings with the generals, production estimates, and, perhaps most important of all, bills for his goods and services. Then Williams left politics to head this armaments conglomerate while Schlager requested and promptly received a return to duty in a command position. A few years later this war began. Williams saw his conglomerates worldwide operations disrupted by this war while years of oversupplying the army meant no more business to be had in this country. Schlager lived through his troops humiliated on the battlefield by lesser enemies while politicians at home bickered over seats in parliament and cabinet posts, only to be returned home after an enemy air raid put shrapnel in his leg. Still nobody remembers the specific chain of events that set off this war, nor those that set off the disorder in the streets, but it’s never been important what specific events led us all into this crisis. If not these, then others, the pressures of so many decades, centuries of worship at the altar of greed having inevitably set us along the path to this ruin. This fact remains true even as we follow this thread in our descent into madness. But even as these men are but pawns of history, as we all are, this fact does not diminish their responsibility for the crimes they are to commit in their quest to advance their own vision of what’s to come. As our history advances, the fight to advance necessarily provokes the rising of the fight to regress, the act of fusing the two into a single experience the next step in reaching out to our future’s end. But it’s not over yet. The cruiser Borealis has made it almost out to sea, just past the docks at Tilbury, and still Dmitri looks through the darkness of the early-morning light with a mounting anticipation. Suddenly, there’s action. “To the cruiser Borealis,” squawks the radio, “this is the army. I order you to stop and heave to. I have vessels underway and I intend to board you. This is your only warning.” Dmitri snaps into action. “Fly the banner! All ahead full! Raise the main batteries! Open fire!”
From the warehouse’s little office, the past can’t be seen for all the future’s troubles looming in the distance like a mountain towering over a highway reaching straight out to the horizon. From this little office, men like Williams and Schlager plot to unseat the new provisional government and institute a regime of terror against the workers and the rebels in the streets of the nation’s cities, but while they so plot they can’t but keep their mouths from watering at the prospect of satiating their deepest, darkest desires. Theirs is a lust for power and prestige unleashed by the working man’s quest for justice and dignity, an evil’s rising necessarily provoked by the emergence of the virtues of decency and modesty in the physical act of the working man’s rising. But now is the time of our history’s future, when the rising of evil must be confronted by the rising of good. But not everyone sees things this way. It’s not only a few persons who come from the wealthy class or from the army’s privileged officer corps who will conspire to oppose the working man’s war of liberation or who will take to the cause of fighting against it, of trying to beat back they who would seek to free themselves from this current regime of injustice and indignity. There are others under the sway of these forces of evil. We’ve spent the bulk of this account of the revolution focusing on the actions of a few residents fighting for the right to live in their own homes, but in truth there’s a vast array of forces fighting for one thing or another, the common thread uniting them all the inexorable advance of our history towards is end. The decks of the Borealis heave as her engines struggle up to full power. Searchlights blind the bridge crew. “Shoot them!” Dmitri orders. Gunfire thunders out. The enemy responds in kind. The cruiser shudders and shakes as rounds fall in the water all around her, while her own guns shoot back, nobody seeming to aim at anything, the whole action immediately degenerating into a confused mess. “Evasive manoeuvres!” Dmitri shouts at the helm, the crewman turning hard to port, then hard to starboard, the Borealis tracking a zigzag path down around the last bend in the river Thames. But then she takes a hit, a round crashing aft, knocking out one engine, the cruiser lurching, shuddering to a crawl. It seems she’s done for.
From this little office, the marshalling of forces against the provisional government should not be taken as a suggestion that compromise the provisional government was meant to embody should have succeeded had it only been given a chance. In any war between the forces of good and the forces of evil, any compromise between the two is a moral and intellectual fraud. Given its inherently fraudulent character, the provisional government was destined to fail, corrupt as it was from its inception. Whether Williams the wealthy man or Schlager the officer understand the character of the provisional government is irrelevant, as is their conception of their own actions and motivations as noble is irrelevant, as our history shall show men like them to be acting in service of the interests of oppression and in so acting reducing themselves to the level of objects to be manipulated according to the whims of the forces against which we fight. As we stand still on the precipice, ready to cast ourselves into the abyss, I urge you to keep in mind the propaganda disseminated by they who would seek to preserve the way of things in the face of an overwhelming campaign for justice. They convince others, even many working people that the rebel’s cause is meant to oppress them, that the cause of justice and dignity is, in fact, the cause of injustice and indignity, that the rebel and his supporters the worker, the student, and the parishioner are marshalled in service of oppression and not liberation. Aboard the Borealis, the ship struggles forward. “We’re hit!” shouts a crewman, a second round striking forward. “Keep the engines ahead full!” orders Dmitri. “Helm’s sluggish,” says the helmsman. “Keep her straight and steady,” says Dmitri, “we just need to make around the next turn in the river.” He turns to the gunner and says, “keep firing, fire as fast as you can. Don’t aim, just keep shooting.” More fire crashes around the ship, erupting columns of water over her bow. All it’ll take is one more square to break the cruiser’s back. It seems all is lost. Then, deliverance.
From this little office, it may seem to the conspirators plotting to overcome the rising tides of history as though they can plot out a course through to safe waters, but this is a fraud. As their plot is still in its infancy, they are as governed by the currents as is the working man fighting against them. If these men had not met to hatch a plan, then someone else would’ve, and if no one would’ve been there to hatch that plan and take the actions these men are about to take then someone or something else would’ve stepped in and forced an attempt to counter the revolutionary fervour gripping the streets. As the working man rises, so too does the wealthy man engage in a counter-rising, the experience of these two forces clashing in a fight to the death a necessary and inevitable precondition for our collective advancement through to the next stage in our history’s future. Still in this tentative early time when neither the forces of good
nor evil have assumed their ultimate form, we see this conspiracy form away from the still-growing influence of the dark essence in the streets, in the hearts of working men everywhere, whether they realize it or not. The dark essence is dark not because in its darkness there lies the blackened character of evil; rather, because it is made to live in the dark, in the little crevasses where shadows lie. After all the wealthy man’s propaganda had begun to fail him and after the thin visage of prosperity he’d built had begun to fade, the dark essence slowly emerged from its hiding place in the shadows and exposed itself to the light. While the dark essence has found men like Valeri to use as a vessel with which to grant itself expression, still it occupies a place neither spiritual nor physical, even as it has come to embody both of these mutually exclusive sides at the same time. On the Thames, explosions erupt ashore, followed by the heavy rattling of machine gun fire. The batteries targeting Borealis fall silent, suddenly. With the Borealis having lost fire control, her guns spit out fire at random, until falling silent themselves, not out of ammunition but jammed. “What’s happening?” asks one crewman. “Steady,” Dmitri orders, “keep watch. Best speed ahead.” But inwardly Dmitri realizes they are all but lost, and he’s determined to go down fighting. He’ll live to fight another day, though, as forces have aligned to deliver him and his men from evil.
“Attention cruiser Borealis,” squawks the radio. This voice’s different from the last. “This is Private Craig Thompson. We have pledged our men to follow the banner of the Popular Front and we have silenced the batteries targeting you. Proceed on your course. We’ll cover you.” At once, Dmitri radios back, acknowledging the signal, then orders the helm to proceed on course. Slowly, the Borealis limps out to sea, making good for the Coast Guard station on the Suffolk coast. Safe, for now, Dmitri takes a breath, knowing full well the real fight is yet to begin. But enough, for now, of all this talk of a dark essence, of rising and of counter-rising. In our immediate future, the task of individuals simply to survive the night, each night. With all that’s happened, we must never lose sight of the fact that there’s still more to happen in our history’s future. After all the bombings, the gun battles, the riots and the massacres, it may seem the state of affairs could hardly get any worse. It may be a bit of a letdown to rely on a cliché such as this, but so long as there’s hope we can never fail. In the heart of every working man who’s given himself over to the struggle for a better future there’s hope, and so long as this hope remains unconquered by the forces arrayed against it then the cause of the working man shall remain triumphant even in the face of certain defeat. Men like Williams and Schlager can plot and scheme all they want, it will never change the inevitability of our final victory. All that remains to be seen is how much pain and suffering the enemies of our final victory will put us through before we destroy them, before we smash them so utterly that it will someday be as though they had never been. Still there’s more blood to be spilled, here in the streets and across the world in battlefields hot and cold, dry and wet, high and low. But when we are victorious at last, it will be as if there’d never been any blood spilled at all.