New Model Army

by Adam Roberts

  11

  There’s monotony in war, since fighting is always at root the same thing; but it is an ecstatic, sort of monotony. We fought as individuals, and experienced the world as individuals do. But as individuals we were portions of a larger whole. We poured our misery in cups into that river and it washed it all away. We fought, day by day. Fighting was our whole being. That meant that we were constantly aware of death, and our resolve was tested every day with the danger and the loss of those comrades we loved. We recruited new men and women, and some of those grew in stature in the demos, and some died.

  I kept seeing the boy with the key in his forehead. To think of all the dead people I had encountered - many of whom I had personally made into dead people - yet it was that little boy I kept seeing. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, and I’d turn my head and he wouldn’t be there any more. But sometimes he would stand in front of me, in plain view, by moonlight or sunlight. A skinny lad, no more than ten, with those loose, ropy arms of youth, and those slouchy legs. But grinning at me, and looking straight at me. It is hard to concentrate on his eyes, because he has this weird little stumpy metal protrusion right in the middle of his forehead and it draws your attention. A short metal shaft, and the little piece of metal crenellation at its end, like a cyber-unicorn. The boy I saw, in Basingstoke, was white - death-pale, in fact. But when I see him about in the world he’s as often black - not racially so, simply in terms of hue. Caucasian features inked dark grey everywhere, like one universal and unswollen bruise. He doesn’t seem bothered to be dead. There’s a question in his eyes. I stare at the key, embedded there in his forehead, and look at the end of it; as if the metal tines contain the answer to my question if only I could decipher it; as if they are not designed for a chublock but are rather letters in some other alphabet to be read: Љ or Ж or Щ.

  You ask me questions. It isn’t all about answers, though. Why do I keep seeing that boy, and no other corpse? I didn’t kill him. It wasn’t our bombardment that killed him, unless it was. I don’t think we killed him.

  Imagine a rocky coastline, trees growing close to the edge of the water. Imagine a sunny day, and the hours passing as the trees withdraw their shadow like sucking it up into their roots. And then noon passes, and the shadows start spilling out again. The pulse of balance, lightness and darkness. We breathe in light and it becomes darkness. We take the dry blue and cache it in the moist ruby of our lungs.

  Simic recovered enough to come back to operations, and he and I hooked up with another man called Daltrey. He claimed to be part of the same family that gave the world the notable last-century rock singer, although a few quick web-checks proved he was fabricating this lineage. Not that we minded. We all have our little lies and performances, the little roles we play to unify the disparate portions of our consciousness, or to conquer our social anxieties, or to add flavour to grey lives. In the New Model Army we don’t care about that; just as we don’t care about your age, or your religious convictions, or your lack of religious convictions, or your ethnicity, or your sexual orientation, or sexual reorientation, or your gender, or those things the outside world considers handicaps. We only care about two things: that you fight, and that you be prepared to live democratically. These two things are hard requirements, of course; and some people come to us excited at the idea only to find them intolerable. Such people slip away, and that’s all right. No harm is done. Our wiki firewalls get cleverer and more responsive every time the enemy tries to hack them. These ADAP patches and softwares integrate themselves into the fabric of the wiki communication itself. It’s very clever; they’re alive, thoughtful, canny. But in fact (listen now, this is important) I have come to understand that fighting and democracy are actually the same thing. Move the first term into the realm of the second we call it debate - democracy works best if debate is conducted briskly, candidly, sharply, with effective strategies such that the strongest case wins the day. If you reverse the semantic exercise and move the second term into the realm of the first, then what have you got, if not the NMAs?

  You remember that old film in which there is a strange lumpy man, his body covered in a sheathe of pink-yellow latex under which have been crammed various lumps and loads, bumps, cushions, silicon implants on his forehead, hot-water-bottles, all to give the impression of monstrous deformity. The film was called a number, in the hundreds, either three or seven - I can’t remember, and because you’ve taken my webaccess away I can’t check. Three, you say? Well surely it was always going to be one of those sacred integers. Nobody was going to make film called 514 or 180. But you know the story. Ancient Greece, and a Spartan story: a city-state sends a small army against a much larger decadent and corrupt feudal military force, to defend the gates at Thermopylae. According to the logic of that film the democratic force refused the service of the deformed fellow. That was where the narrative left reality behind. Any NMA worth its salt would say, You are strong enough to move about, canny enough to aim a weapon. Take this credit card and, with the help and advice of many people, accessed through this facelink wiki, buy some body armour and some weaponry. If you don’t know from whom to buy such things then we will advise you; if you can’t find the right stuff ask your comrades and they’ll help. Then, when we go to war, contribute to the strategic debate, take on such tasks as are decided upon, fight as best you can. If you are too disabled to fight well then you will be killed - but if you (you know yourself best, of course) consider that a likely outcome, then it would make sense not to join us in the first place. That film with the numerous title got it wrong. We would take lumpy man, and he would fight with us, as he wished. If he tried, then, to betray us, then what could he do? If he tried to harm us from within, then we’d grok his wrongness pretty soon, and we would be able to act against him, because he would be inside the body. But why would he wish to do that? He would have gotten what he wished. He would be part of the whole, and no longer a remnant. No human being can live long outside the walls of the polis.

  Betrayal, you see. Treachery, you see.

  There are many different sorts of deformity, of course. The idea that deformity must always be visible, on the skin, or immediately underneath it (as in that film) is a foolish one. Look at my skin. Look - my hands! My hands!

  We armed ourselves at Aldershot, and elsewhere, and converged in our swarming, coherent way upon Dorking. The enemy had by this time learned that they could not press us to a single decisive battle, after the historical model, and were trying to put in place plans to engage us with myriad smaller anti-guerrilla forces. So because they were not expecting it, we gave it to them - a large, pitched battle. Forces gathered at a large temporary camp south of Dorking, ready to go out - with police units as auxiliaries (in fact the authorities were spinning this as a police action with military support, rather than the other way around) - to scour the vale of the south in search of guerrilla bands. We moved in upon them at lunchtime, in force (and like a thunderbolt we fall) and caused a great deal of damage.

  It was summertime now. A blue sky taut as a drumskin. Vivid quantities of birdsong.

  There was a degree of panic amongst our enemy in the aftermath of this; them not being used (I suppose) to our mounting a single large-scale thrust-attack, after the manner of the old-style military tactic. They withdrew most of their forces rapidly into defensive positions inside the town of Dorking, leaving behind both large numbers of wounded and unarmed police. It is one curious feature of the police force of my native land that only a small portion of its officers is armed. They are supposed to enforce the law using, as I understand it, the moral force of their example and personality, as well as a piece of wooden broomhandle. Other countries are not so blithe on this important question, especially during wartime. But there you go.

  We debated what to do with what amounted to a body of many hundred prisoners; and the debate took longer than these things usually do. Discussion was complicated by the fact that the national Chief Consta
ble, the head of the civilian police authorities, immediately made multiple declarations on various media - in amongst a great deal of chatter about our lawlessness and our terrorism and our outrageous crimes and so on - that he would authorize no ransom payments for his men and women. He knew, he said, that the army had, previously, paid us ransom money, and he considered this a terrible tactical error, for it encouraged us in our kidnapping. The British Police Authority would pay no money to our illegal bandit mafia (and so on, and so forth), no funds from the British police would flow into the coffers of terrorists and wreckers and rebels (and so on, and so forth) and he instructed us to surrender our ringleaders to the processes of justice and law, to lay down our arms and to return to our homes.

  It forced our hand, though. Some of us insisted he was bluffing, and that he would indeed pay us ransom, perhaps through private channels. Others advised taking him at his word, giving up the chance of ransom and ridding ourselves of the body of prisoners, either by simply turning them loose, or else by executing them. We could not simply sit on them. Events were moving rapidly.

  What was happening, in fact, was that long-standing nests of disgruntlement, and principled objection, and local tribalism, were dissolving the bonds of the united kingdom. Some of this urge for independence was pseudo-national, or infra-national, as with Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, North Country, Asian-Muslim, Asian-Hindu, Polish and other knots and groupings. Some was simply oppositional, in that ‘English’ had for some decades been a signifier of generic oppression, and many sorts of people - religions, regions, subcultures - welcomed the chance to break that domination. Some of it was properly ideological, and some people welcomed the same technologies that had liberated the NMAs as a road to a wholly new social contract, in which all central authority would be rescinded and every woman and man would be their own country.

  On the other side, of course, there was more than just the inertia of tradition. There were many people - the majority of the total population, probably - who did not want the united kingdom untied. They were brought together under the terminology of royalism, or successionists - those who wanted yesterday’s UK to succeed into tomorrow - although I know many of them were not particularly wedded to the British royal family. But things like royalty stand in symbolic, not actual, relation to the world; and this was the banner that was raised. The British Army, for instance, had sworn an oath of allegiance to the King, and notionally fought for him. Those who supported the army included many Scots, Irish, Cornish, Northern, Asian, Polish and even Anarchist individuals; just as a good number of Southern English individuals supported the other side. But that is the nature of war. A country is never divided into two portions, a red and a blue. Try to pick up one or other half, and lift it from the map, and you will discover how many, how fine and how deep-reaching are the tendrils (red, or blue) that rip in scores and scars and channels in the other side.

  We moved amongst the people, and to subsist we bought food and supplies, and sometimes shelter. Often these transactions went perfectly smoothly. Of course, because we were buying from shops in the same territory in which we were fighting we often encountered suspicion, and sometimes direct hostility, such that we were forced sometimes to buy at gunpoint, or sometimes leave empty-handed. But sometimes we would deal with people eager to be of help to us, and not always out of fear.

  What I am saying is that the thing the media had been denying the very existence of for - literally - years, was now certainly in process: a war of succession. And whilst our contract was still officially with the Scottish Parliament, and they still paid us, it was clear enough that we were now fighting a bigger war.

  Take that big battle at Exeter, for instance; the British did better against the NMA down there, which is what you might expect, since not every giant is as muscular as every other. Many New Model soldiers were killed. But the British were still beaten.

  You want me to tell you about Dorking, and all those prisoners that had been thrust upon us. Understand that I didn’t enjoy it at all. But sometimes things are needful. I don’t say I was only obeying orders, because the shame of that defence - and it is a ridiculous, dishonourable defence - is not the orders, but the subordination of the actor to the authority of the person higher up the chain. To say that is to say ‘I am not culpable because I’m a slave’: who could bear to even try and avoid a guilty verdict on such terms? An NMA is not like that. I voted, and I shan’t tell you whether I voted pro or contra, since that’s not what matters. What matters was my fidelity to the will of the majority. That’s what democracy means, after all.

  The debate on what to do with the prisoners at Dorking resulted in a vote on a proposition from a trooper called Norris. The proposition was that we disable the prisoners and thereby free ourselves to move on. The vote was passed by a narrow majority, but a majority all the same. This, then, we did; and it was a squeamish and unpleasant process. We went among them shooting them in knees and shins, and the sounds in that field were very unpleasant: squealings like pigs in an abattoir, or deeper-throated howlings and bellowings. I wanted to say to these men: would you prefer we kill you outright? I wanted to explain to them that this was the consequence of their Chief Constable’s public pronouncements, and that it had been properly and democratically debated amongst us. I wanted to explain that this was democracy and that this was mercy. But there wasn’t any time for that; we had a lot of people to work through.

  I discovered that putting on iPod headphones and listening to loud guitars helped me focus on the business; although I knew I was taking a risk doing this, since it made it easier for an assailant to come up upon me from behind. But it was better that than the alternative. I tried to aim for knees, since shooting them in the shins seemed to me worse. Either way, though, there was much blood, and little ricegrain flecks of bone, and they yelled. The bullets sometimes went straight through the kneecap leaving only a little hole and minimizing the bleeding. That, clearly, was preferable to a severed shinbone, or a carved-through thigh artery. But the problem was they wouldn’t stand straight to be shot - they squirmed, or rushed, or tried to run away. They held up their plastic-cuffed wrists, both hands together like they were about to catch a cricket ball, and pleaded, and screamed, and begged. If they’d stayed still it would have been better for them. But they wouldn’t stay still. Given these circumstances, and our own need for haste (let us say: for proceeding without delay) the amazing thing is not that a certain number bled to death in that field, but rather that this number was, relatively speaking, as low as it was.

  I saw the boy with the key in his head with us, slinking in and out unnoticed between the people in the field, and hopping playfully over the prone.

  When it was all done we informed the medical emergency services, and pulled out. We made our way eastward, towards London.

  We talked a lot, in person and electronically, about what we had just done. I was even, I suppose I can say, a little surprised by how talkative we all were. We kept priority channels clear for tactical and emergency communication, but other channels blobbed into scores of little chatgroups, circles of justification and philosophy and anguish that swelled and burbled, connecting sometimes with other bubbles of talk. We didn’t sit sourly on the thing. We talked it out.

  The enemy was not ready to negotiate with us. That meant we were to keep fighting.

  We fought the enemy at Chertsey, by the river, and then fought half a dozen skirmishes along the river, up to the bridge where the M3 motorway crosses the water. The banks were so crowded with boats and barges - pleasure craft, most of them - that it was as easy to fight on the decks as the grass. We commandeered some of these skinny boats and festooned them with explosives to blow the M3 bridge. Then we moved upstream to Staines where we snapped both the town’s old stone bridge - a handsome two-span structure with a Victorian look about it - and also the bigger concrete edifice a mile or so upstream that carries the M25 over the river.

  Once we had smashed these bridges w
e demobbed, dissolved into the country, eight thousand individuals loosed and disassembled for three days. We did this primarily to rest ourselves, and also to confuse the enemy - for they of course rampaged up and down to try and find us, and engage us. They assumed (which is to say, the media certainly did, and I believe army high command did as well) that the attack on Staines was a preliminary to a large-scale assault on Heathrow, the airport that stood not far away. Planes were all grounded, and a large concentration of troops dug into positions on the airport perimeter.

  On the fourth day we reassembled ourselves. A pontoon bridge had been put together where the M25 bridge had been blown, and at Staines Town a wooden Bailey bridge was in process of being constructed. We targeted this latter and blew it up easily. Then, avoiding Heathrow (no planes were flying. It was heavily defended. Why should we bother with attacking the position?), we moved eastward into London. We spread ourselves widely, seeping through the outer postcodes, like mice through fields of wheat. As we moved we blew up bridges and mounted myriad small-squad attacks (six or twelve people) on police stations and official buildings.

  A few hundred of us took to the underground railway network. This system had been subject to terrorist attacks in the past, but the authorities had done little to fortify it - to be fair to the authorities, and in point of fact, there was little that could be done. We took Putney and Queens Park tube stations without any opposition at all, moved the civvies out and blew up the rails. The authorities, naturally, closed the entire network; and the absence of trains actually made it easier for us to go into the tunnels at Hammersmith, move through them on foot, flashlight ovals wobbling on the walls, grey rats squeaking between the rails like they needed oiling. We laid down several dozen large-enough devices, all through the Circle and District lines, and then put some more in the central London stretches of the Northern, Victorian and Piccadilly lines. We cleared out and exploded them from above ground.