by Holroyd, Tom
Where we were really lacking was in the industrial capacity to support the army. We had only just managed to recapture the munitions plant just outside Newcastle and were in the process of getting that set up to churn out as many bullets as possible.
The final point was that we did not have enough bastion walls, we had used them when we built the Safe Zone walls and then later to move the Northern Line but as the plan for the Restoration took shape we realised that we would need an unprecedented amount of these things. Again the Ministry of Resources came to our aid and simply turned every spare person they could find to the task of manufacturing them. It was a Herculean effort and those workers deserve as much credit for victory as the soldiers.
When it came to how we were going to actually clear the country we realised pretty early on the we couldn’t just march south in a straight line and sweep it clear like the Americans did. The country was too bloody big and we did not have enough men. On top of that we were up against a hell of a lot of infected and if we took them all on at once then we would be overrun and slaughtered.
We had estimated that with something like 15 million people in the Safe Zones, Ireland or the Burghs and another 15 million dead or reanimated in the Great Panic that left somewhere in the region of 45 million zombies, give or take the few million that we had killed already. What we needed to do was divide them into manageable chunks and take them on at a slow measure pace. That was the basic outline of the plan but what we really needed to do was test the low-level tactics and check if the whole thing was even feasible and that is where Carlisle came in.
Battle of Carlisle
Port Stanley, Falkland Islands
Jock MacTavish has just returned from one of his frequent patrols around the fortified settlement of Stanley. Thought there is very little risk of zombie attacks in this bleak corner of the world, mainly due to the cold weather and icy seas, there is still a risk from pirates who frequently raid the island for supplies including the large sheep population. We have just finished dinner and while his wife and children finish the dishes we sit at the table to talk.
I know it sounds strange but you know what I felt when we got the orders that we were going over the wall? Relief! Weird isn’t it but I guess I was just really glad to be finally taking the fight to the enemy. Sure I had taken part in the clearance of the Safe Zone and spent my time on the wall like everyone else. I had missed out on Ireland and Euston as I was helping to train the Militia so I was pissed off about that but this was different; it was the first chance to have a go at the G’s in their back yard. To give them a fucking good kicking and say that we weren’t going to roll over and die.
Don’t get me wrong though, I was still shitting myself as we were preparing for the Op. Command pulled together a mixed bag of soldiers drawn from every Regiment in the army, it was really clever when you think about it. If the Op goes badly then only a platoon from each Regiment is lost but if it goes well, then that platoon goes back to their unit and starts bragging and spreading the good news, everyone starts to feel more confident. Genius really!
Anyway, they pulled this force together, something like nine hundred men with another hundred support troops to make it a nice even thousand and billeted us in Fort Rockcliffe at the western end of the wall and began training us together as a Unit. Don’t get me wrong, we had been training ever since the end of the Op in Ireland on the new tactics that had been tested out there but this was different. We were drilled remorselessly until we could move together and given more ammunition to play with than most of us had ever seen before.
Could you describe the training that the rest of the army got?
After Ireland, the Army conducted a review of all the engagements and all the different tactics that had been tried; discarded those that didn’t work and used those that did. In the end they worked out that there were two things that were essential to defeat the Gs; marksmanship and psychology. Typical of the bloody Army that it takes them six months to work out what I could have told you in a minute. Marksmanship was obvious, you want to kill a G you have to destroy the brain but hitting a target that small, while it’s moving, requires some fucking good shooting. The pre-war army trained us to shoot at the chest because it is a nice big easy target and would put a human down in one shot. You shoot a G in the chest it will just knock it on its arse or worse you break it spine.
Why is that worse, surely disabling it is a good thing?
If you break a G’s back or blow off a leg, then it becomes a crawler and they’re fucking dangerous. Ideally you want your G standing up where you can see him so you can get a nice clean shot. Crawlers are like fucking land mines, you can’t see them until you step on one and then they take your leg off. Happened to a mate of mine during one of the clearance sweeps, we were patrolling through the Highlands and all of a sudden he screamed and disappeared into the tall grass, we rushed over and this G had grabbed him and was chewing on his leg, we hadn’t heard the fucking thing because it’s throat had been ripped out sometime in the past. It was bloody horrible, we had to put them both down, none of those nice euthanasia jabs that came along later, but we learnt the lesson the hard way and we always brought dogs with us after that. Saved a lot of lives those lovely furry bastards, they always found the crawlers before we did.
The shooting training was just never ending, every day we were on the ranges firing at these wooden targets fixed to a conveyor belt that was meant to simulate the Gs getting closer and closer. After Junction and a load of other battles the Army had worked out that if you slowed the rate of fire right down you could hold off Christ knows how many Gs as long as you had enough ammunition and enough men to fire it. So we practised day after day with a big base drum thumping out a beat every second and on every beat we would fire.
The other part of the training was the psychological conditioning. One of the things that made the Gs so deadly wasn’t their bite or their determination, it was the fear that they generate. The irrational panic that drove people to do stupid things and act even more stupidly, just look at all the crap that happened during the Panic, here and around the world. All that caused by the fear that these things caused.
Command’s bright idea was to take away that fear, by making us rationalise the G, to understand it. We learnt all about what they can and can’t do, their methods of attack, that sort of thing. As I said we had all spent time on the walls practising our shooting and that really helped. Fact is that when you come down to it, a G is just a slow moving, shambling hunk of meat and as long as you keep calm and keep some space between you and it, you’ll be fine.
All that was well and good but you try telling that to me as we were on the boats crossing the river. I was shitting myself, every thought in my head was screaming at me that this was a stupid idea, this was their territory now and that we were all going to die but I was a Sergeant now and I had a responsibility to my men. I looked around at those lads and lasses in my platoon, seeing how they were all looking at me and my Platoon Commander, trusting us to get them through this; all that fear just fell away and I promised myself that we would all get through this in one piece.
It was April the fucking first, can you believe that; some bastard up at Command had a right fucking sense of humour. April fucking Fools Day. Prick.
We landed at dawn just on the other side of the river from Fort Rockcliffe and had to march to the place that Command had chosen for the battle, a little place called Monkhill, not Carlisle despite what they call the battle now.
We were silent the whole time as we didn’t want to get the show started early and there were small teams of the Royal Scouts ranging ahead of the unit to silence any G’s that might discover us. I tell you, those guys were fucking insane. They were a made up of lads from the Special Forces, the military dogs units and the Household Cavalry. It was their job to keep the Gs off a unit until it was ready to fight and then to slowly draw them in for the kill. It must have been physically and mentally knackering, running o
r ridding around the Grey playing a fucked up game of Pied Piper with a load of Gs on your arse. I considered joining them for about a second but then remembered that I like having my mates standing either side of me behind a shield wall. Fuck running around with a dog and silenced rifle for a game of soldiers.
Anyway, we made it to an overgrown wheat field just outside Monkhill with clear fields of fire and began to dig in. It was standard procedure now to build defences whenever we stopped for the night or to fight a pitched battle. “Field fortifications” they called it; digging a bloody great square ditch is what I called it, I felt like a fucking Roman. We all dug our specific bit and then put our shields on top of the mound. These were a great bit of kit, a metal rectangle about three feet high that you could sling on your back on the march or set it in the ground with an angled spike to hold it up. It wouldn’t stop a group of zombies but it would slow them down and it made you feel a whole lot better having a barrier between you and them.
About Nine O’clock we were set and ready to go, the ditch and walls built, the range markers had all been set out and everyone had had breakfast and the chance to take a piss. The command group in the centre had set up their radios and the surveillance balloon was up on its tether. The call had gone out to the Scouts to begin reeling the Gs in and we could see them beginning to walk in over the fields with a tail of infected shuffling after them.
We all stood to as they got a thousand meters out and the Scouts came running back into the perimeter, at the same time the band began to play. The Pipes and Drums were banging away with Highland Cathedral. I remember being disappointed by the small numbers of Gs that were coming in, there must have only been something like two hundred and I thought that this will be over in a second.
Of course, that was when the rest of the bastards turned up, a huge wedge of grey that just piled over the brow of the far hill and came straight towards us. The Scouts must have pulled half of the Carlisle swarm on to us. That was when I suddenly needed a piss again but I looked either side of me at the lads and stood firm. The music helped of course, it’s hard to feel afraid when the pipes are playing, it really gets you going and I felt seven feet tall.
By the time the first G’s got to the five-hundred-meter line we were all like dogs straining at the leash with our teeth bared. It was like “come and fucking have some”, the adrenaline was pumping and we were fucking ready to go.
At five hundred meters, the sharpshooters began to take down the leading G’s and a line of corpses began to build up but they just kept coming, walking straight over their dead, arms outstretched coming for us. At four hundred the band stopped playing and ran to their positions in the centre of the square to act as our reserve. The Regimental Sergeant Major raised his voice and yelled “Battalion…. Kneel”, the front rank knelt with the second rank standing behind us.
“Battalion….present ARMS! “, across the front rank our SA80’s came up to face the enemy. I looked through my sights at the target I had picked, some bloke in a business suit with half his jaw missing. I controlled my breathing and waited. As they crossed the three-hundred-meter line the order came to fire, I squeezed the trigger, felt the recoil and watched as the whole front of the horde just dropped like they had been cut down by a scythe.
After that it was just automatic, the base drum began its one second beat and we fired on every thump just as we had been trained. I emptied my first magazine into the horde and just kept on going, change magazine, sight your target and keep firing to the beat of the drum. By now there was a barrier of corpses building up and they began to spread round to the flanks and that was when we heard the other lads open up.
I emptied my six magazines and stood up yelling “change” as the man behind me stepped forward and took my place. I raised my hand and one of the Powder Monkeys came running over, he was a young lad about fifteen and carrying a satchel full of magazines, we swapped empties for full and then he was off to the next guy. It was a good system as it meant each man got about three minutes to reload, take a drink of water or a quick bite of a power bar before getting back into it.
I remember taking a moment to look around and see how the battle was going; we were now fighting on three sides but seemed to be holding our own and a carpet of bodies seemed to be piling up between the three hundred and two hundred markers. The next time I remember looking around that carpet had become a mound that the bastards had to climb over to get to us. By then we were completely surrounded but despite the numbers against us nothing had gotten to the hundred-meter marker.
At some point, I noticed that the rate of fire had slowed and that my breaks were getting longer. I looked around me and saw that we were completely surrounded by a wall of bodies about ten feet high and every now and then a G’s head would appear over the top and get shot off. I glanced at my watch and realised that only three hours had passed since we had set up but we could already tell by the moaning from the other side of the wall that the numbers were starting to fall off. We were given the order for half the Battalion to stand down, so while half of us took a breather, cleaned our weapons or got a bite to eat the others stood on the line and took pot-shots at anything that moved. Amazingly some of the lads even managed to fall asleep.
A few hours later we could tell that it was almost over, there were less and less heads popping over the wall of bodies and the officers in the middle were looking at their computer screens and talking on the radio. By two in the afternoon it was all over, an armoured tractor had been airlifted into the square by a Chinook and bulldozed a path through the wall. The Scouts went first to clear out any stragglers but by then we were pretty confident that we had broken the chain. It was a weird feeling, standing in this totally silent field with a huge square of corpses as the only proof that we had even fought a battle here. Of course, that peace and quiet didn’t last long as it was time for battlefield sanitation, you have to remember that at this time we didn’t have the American PIE rounds yet, the ones that burn inside the brain and make clearing up much easier, we just had the old 5.56 NATO standard round and that made a fucking mess of the human head I can tell you. On top of that we had to make sure that every one of the bastards in the mound was dead.
It was one of the shittest experiences of my life, talk about a come down. Going from the high of having survived the first pitched battle of the Restoration to tossing bodies onto a huge bonfire that the engineers had built, fuck me that stunk. It got a bit hairy too, as some of the Gs were still alive. I guess they must have been trapped by their mates falling on top of them and now they came tumbling out, grabbing and biting. One of my lads almost got bitten but managed to get his cutlass in the way in time while his mate took the fucking thing’s head off.
It was getting dark by the time we were finished and we packed up and marched to the boats, all I wanted to do at that point was get back to the fort, shower and sleep for a week. Of course, the first thing that happened after we finished cleaning our kit was we all went straight to the bar and got pissed. It was great; we all talked and joked and bigged ourselves up, competing with how many Gs we thought we had killed. It was typical solder shit but it helped to burn off the last of the adrenaline and I suppose a lot of the stress and fear that would cause us issues further down the line.
Do you know that after the Falklands War there were less cases of PTSD in the Royal Marines than the Army? It was all because the Boot Necks went back by sea and had three months to talk through all the shit they went through rather than the Army lads who flew home and twenty-four hours later were kissing their wives and sweethearts. No wonder it fucked your head up.
The next day, with a lot of sore heads, we were paraded and told that we had killed over ten thousand zombies and achieved a great victory. Before we went back to our regiments we were all presented with a white piece of cloth with the words Carlisle stitched onto it and told to sow it onto our uniforms and wear it with pride. I guess there was not enough metal to spare to make any medals but I did wear
it with pride and still do.
Jock points to his faded red coat hanging in a frame on the wall. There are a score of battle stripes on the right sleeve.
After that it was back to our units and a few months later we were on the offensive. The Restoration had begun.
On the move
Department for Infrastructure, Whitehall, London.
Frank Elman is a former British Army Royal Engineer. Since the end of the war he has been a senior manager in the Department for Infrastructure, responsible for the building and maintenance of the entire critical national infrastructure, from roads and rail to defensive walls and power stations.
Frank is responsible for the maintenance of the national defences and the transport links, a job he has much experience in, given that during the war he spent much of his time building the defensive walls that still criss-cross the nation.
During the war my main role was the construction of the defensive walls that divided the country into manageable chunks, sounds easy doesn't it but the reality was much more complicated. For starters there was the supply problem. Did you know that the first thing an engineer does when they start a new project is to look at the plans and work out what resources they would need to complete it? Well we took one look at the plan and just said “no way”.
