by Holroyd, Tom
It’s what I would have wanted, that’s how I justify it. Like I said I hated that part.
Combat like that fucks you up you know; your body becomes used to the adrenaline, addicted to it like a crack head. The combat, the nerves, fear and adrenal spike re-wire your brain until you just become used to operating at such a keyed up level of tension that everything else seems mundane. The real problem is once the combat stops, it’s like a drug addict suddenly going cold turkey. One day you are getting your daily dose of adrenaline, the next you have hit Westminster station and it is quite literally the end of the line; no more fighting, no more fear just a pat on the back, a thank you very much for your valued service and now fuck off so we can get on with pretending that the war had in fact ended a year ago.
By the time I re-emerged into the real world everything had changed; a nation was trying to come to terms with being at peace, the Army was abroad helping the Commonwealth sort themselves out, we had re-captured the Falklands, again, and we had crowned a King. On top of that a lot of my mates were dead; of my team of forty only twelve of us made it to the end. You try taking in all that and still stay level.
I became a very angry alcoholic, so did a lot of my mates and I spent far too much time getting into fights in pubs and then sleeping it off in a police cell. It got so bad that Director Special Forces, who was in the process of trying to re-organise all of the Regiments back to their Pre-War strengths, had to confine the whole lot of us to barracks for six months and subject us to a barrage of shrinks, therapy sessions and group hugs. It was a load of pink and fluffy crap but it worked, we all went in a bunch of head cases and came out as relatively balanced and professional soldiers.
BRITANNIA ASCENDANT
Post Victory Hangover
Grace Southerby is the current Foreign Secretary. For much of her life she lived in Africa, the daughter of a career diplomat, living in what used to be Nigeria before the war started. She and her family were trapped in Lagos for much of the war, fighting and surviving on Lagos Island. During this time, she lost her father and mother to the outbreak and took the first steps on the road to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office when she the small community on the island and led it to stability and security. She was eventually reunited with Britain when the first of the aid flotillas arrived in Lagos Harbour.
I have spent my entire life in the diplomatic world. As a little girl, I would attend diplomatic parties at various embassies and talk to the great and the good. My father would always sit me down afterwards and ask what I thought about so and so and if I thought they were trustworthy. For some reason, he trusted the intuition of a child over that of his seasoned staff.
The reason that I am telling you this is that I feel that I have had a very broad upbringing and have seen parts of the world that very few in government have ever heard of let alone visited. This has given me a unique outlook on life that has served me well as a diplomat. There is nothing like spending a few years in a cut off hell hole to scrub you of your preconceptions of Britain’s place in the world and another nation’s view of you. That view, dare I say cynicism, is what got me to where I am today.
With Victory in Britain being declared in London, the country did what it did best, which is have a huge party but it was the wakeup call afterwards that was the real problem. It didn’t take us long to see that there was still a hell of a task ahead of us. Much of the country was still in ruins, our industrial capability was limited to the two safe zones and most of the population was still stuck behind the walls of their Burghs and settlements. We needed a plan to get back to a functioning economy and society. Fortunately, the PM had the foresight to not take the country off a war footing. As he said, “The job is only half done. The rest of the world is still in the grip of the infection and it is beholden on us to support our fellow humans wherever we may find them”. Fine words but what did they mean in practice?
Amazingly, there was a plan. You will forgive my tone but politicians are not renowned for planning ahead and while I can’t comment, as I was a few thousand miles away at the time, I am convinced that the plan was delivered by the military as a finished product.
What were the details of that plan?
It essential called for a re-colonisation of the country. Despite best efforts during the Consolidation, we still had thousands of people in temporary accommodation and refugee ships all over the country and we needed to get them settled quickly. The government established a settler council that identified viable locations, found the people with the right skills to make it a success and allocated the appropriate resources.
The result was like a second wave of the Restoration. Tens of thousands of people either headed back to their homes or found new ones. Farm collectives were established, recycling and manufacturing centres were set up and power and communication infrastructure developed. Thanks to vertical farming, renewable energy, 3D printing and bio-fuel harvesting, most settlements were self-sufficient within a year.
That was when we could look outwards to the wider world; the problem was that we didn’t like what we saw.
Why was that?
Once again, the geography of Britain had been her saving grace. The Channel, North Sea and Irish Sea had been the most effective barrier that we could have wished for. Yes, we had hordes of refugees crossing by sea but that was nothing compared to the rest of the world. When all that is stopping the swarms of infected is a chain link fence and a line on a map, borders cease to be meaningful and the reality was that many of the nations of Old Europe and the rest of the world had just gone. Most of humanity was reduced to a series of fortified cities surrounded by a sea of infected.
One of the main issues we had was who to deal with. Europe was in a bloody mess and we had no idea who we should be talking to. The French still weren't talking to us after we blew up the Channel Tunnel, Germany and central Europe had fractured into dozens of small states some of which were being run by old European royal families, some by warlords and one by some psychotic ex-prisoner who was running his own little kingdom. The Balkans had gone back to their favourite past time of killing each other; the Baltic states were just about clinging on despite God knows how many waves of infected coming out of Russia; and Russia was, well Russia. There was no way they were going to accept any help from anyone. The only people who were in as good a condition as the UK was the Nordic Confederacy and we already had a trade and defence agreement with them. The Nordic Confederacy is a military and economic alliance of Norway, Sweden and Finland. It was formed in the late stages of the Panic to pool resources. Today it is one of the most successful alliances in history and is one of the major economic players on the world stage.
So you see our problem. Back before the war an American President had asked “If I want to speak to Europe, who do I call?” now we were asking the same question.
What about the US and the UN?
What about them? The US was on the other side of the Atlantic, stuck behind the Rocky Mountains and in no position to help anyone. The UN was even worse; no seat of government, no real power or authority, at least not until VA day. Only then did they get some clout when the Americans rallied behind them.
No, the way Britain saw it, we were an island of calm in a sea of chaos and we needed to start helping people pull themselves back from the brink.
How did you do that?
Well the problem was that memories are long and Europe had always been a bone of contention for most Brits. Are we British or are we European? It was a question that has vexed politicians for generations and I still don’t think that we have an answer.
Britain has always been a maritime nation, relying on trade and sea power to extend our influence and ensure we had the resources that we needed to thrive, so we resorted to type and looked outward beyond Europe to the old Commonwealth. But before that we did something even more in our national character, we invaded France.
Foothold
Calais has been a bone of contention between Bri
tain and France for centuries. During the Hundred Years War, it was captured by the English and remained a crown possession until the 16th Century. It remained a political issue for many years following World War II, acting as a gateway to refugee traffic heading to Britain. During the war, Calais was overrun by the infected and abandoned. It was subsequently re-occupied by Britain as a gateway to mainland Europe. It is still a major political issue between Britain and France, one that the current mayor, Ian Hacker is all too aware.
So here we are again. A few hundred years later but once again the British are in France and we are refusing to leave. I understand the original reason for occupying the port and Calais-Nord, it was sound strategic logic but we have gotten to the point where even I think that we have overstayed our welcome.
Can you explain the original aim for us being here?
The short version is that we needed a foothold in Europe from which we could deliver supplies and power to the rest of the continent. The long version is that when we looked over the Chanel and all we could see was chaos, we felt that we needed to take matters into our own hands. The French government in Rennes was refusing all offers of assistance from us and we needed a staging area that we could establish and then expand outward from, to deliver aid to isolated communities. Calais was the obvious choice. It was a short distance over the Chanel, it was easily defendable and it had existing port infrastructure. I think secretly some people also enjoyed the historical irony of us re-capturing the last English possession in France.
How did the colonisation take place?
We don’t call it that. It is the “Liberation”.
The Liberation then.
Well it was a standard military operation. The Royal Navy cleared the underwater infected with their “ping and drop” and the Army flew in to clear the remainder. They established a perimeter wall around the port and old town and then the Engineers went to work clearing the port. That part took longer than the military operation, what with the hundreds of ships that had to be cleared and moved.
Once the port was clear, the dock workers, garrison, civilian administrators and staff arrived and started the business of establishing the port and building up supplies. An underwater power and fibre-optic line were run from Dover, the Channel Tunnel was cleared and that was it, we were up and running and in business. The problem was that we had no one to do business with.
What was the French view on all of this?
As I understand it, the French government had no idea it was going on. It was only when the first scout teams began to reach isolated settlements that they found out. They screamed bloody murder and threated to drive us off but in reality, they didn’t have the capacity. Ironically, it was only after they accepted our help and shipments began arriving in Brest that they could break out of their siege lines and start retaking territory. It did lead to a very tense standoff when the French Army closed on Calais and demanded that we hand it over. I think that it was only by some very clever diplomacy and the twenty-five-year lease plan that we avoided an all-out war.
How successful were the aid missions?
I think that they were very successful. The settlements that we reached out to were more than grateful for any form of support and once the UK government made the decision to give away plans for the vertical farms and 3D printing, settlements could trade amongst each other. Pretty soon we had established a trade network of defended sites across most of Western Europe, it wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t formal but you can see how the Federation developed from it.
What do you say to the accusations that the British policy in Europe destroyed the European Union and the borders of Old Europe?
That is such a load of shit. Typical EU fantasist bollocks. Anyone could see that Old Europe was gone. Human control was limited to what could be defended and held. As one commentator put it “there is no peace beyond the line”. In many cases that peace extended no further than the walls of your settlement or if you were lucky some physical boundary like mountains or a river. Some were luckier than others though; Eastern Europe, Germany and France with their wide-open geography never had a chance. But look at the Swiss, blew the tunnels and passes into the Alps as soon as they realised the danger and sat out the war in their typical style.
Yes, we indirectly helped to set up a series of independent and self-sufficient city states that no longer looked to a national identity. Did we intend to? No, but it was what was required at the time and on the plus side, it led to the European Federation being founded.
Commonwealth
The Foreign Secretary has brought me to the refurbished Foreign and Commonwealth Office which is the headquarters of the world’s newest global power.
The Commonwealth was born out of our national need to do something to help the rest of the world. We had cleared our island ahead of pretty much anyone else, we were starting to get traction in Europe and we were now able to help anyone who wanted it. Of course, that was half the problem.
How so?
Well look at our recent past. Three hundred years ago Britain ruled the world. I know that phrase will upset a few of your readers but that really makes my point for me. The British Empire dominated the world politically, economically, culturally and militarily. We were the super power of the day.
We then spent the next one hundred years feeling guilty for it. Despite giving the world a common language, a common legal system, the industrial revolution and the abolition of slavery, all people remembered is that we conquered most of it at the point of a bayonet.
That was the problem we faced, no one was willing to accept our help; militarily that is, economically people were clawing at our door.
The need to survive as a nation meant that we had to innovate and adapt. Thanks to the work of the Ministry of Resources, Britain was now a world leader in hydroponic farming, renewable energy, 3D printing and algae bio-fuel production. On top of that we still had the North Sea oil fields pumping away. In a few years, we had become a net exporter of food, energy and fuel; all that export had boosted the economy which in turn had kicked off the British manufacturing industry. We were still on a war footing, churning out guns and ammunition by the bucket load but we had started to produce every day goods like clothes and medicines. Everyone wanted some part of what we were making and Britain was happy to donate or sell.
Did you know that Napoleon once referred to England as “a nation of shopkeepers”, he meant it in a derogatory way but look how well that worked out for him? Ask anyone who knows anything; if you want to win a war it is usually the side that has the most money that comes out on top. And now here we were again, sitting pretty on a strong economy and a world that wanted what we had to sell.
And what were you selling?
Everything we could. Food, fuel, manufactured goods but what was really important was the knowledge we were selling; the technology and expertise as well as the military advice.
Was it successful?
Very, but not in the way we expected. Europe unsurprisingly wanted no military help of any sort. I think it was pride speaking, not that I blame them. If we were in their position I wouldn't have wanted some bloody pompous Brit asking if we needed a hand. Advice and supplies they were more than willing to accept but we made sure to limit military involvement to a few advisors and trainers.
We got a lot of interest from the old Commonwealth countries, but again they didn't want the British Army turning up on their door step, too many shadows of Empire. Not that we could have invaded anything anyway. After the VB day declaration, most of the Army was de-mobilised and what was left was on its way to re-take the British Overseas Territories. What they were asking for was advice, both technical and military and that was when the PM hit on the idea of the New Commonwealth.
It was based on the model of the Irish treaty and anyone who wanted our help could become part of a new international organisation that had at its core the values of free trade, military co-operation and a common code of laws. He calle
d it “A political union of equals working together to make each other stronger”. Admittedly it was a bit dictatorial of us to impose conditions on our help but I think history will prove the PM right. He saw an opportunity to build something great and he took it.
Many countries jumped at the chance to join once the offer had been made. Sign up to this charter of agreements and practices and you get a nice aid ship turning up at your door laden with food, fuel, ammunition and advisers. It was nation building in a box and once everyone saw how successfully it worked in Freetown, everyone wanted to join. Most of the new African city-states joined as a block, followed by the Caribbean and Pacific islands. Canada, India, Australia and New Zeeland were invited to join on account of their being in a much better shape than a lot of the world. After a hell of a lot of negotiation they are now fully participating members.
