by J. T. Marsh
It seems like such a strange notion, quaint even, that it was only some years earlier that the working man should’ve been looked to the distant skyline and seen gleaming, glass-and-steel towers reaching for the sky, higher and higher with every passing week. In truth, there’s been war, someplace, sometime, for longer than anyone can remember, and this new war is not new but rather a sudden and unexpected escalation of an old war once confined to some province of some country none of us have ever been to but which now involves us all. At the mercy of forces so much greater than ourselves, we can think only to press ahead. Walls crumble, only to crumble again days later. A third of the stars fall from the skies, only for those very stars to fall again the next night. Before the failed rising fifteen years ago, everyone had been led to believe here in Britain, but also throughout the rest of Europe, the United States and Canada we’d led peaceful lives, free from conflict, as though all had once been well. But it’s a fraud. This, this war erupting on the streets of our cities is but the logical culmination of hundreds of years of fighting, of exploitation of man by man, the way of things collapsing under the weight of so much greed. The air’s filled with the sounds of sirens wailing, of gunshots cracking, of water gushing from fractured mains and of buses trundling along, stopped only by troopers searching them for something, anything at all.
In the time it’s taken all this to transpire, an insidious evil has gathered its own strength, filling the screens of the thousands and thousands with scathing denunciations of this new, foreign enemy, who had only a short time ago been merely a rival, a short time before that a friend, an ally even. This, then, is an insidious power of the way of things, the power to rewrite our common history to convince us these were our enemies all along. In Valeri’s lifetime, he’s seen much anguish. Now, as he emerges from his sleep into a world suddenly at war, he can only look out over the street and imagine himself with another again. At his side Tonya appears, her last suspicion and the last tension having eased. Though he’s committed, she’s not, not yet, still clinging to that last bit of doubt left in her. “You must come to the hall,” he says, “there you can meet our friends, so you can make yourself useful to them later.” “It’s not safe to go out right now,” she says. Tonya, she’s not at all like him, even as she comes from the same stock as him. She fights not on behalf of her children, but on behalf of the children she’d never had. Little does he know she’s about to disappear, to blend in with the teeming masses, to make herself one with the rebels of the Popular Front in anticipation of the final offensive. She may not survive; in fact, it’s almost assured she’ll die in the very streets where once she’d lived. But hers will, in time, be an honourable death, noble, in service of the working man’s cause. She’ll live long enough, though, to make herself useful to the working man in standing against the criminals in power, in seizing her home and forcing the criminals to try and take it back.
Though neither Tonya nor Roger have told anyone, it’s obvious to the other residents they’ve fallen in love, not from anything either has said or done but from the way they seem to avoid one another in the day and only take into each other’s rooms at night. But Valeri looks on her with a muted envy, half-wishing his love Sydney could be there with them to make their stand, whether they live or die unimportant to him in this frame of mind so long as they’re together. But he shakes the thought. “It’s imperative we all do what we can,” he says, “for our children, and our children’s children.” She says, “I would trade my life for my children’s, if I had any children to trade my life for.” Valeri nods and says, “I know what you mean.” He looks on as she gathers her things and makes to leave, then steps in front of her. Though this is that time, that short, brutish time between war’s declaration and the first battles, the city and the country beyond is already burning, from the corner of his eye Valeri spotting through the window behind Tonya a column of smoke rising from the city’s streets, casting a shadow that strikes the two of them at just the right moment to send a shiver running the length of his spine. In the morning, she goes with Valeri to the union hall and in so going she encounters her own future. There won’t be any one sight, any one word spoken or clenched fist thrust into the air that should move her to commit herself wholeheartedly and enthusiastically to the Popular Front’s struggle; there’s no way to explain what happens, if anything happens at all. This is what she was meant to do, the path she was meant to walk in service of the higher purpose assigned to her by the flow of history.
It’s all happened so fast. It’s been building for hundreds of years. If you were to tell the working man that these are the times foreseen by learned men, men more learned than him for every one of those hundreds of years, he’d scoff and push you away. As men squabble over which personality ought to take the chair of some committee in parliament, forces gather. Carefully, the rebel chooses his target, and when the timing is right he strikes. In the time before the rebel’s next strike, though, the working man has found himself caught up in the turmoil, his life spiralling out of control until he soon finds himself struggling to maintain anything like a normal, day-to-day routine. Aboard the cruiser Borealis, the Captain announces they’ve made into port at Copenhagen to take on supplies and join a multinational task force. Their sister-ship, the Australis, has already arrived some days earlier. Then he dashes hopes by declaring there’s to be no shore leave. Already Dmitri has become something of a leader among the men. Perhaps it’s inevitable there should be a leader who arises from the men, out of the little conversations that forge a consensus the men self-selecting for their own. Still, the men are allowed time on deck, during one such break Dmitri looking out across the port at a Spanish-flagged frigate, the frigate’s crew on deck looking right back. There’s a silent moment exchanged between the men of the two nations, cut off by the sudden exploding of a bomb in the streets. It’s distant enough not to be seen, but close enough to be felt like the quivering of a slight earthquake, to be heard almost like the backfiring of a lorry’s engine. Then, the intermittent rattling of gunfire, only for a moment before cutting out. If Dmitri should close his eyes and listen, he would think the Borealis still at home on the Thames.
As the fires rage and as the world he knows crumbles into dust, the working man might be forgiven for seeking at least some small measure of solace in the memories of his own making. In the union halls he meets with his brothers and sisters, but now the mood has become grim. Their numbers have thinned, some jailed, some killed, but most scattered into the wind in cobbling together at least some meagre sustenance for their families. The rebel has not yet begun to provide for him; as if to punctuate this fact, a string of explosions rip through the city, scattering debris like wooden splinters and broken bodies like broken dreams. In the union halls, the working man gathers the last of his strength, takes the stage, and puts in his best face for his brothers and sisters as he makes the case for the next wave of strikes. At the union hall where Valeri takes Tonya, they encounter not one but three angry men standing up high on the stage. “…Are you ready?” one speaker asks the crowd, receiving in response cheers and roars. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen Captain Abramovich orders the crew of the Borealis below decks, curtailing even the minimal privilege of fresh air for the men. There’s some resistance, but it’s limited mostly to the muttering of expletives when the officers’ backs are turned. Dmitri, though, remains standing on deck for a moment, gripping the rails, thinking to stand firmly in place and force the officers to drag him away. But it’s a fleeting thought, a futile notion, in the end the better part of him turning in with the rest, in the bunks that night those mutterings becoming open dissent. “I hate that Captain,” says one crewman. “We’ve lost men in these drills and still he orders more,” says another. “If we’re ordered into action, what will we do?” asks a third. “We’ll fight,” Dmitri says, to himself as much as his bunkmates, “it’s what we do.” The others nod their grim assent.
The speaker at the union hall goes on to say, “They
have spent our wages on weaponry and technology to defeat armies on the battlefield, at sea, in the skies, but none of these expensive weapons can possibly defeat the rising of the working man against them!” Another round of cheers and roars. Soon Valeri is shouting, Tonya shouting too, the whole lot of them drowning their own doubts in a sea of voices all crying out for vengeance as one. Tonya seems excited in her own right, and for a time Valeri is convinced she’s come around to his way of thinking, if only he could know better. In agreeing they’ll fight, the crew of the cruiser Borealis silently acknowledge the truth of the matter, that it’s not important whether the coming battle against some foreign enemy is won or lost, whether the men aboard the Borealis live or die in the waters of the Baltic Sea. (They still haven’t been told where they’re headed, but from their course so far it’s abundantly clear to all.) Clinging to the futility of a life marked by impoverishment, indignity, and despair is the folly of the delusional. Still, as Dmitri listens through the night to the rattling of gunfire and the intermittent thud of explosions on the streets of this foreign city, he is committed to the working class struggle in ways even he can’t understand, his spirit given to the way forward offered by the rebel Elijah and the Popular Front, even if his mind is not yet made on the exact way forward. Still there’s talk of mutiny; it’ll come to that, sooner than they think.
It seems random, but when the first in a string of explosions rattles across the city it all becomes clear. The dust settles, revealing a bombed-out storefront, with debris scattered across the street like so much useless confetti. An old café, on the same block as a police station, the café known locally as a favourite place for the policemen to come when off duty. Policemen are among the dead and wounded. In an act of calculated savagery, the rebel has, unknown to all but a select few, struck a declaration that he is to be reckoned with. In the coming days, another explosion rocks the city’s streets, then another, then another, all across the country a series of explosions all strike at the same targets, all using the same methods, bombs set to demolish places highly visible, near the instruments of power, restaurants near army bases, stores near state offices, warnings phoned in without enough time to get word out to evacuate. Like an exclamation point inappropriately placed at the end of a too-long sentence, these are a sequence of attacks meant to show they are all carried out by the same people, using the same tools, but without declaring their identities, the rebel aiming to induce all to find him and make him known in ways no propaganda ever could. Still living in the sewers, in the little nooks and crannies where the light cannot reach, the rebel blends in with his surroundings as seamlessly as a rivet made flush with sheet metal, and in so blending evades detection; when the storm troopers raid his hideouts, they find only empty warehouses, tunnels, and old, disused garages, one after the other until, there must happen something, until there must be that opportunity inevitably handed down by way of divine influence, a few days after all that’d happened this influence reaching out to offer its intervention in the affairs of the human heart. It’s a fight to the finish, all will come to realize, and in fighting to the finish all will come to see theirs as a fight for the finish, an explosion, then another, then another, a string of explosions bursting across the city at precisely the right moments, creating the impression without confirming the fact all come from the same place. Still at the union hall when these explosions take place, Valeri and Tonya stand aground, looking as one. But when Valeri’s turn to speak comes, he looks this way and that, and then nods back at Tonya, inviting her to stand on the stage beside him. “…And this is why we must all stand together now and fill the streets as one! United we can never fail!” And she follows his lead, standing by his side as he whips the crowd into an ever-intensifying frenzy, speaking his piece while outside the world sets itself on fire anew.
A murmur sweeps across the crowd as news breaks of this latest attack. “Brothers and sisters!” Another speaker takes the stage, Valeri turning back with Tonya to watch from the side. “Don’t fear the acts of our friends who fight! They’re fighting for you! They will attack the rich man who controls all, and their attacks will pave the way for our future!” But the assent is far from unanimous. In Valeri’s heart, though, the sounds of explosions booming across the city inspires in him a surge of passion, and he steps forward to cheer and urge the crowd on. But Tonya doesn’t step with him, not yet. Amid acts of spontaneity the significance of this act of deliberation can’t be lost on the wealthy man’s apparatchiks. After the speech is had, Valeri and Tonya meet in the alley behind the hall with Miguel Figueroa and Rose Powell, the latter pair promising them guns to use in their stand. Meanwhile, in a lot somewhere, holding the half-finished shell of what were to be an investment for the wealthy man, troopers stage another of their raids, finding nothing, as they’re about to leave one young trooper pressed into service during these times of crisis mistakenly setting off a bomb. Only the one trooper dies, and only later, after his colleagues rush him to the nearest hospital. It may seem like a small thing, the death of a single trooper against the violence and the loss of life all around, but it’s these little acts that, over time, add up, and in so adding provoking a larger turn of events. A young woman’s death, still an act with the power to shock and outrage after all that’s happened, provoking an outpouring of anger as crowds again take to the streets, in turn provoking the shooting deaths of scores more, when the cycle of crowds and shootings and crowds and shootings reaches its apex the rebel stepping to set off another of his explosions, this one placed so perfectly at the head of the largest crowd yet, in the immediate aftermath spreading the notion it was an attack by the storm troopers themselves. Through this whole period, the rebel sends his gunmen out into the streets in ever increasing numbers, drawing on his newfound reputation as a man of the people to recruit, under the cover of darkness gunfire rattling across the city. Still yet the rebel conserves the bulk of his strength; his time is not yet come. Still yet the rebel reserves his strongest fire and fury for the fires yet to be set.
24. Call to Arms
It comes suddenly, as such things tend to, with all but a few among the working man’s ranks taken by surprise. The army, the Prime Minister declares, is to be marched into battle right away, where it will surely rout the enemy and bring quick victory to the nation and to every man, woman, and child living under the banner of heaven. For his part, the working man can’t figure out what to make of this grand pronouncement, and it only hits him hard the next day when he sees his own, fresh faced, young men being marched along the street in formation. The war has finally hit home. Russia launches an invasion of the Baltic countries where the Borealis has been heading; they don’t call it an invasion, but that’s what it is. The Baltic countries are part of a Western military alliance, and the Russians are betting none of their allies will come to their aid given all the internal turmoil going on within their rivals’ borders. The United States, given to isolationism and with a faltering industrial plant, refuses to honour its treaty; but the United Kingdom and most of the others dutifully declare war. Serbia takes advantage of the opportunity to launch an attack on Kosovo. Old rivals Greece and Turkey trade air raids in the night. In the span of a few days, the last vestiges of the old European Union are gone. Like the Americans, the Chinese government stays out of the fighting, for now content to continue quietly consolidating strength through covert means in all combatant countries, but in time their central role in this, our apocalypse rising, will become clear as a summer’s rain. Beset by internal conflict, the world’s empires seek a resolution to their own strife by using each other as an outlet. Each of these empires has their ruling interests, each is governed by a coalition of these interests as is this country in which our working man lives. For Valeri, this turn of world events strikes near to him, his mother and father having come from the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk, leaving many family and friends behind. He has aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins still in Russia; however far this war reaches, howev
er long it lasts, some of them might be killed in it. This, Valeri realizes as he watches the news on his screen, is reason enough to oppose the war.
On board the Borealis the news comes immediately, even before the public is made aware, and Captain Abramovich announces the declaration of war over the ship’s intercom. Dmitri’s in his bunk when the announcement comes through. “At last, the waiting is over,” he says. “I’m not ready to give up on this,” says another crewman. “Nor am I,” says Dmitri, “but soon enough we’ll find which way we’ll turn.” Later that day, the Borealis joins a task force headed up the Norwegian coast for Russian waters. Still in his bunk when the order comes down for all hands to battlestations, Dmitri scrambles with the others, arriving at forward gunnery unsure whether he would live or die that day but determined nevertheless to see his shipmates through. Before the day is out, he’ll lose some of them, still to lose many more before the real war is won.
In the back alleys, the rebel is not concerned but reassured by this turn of events, unexpected as it’s come even to him. In time, the working man and his rebel ally will come to regret the latter’s overconfidence, not because they’ll wind up on the losing side but because their lack of prescience and foresight will surely make their ultimate victory so much costlier than it’ll need to be. Not all is lost, and as it seems so unlikely for a nation so embroiled in bitter civil unrest to go to war against its rivals, but in fact it’s the perfect moment. As the rebel looks on, the wealthy man musters his influence and his strength in service of this new war, the wealthy man placing his faith and his fate entirely in the fight against nothing at all. And when the student, the parishioner, the worker, the trooper, and the migrant all learn Britain has gone to war, they react with unanimous outrage, taking to the streets not as disparate interests but as a united front, surging against the government and the wealthy men who control it like the raging waters of a powerful storm against the face of a dam. Though it may not be readily apparent, this is one dam about to spring the smallest of pinhole leaks, in turn about to collapse in a torrent. This is the last we’ll follow each of these men, each of these individuals who represent a facet of the working class movement, but their stories have yet to end. As the United Kingdom goes to war each will keep on fighting, in their own way.
