New Model Army

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Because,’ I said, ‘you belong here.’

  He didn’t contradict this.

  ‘That’s the bottom line,’ I said. ‘I fight because that’s what I do. And I fight for my army because that’s where I belong. From my point of view, it’s hard for me to imagine why a smart guy like you can feel so at home in a feudal organization like the British Army. Why fight as a slave when you can fight as a free man?’

  He puffed at this. Again, it was, I concede, insulting of me to call this young officer’s spade a spade. People installed in the feudal logic of their army don’t like to be reminded of their true condition.

  I was spared the need to apologize because that was the moment we finally received the summons into the presence of the officer in command, the Major-General himself. Through we went, accompanied by two red-capped military policemen, into the tent of the M-G. He (of course, he) was sitting straight up in his chair like a fairground target: stiff spine, wide shoulders. He was a young man; good-looking: evenly brown hair cut short and intense, algae-green eyes. He was wearing combat fatigues.

  The Major-General’s coffee was sitting, untested, on the desk beside his open laptop. Threads of steam fine as dental floss floated up from it. We had not been offered coffee. A snub, I don’t doubt.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’ He nodded at the three folding chairs positioned before of his folding desk.

  According to the logic of the hierarchy there are two things to do: either to do as the Authority Figure says, or else to make some token resistance, insofar as the feudal world permits such a thing, by saying (for instance) ‘I prefer to stand, sir’, and then standing awkwardly with yours hands behind your back. We did neither. Sol Barber and I walked around the tent having a good old look at everything inside it. Theodora took a folded chair from a stack by the tent’s entrance, unfolded it and sat down there.

  The Major-General was not happy. You might think that, since he was near the top of the hierarchy, his morale would be higher than the grunts lower down, with the whole weight of the irrational do-as-you’re-told army on top of them. But it was not so.

  ‘Shall we begin?’ he barked. ‘I take it you are here to discuss terms?’

  ‘How do you like to be addressed?’ I asked him. ‘I know you feudal army types are very particular when it comes to modes of address.’

  His young face pinked at my insolence. ‘I am Major-General Crawford-Smith,’ he said.

  ‘Well, Major-General Crawford-Smith,’ said Theodora. ‘Let’s neg. Oh!’ She opened her eyes very wide, like a clown.

  ‘She,’ I said.

  ‘Ate,’ Theodora finished.

  The young Major-General looked from one to the other, and then stretched out his gangly longs legs under his table so that the boots poked through the other side. ‘The time,’ he said, ‘is most fucking undeniably out of joint.’ He spoke this modified Shakespeare with a sort of furious gloominess.

  Theodora laughed.

  We negotiated. There were two main matters of business: ransoms and the parameters of the ceasefire. We spent much longer time on the former than on the latter: the question of ransoming back to the British Army the several thousand of their men for a sum not in excess of eight hundred thousand euros. We haggled on a per man basis, rather than on the flat fee basis of some other NMAs. It was our view that a larger group of prisoners should cost more to ransom back than a smaller: since getting their men back in good health provided the army with a more valuable resource to then put back into the field.

  I’m aware, of course, that this business of ransoms is a thing that excites very great animus against the NMAs. But I am honestly not sure why. To be precise, I can see why people are unhappy at their tax money being disbursed in this manner, but given that our business is, you know, killing people for a living, it seems to me low on the list of ethical outrages associated with our trade. Ransoming is an efficient transaction: it speaks to our market share. People contract New Model Armies to fight their wars because we are much cheaper than regular armies, and the strategies we employ to keep client costs down is crucial to our activity. Scotland had once sold oil on the world market but was now reduced to that international dole, tourist income, supplemented by sales of a type of sulfur-coloured alcohol. She did not have enough money to compete, militarily, with England. That was why they hired us.

  There are, it goes without saying, certain baseline costs associated with the business of waging war - a certain spec and amount of core ordnance, a supply of ammunition, per diems for soldiers in terms of food, healthcare and accommodation. We keep these to a minimum, and so we stay in business. Ransoms are a necessary augmentation of our income.

  Nevertheless Major-General Crawford-Smith was deeply unhappy at having to pay anything to get his serfs back - he had the belief that the conquering army should luxuriously barrack prisoners during the war and afterwards give them back for free. But I believe he had not fully understood what is involved in serfdom. A feudal logic is such that serfs are there to be bought and sold, transferred from owner to owner. Ransoming was, by this logic, one of the least New Model things we did. He hadn’t read Dead Souls, I suppose.

  Then we discussed the ceasefire. Major-General Crawford-Smith wanted us to withdraw from Reading and to concentrate our force in Basingstoke, which town, graciously, he conceded to us. We, obviously, had no intention of doing anything so foolish, on either score. You could see, as he discussed the matter, he was desperate to dismiss us entirely - to hurl us from his tent, to bawl us out. He could not believe we had beaten his army three times in succession. Some part of his mind was saying: let’s have it out one more time: for surely we’ll beat them this time. But good sense overcame impulse. That’s a pretty fair definition of military discipline, right there.

  We came to an end of our negotiations, and everything was agreed. It left Major-General Crawford-Smith in a state of near bursting.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he said, his fury bulging palpably with his words. He jabbed at his laptop, presumably turning off whatever machinery was recording our encounter. ‘And I’ll thank you to pay heed. I think your New Model Armies are a plague. Do you understand?’ His young, fruity vowels.

  ‘Plague,’ said Sol Barber, testing the word.

  ‘Human communities have constituted armies to protect them for as long as humans have walked upright,’ he said. ‘And those armies have always served the communities. Service is the essence of the military life. That is what makes it a worthwhile occupation for a man. There is nothing nobler than service, and service in which you are prepared to risk your life to protect your community is the highest of all. But these New Model types of force serve no community but themselves.’

  ‘I can’t speak for any other NMAs you may have been fighting,’ I said. ‘But we were contracted by the Scottish Parliament.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean! You know very well indeed, that is not the point! Don’t pretend otherwise! You are not a territorial army. You serve no territory.’

  ‘He’s right about that,’ said Theodora, in an insolent voice.

  ‘You’re like locusts, passing over the land and consuming it. You have no home.’

  ‘I shall interrupt you to correct you, Major-General Crawford-Smith,’ I said. ‘We are our home.’

  But he wasn’t to be distracted. ‘You, sir, and you madams, and your entire force of armed irregulars - are an abomination. I don’t use the word lightly, believe me. We have treated with one another here today, and as I am an officer in the British Army and my word is my bond. But you and I, we can look further than this particular treaty I hope.’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘You will be eradicated. Your kind will be eradicated. That will, once the hiccoughs of the succession business are disposed of, that will be the great project of the times. Augustus Caesar’s first claim to eminence was that he rid the Mediterranean of pirates. Some commander will perform the same purging activity upon th
ese islands, to rid them of New Model Armies.’

  ‘We’re an army, just as you are,’ said Sol Barber.

  ‘Except that we’re better at fighting than you are,’ added Theodora.

  ‘Pirates is an inexact comparison, I think,’ I said. ‘Pirates existed to steal money and make themselves rich. We’re not interested in theft, or riches—’

  ‘The ransom we have just negotiated!’ he spluttered.

  ‘Oh, sure, we need money. So does your army, Major-General Crawford-Smith. But we need this money for supplies, not for enriching ourselves. Otherwise we exist to fight, because we are soldiers and that’s what we do. And we fight for our army because it’s our home.’

  And in the end, after so much bluster and feudal-gobbledygook, Major-General Crawford-Smith finally said something perceptive. ‘But that is exactly what is so monstrous! You’re a closed loop, the lot of you! You don’t have the usual motivations or human habits. Your whole army is a self-sufficient organism that exists just to keep itself alive. It’s a dragon, feeding on England, and roaming from town to town. But one day you’ll encounter a Saint George. You mark my words. One day a Saint George will arise, and mankind will begin the business of wiping you and all your brethren from the face of the earth!’

  The three of us looked at one another. ‘I like that,’ said Sol. ‘Dragon. That’s well put.’

  The Major-General made polo-mint eyes at each of us in turn. His eyebrows made a dash for his hairline.

  ‘You have the knack of talking to him,’ Theodora said to me. ‘Make him see the future belongs to the dragons. Tell him, the name of this fucking dragon is democracy, and if he doesn’t like democracy he’d better learn to lump it. Feudalism’s a dead end, tell him that.’

  ‘Piracy,’ muttered the young Major-General, his face pinking further, ‘is nothing new. Mercenaries are not the future.’

  One trick I have picked up: if you are in negotiations with a feudal officer - or, indeed, with a soldier lower down the rankings - then let them have the last word. It doesn’t mean anything, in concrete terms; but you’d be amazed how malleable it renders them. It is another one of the peculiar features of the psychological distortion of the feudal mindset.

  7

  What was this war about?

  The war began when the Scottish Parliament voted to contract us. Our experience (we are a giant, after all, and a warrior) begins with that action. But there are casus belli in any conflict, and it’s good to be informed about them because they speak to, for instance, the morale and application of your enemy, the disposition of civilians and so on. The danger - here’s me offering you advice, again - is that looking too deeply into the causes of war may encourage you to try and tease out right and wrong. That’s a mistake, not because right and wrong aren’t crucial and real in-the-world (of course they are), but because if the rights and wrongs could be easily sorted out then people wouldn’t have gone to war over them in the first place. That’s not an infallible description of human interaction, I might add; but it is one that obtains in the vast majority of cases. War is painful and costly and nations or groups indulge in it only when less painful and less costly alternatives are unavailable. War is precisely the index of incompatible notions of right and wrong.

  So, what can I tell you about the causes of the Succession War? Those causes trail a very long way back in time, into the historical relations between the Celtic portions and the English portions of these islands of Britain. There have been many wars between those two tribes. I wouldn’t have space, in this document, to detail the half of them. Take the long view, and it’s been mostly war, actually, occasionally interspersed with uneasy periods of truce. But a clutch of centuries ago the Saxon south-east got the upper hand and imposed an ‘Act of Union’. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been, amongst other things, the story of a slow Celtic unpicking of that union. The first to do so were the Irish, fighting an old school war against the English. They took advantage, cannily, of the First World War to begin the process - an advantage not because the English soldiery were otherwise engaged (that war finished a few years after the Irish began their rising) but because it had been so devastating a conflict that the immediate aftermath was characterized, in England, as elsewhere, by weariness and war-satiety. So the Irish used that as leverage and fought their way to freedom, though their army was smaller and less-well-equipped. So began a century in which the Napoleonic logic of war - the logic that war is won by the Grand Army of the Republic and by throwing all of that Grand Army wholly into war-making - began to be corroded. This Total War philosophy was not demolished altogether in one go, of course. Indeed, the twentieth century saw some of the greatest achievements of the Grand Army philosophy. Most notably, perhaps, the Soviets repelled what ought, by all lights, to have been an unstoppable German invasion by simply throwing all their adult males at the invaders. That worked in 1940; and it might work in 2030 too, except that the terrain has changed - the social terrain, the cultural terrain, the technological terrain. And for those who could see, the nature of war had changed too. Mao took a small band and conquered the enormous military of the old Chinese regime. The wasp of the Viet Cong beat the American tarantula. First the Soviets, and then the Americans and British, poured trillions of euros and hundreds of thousands of men and all the most expensive ordnance into Afghanistan and could not eliminate a small group of hairy, poorly-armed men. Then there was that business in the Indian subcontinent - although by then, of course, NMAs had leapt, fully armed, from the forehead of History.

  This is to digress. Why did the Scottish Gaels hire us?

  Again, this is to speak to the twentieth-century history of the island, which was governed in large part by Saxon-versus-Celt tensions in the four other portions of the former UK that had yet to declare independence. Some Celtic forces in Northern Ireland attempted to replicate the military success of the South, making sporadic, often amateur assaults upon English soldiers and English targets, in Northern Ireland and in main-land Britain. With, as the historians note, their bombs, and their guns, and their guns, and their bombs. This assault was prolonged over decades, an in-its-way impressive piece of determined application. But in the end it failed. They failed, history says, because they were fighting a guerilla but otherwise conventional war against a superior force, and - beginning in the late 1960s and fighting through to the 1990s - they could not capitalize on war-weariness the way the South had done. Perhaps that’s true; but I’d tend to believe that they fought in too feudal a manner, and put too much of their energy into such feudal goals as ‘holding territory’ and ‘status’ and ‘national identity.’

  Some elements in Cornwall were also eager to free themselves from the English, but they were swamped by economic rather than military inundation. The fact that Cornwall is amongst the most attractive portions of the British Isles, in terms of landscape and climate, combined with its relative proximity to the English heartlands, meant that a great many English bought property and established lives there. As in Northern Ireland, a divided home population - some of whom wanted to fight the English, some of whom considered themselves English - vitiated the effectiveness of belligerency.

  But in Wales and to an even greater degree in Scotland the situation was forced by an increasing concentration of wealth in the south-east. There was a temporary amelioration of this towards the end of the last century when the Scots capitalized on the oil discovered off their coastline. And a general UK prosperity meant that the English could make funding subventions to poorer areas on the kingdom and thereby buy out a degree of dissatisfaction. But the great crash of 08, and the emptying of Scottish oil wells by the mid teens, took away the money that enabled that strategy of financial pacification. Perhaps, indeed, people had even forgotten why nations imperialize in the first place - money, of course. Why else go to the bother and danger of building an empire if not for money?

  As the twenty-teens ground on, life in the Celtic portions of the country became
less and less agreeable. Recession deepened. The Scottish Parliament made a number of legislative gestures towards administrative independence. But the English asserted their control over the remaining natural resources. Then immigration - a classical source of national wealth, and one that had been previously spread around the whole country - dried up; indeed, it reversed in many areas. Such immigration into the island as still occurred (for historical reasons this was mostly from south-central Asia and Eastern Europe) tended to concentrate in the south-east, because that was where most of the wealth was still pooled.

  Perhaps it seems that I am saying the root causes of this war are economic. Isn’t such a statement merely tautological? We can do better than that.

  The proximate causes are easy to identify. The UK monarchy, boasting an unbroken succession since William the Conqueror, but actually dating from the importation from Germany of a nineteenth-century Queen, had long since given up active political decision-making. But they represent, even in our century, a considerable political reality for all that, compounded of symbolic and semiotic potency and a degree of popular-cultural ‘celebrity’ acuity. And in the twenty-first century being a certain kind of celebrity was as important a feature of the political landscape as being an elected official.