The Old Soldiers

Two men who went looking for their army, and found the Wasteland waiting instead.

Recorded history

They served together in the last years of the old world, when by their own description the uniform still meant something and orders still arrived often enough to be worth obeying.

Their unit was the Snowdon Joint Training Detachment, Cambrian Sub-Sector, a joint American and British undertaking whose work was not fighting but the manufacture of people who could. It raised militias out of civilians for the defence of north Wales. Below the militias it raised Auxiliaries, drawn from whoever was left: the unfit, the too old, traffic wardens, and people lifted out of the refugee columns on the A55 on the grounds that they looked capable of carrying something. Auxiliaries wore a white or orange armlet stencilled AUX in black. They cleared debris from roads, carried ammunition forward and carried wounded back. They were not expected to fight.

The pair were attached to a platoon of thirty-five of the Anglesey & Caernarvon Militia, itself attached to the local 3rd (Volunteer) Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Their task was to hold what the regular forces could no longer spare men for: food stores, power stations, the infrastructure a district dies without.

They fought beside that platoon around Tan-y-Bwlch and the dam at Stwlan, in the fighting the region remembers as the Grey War. What they describe of it is confusion rather than manoeuvre: forests, emptied villages and trenches cut above the reservoir, units arriving without ammunition, units withdrawing without orders, and men firing without knowing who held the opposite slope.

In the unrest after the fighting ended, one of them was ordered forward to reinforce Ffestiniog Power Station once the enemy had withdrawn. The other disappeared in the same confusion, while commanding a section.

Then, in their account, the bombs fell.

Each believed the other dead, and each went on believing it for years.

After the Fall

The soldier at Ffestiniog came through it underground, and came up into silence.

The command network was not jammed or degraded. It was simply not there, and nothing has since answered it. What his companion did in the same years is much less certain: wastelanders place him among ruined settlements and among armed groups he declines to name, and the archive has not established which of those accounts, if any, is the true one.

Both spent those years working apart and working the same trades: guards on outposts, guides across ground nobody else would cross, hired guns. Both accepted the same unusual form of payment where it was offered, which was verifiable information about surviving units. Neither found any.

They met again at their own former headquarters, the old militia barracks at Caernarfon. At the time no faction and no individual would enter it, because of the depth of wire and the anti-personnel traps laid around it, and because the only route through was known to the two men who laid it. Witnesses disagree about the reunion in every detail except one. Both men agree, and so does everyone who claims to have been there, that the first thing either of them said concerned the state of the other's weapon and kit, and that the joke in it was that there were no longer any NCOs to say it for them.

They have not separated since.

Iron Haven

They crossed the last bridge still standing, found Iron Haven, and enlisted with the Remnants.

The reasoning was not complicated. The Remnants had weapons, manpower and a chain of command, which was three more things than anyone else in the region had, and the two men had spent years looking for exactly that. What they found inside it was a force heavily equipped and badly led: orders absent or contradictory, communications that failed or arrived meaning something other than what was intended, and troops attacking settlers who presented no threat to anybody.

They had enlisted to restore order and protect people who needed protecting. They had already seen as much war and as much suffering as they wanted. They deserted, and went back out into the Wasteland to look for their own regiments.

They were still looking when Iron Haven fell.

A rumour reached them first, of a Royal Navy frigate standing off Holyhead, flashing signals and getting nothing back because there was nobody left ashore to answer. They followed the reports and saw nothing. It did not stop them: both still speak of rejoining their formations, clearing the roads of raiders, and holding enough ground steady that settlers could put something down and build on it.

Then word came that the city had gone under Remnant rule, and they turned back.

Why is disputed. Some say they went back for the people trapped inside. Others hold that they felt responsible, having briefly made the occupying faction stronger than it was. The archive records both and does not prefer one.

Field Surveyors

A later account, which comes from their employers rather than from the two men, has them attached to RENED as Field Surveyors. RENED is a Crown department which says it officially never existed, and which arrived in Caernarfon after them. The work is survey and recovery beyond the wire, for what the account calls Her Majesty's Government, or whatever remains of it. They had spent the years apart as guns for hire. On that reading they are guns for hire again, and the difference is who holds the contract.

The account attaches both men. The archive has not established that the arrangement covers both of them, whether it still stands, or where it falls in the rest of their history.

They are said to go out on that work with some confidence. Whatever happens past the wire, there are loyal soldiers back at the Barracks who will come looking for them if it goes badly. For two men whose record until now has been a search for a chain of command, the archive notes, that is not a small thing to be able to say.

The only likeness

The archive holds one image of these men, and it was on file for some time before there was anything to attach it to.

The plate is annotated 1981 in a hand that is not theirs, and the training it records is the training of Auxiliaries. Both men are laughing in it.

Assessment

The Old Soldiers are not opposed to military authority. They are searching for it.

That is the distinction the archive considers worth writing down, because it is the one most often got wrong about them. They did not desert the Remnants out of any objection to discipline, hierarchy or force; they hold all three in higher regard than most people now living. They deserted because they could tell the difference between lawful command and violence dressed as it, and the Remnants could not, or would not.

Their loyalty now rests in three places: each other, the civilians they have taken responsibility for, and an idea of service that may no longer have anything on the other end of it. Both continue to look for evidence of surviving NATO formations. Neither will say aloud that there may be none left to find, and the archive has not raised it with them.

If the account of their attachment is true, something has now answered. Whether it is what they were looking for, and whether it is what it says it is, the archive cannot establish.

There is a further difficulty and it is not theirs. These are two men who describe a war the archive can date only through the annotations on four photographs, who came up out of a bunker into a silence that has not ended, and who are at present alive, working, and accepting contracts. The archive records that it cannot reconcile the two facts and has no method that would.

Archive notes

• Two subjects, one record. Neither man has given a name and neither has been separately identified.
• Served with the Snowdon Joint Training Detachment, training militias and Auxiliaries in north Wales.
• Fought around Tan-y-Bwlch and Stwlan in the Grey War. Their account is the archive's only source for that battle, retold once by their reported employers.
• Separated in the unrest afterwards. One reinforced Ffestiniog Power Station; the other went missing commanding a section.
• Reunited years later at the Militia Barracks, Caernarfon, which they had wired and trapped against everyone else, and which is now reported to be garrisoned.
• Former Remnant personnel, by desertion. Formally that makes them deserters, and the Remnants are understood to hold it against them.
• File with the Scattered.
• Reportedly attached to RENED as Field Surveyors, on that department's account. Not established for both men, nor that it still holds.
• The archive's only likeness of them is a plate annotated 1981. It cannot be reconciled with their being alive now, and the archive does not attempt it.