The Battle for Tan y Bwlch

Told everywhere in the region, and sourced everywhere to the same two men or to the people they work for.

Recorded history

Wastelanders do not agree about the end of the world and are comfortable with that.

Ask in this region and the answers arrive without hesitation and without evidence. Goat herders got at stolen warheads and set them off. A Soviet laboratory experiment went wrong somewhere no one can name. The archive holds a much longer account in which nothing is set off at all and the world simply stops paying for itself. None of these can be tested and none of them is going to be.

The Battle for Tan y Bwlch is different only in that it is small enough to be described. It is a single engagement near Blaenau Ffestiniog, told in detail, with ground and weather and unit types in it, and it is the nearest thing the region has to a look at the old world in its last days. It is not offered as an explanation of the Fall. It is offered as the last thing that happened before it.

Every version the archive has taken down is credited to the same two men, bar one. That one is RENED's, and RENED is reported to employ them.

The Grey War

By the time of the battle the fighting in the district was known locally as the Grey War, and the name was about the slate.

Blaenau Ffestiniog had been a stronghold since the invasion. A mechanised force of some size was dug in there with a mobile reserve of helicopter troops, holding the road network that fed the front in England and sitting on the two things the war had come down to: the hydroelectric station, and clean water in quantity. Both sides had reached the point of fighting over drinking water and electricity, and so, according to the account, had everywhere else. It describes wars across Europe and the Americas, the Far East, the Middle East and the whole of Asia, over power, food, water and rare earths, and over religion and money as usual.

Survivors from around Trawsfynydd, who were near enough to that station when the bomb came down on it, describe house-to-house fighting through the streets first.

Then it went into the rock. The account is explicit that the mountains and quarries turned the fighting into something out of a much older war: trenches cut into slate, sandbags, cut-and-cover bunkers, positions on ground too steep to flank. Those telling it reach for the Alpine fronts of 1914 to 1918 to make it understood, the White War in the mountains and the stalemate on the Isonzo, and then correct themselves. Not white. Grey.

The account calls the enemy Soviet throughout and never explains the word. So does the red annotation on the Bangor plates, written by a different hand entirely. The archive reproduces the term because both its sources use it, and records that it has no independent means of establishing who these people were, where they came from, or what they wanted beyond the water and the current.

No record of any unit involved survives anywhere the archive can reach. What it holds is the recollection of two men. On both sides, they say, it was conscripts and worn-out regulars, led by officers who had been at it for years and were past caring.

The last day

Weeks of it had gone by, and the stalemate was holding for the least heroic reason available: neither side had the ammunition or the strength to break it.

Then, on the last day, an officer arrived.

He came up in Service Dress with a peaked cap and a sword, on a fine white horse, followed by command, signals and gun-turreted FV432s, and he ordered a final push for Queen and Country. Every soldier still standing was to go forward with the bayonet, walking wounded included. He then had the Auxiliaries brought up from behind the lines, the road-clearers and stretcher-carriers who were never meant to fight, and issued them captured SKS carbines and old stocks of No.4 Lee Enfields.

The charge is said to have started on the banks of the Rhaeadr Cymerau and to have ended at the Stwlan dam itself. Wave after wave of men.

The enemy put up what the account calls a token resistance. Some ran. Some surrendered, and were bayoneted anyway by frightened men who had been soldiers for less than an hour.

The power station

The dam and the station were shot and shelled through, and the plant survived.

That is the part the tellers always arrive at, because it is the part that mattered afterwards. The machinery inside came through it, and after emergency repairs the station could still put power into the region. The account states that it changed hands twelve times during the battle.

The two men who fought there call Tan y Bwlch the last battle. The archive notes that they mean the last battle of that war, and not the last fighting in this region, which has continued more or less without interruption ever since.

The officer

Outlanders from around Tan-y-Bwlch say the officer is still there.

Having spent every life he had available on that last order, he is described as continuing to ride the area, fused into the horse he gave the order from. The archive has recorded the claim in the words it was given and makes no observation about it beyond noting how consistently it is repeated and how little anyone telling it seems to want to elaborate.

The Department's telling

RENED, a Crown department reported at Caernarfon, tells the same war from further off.

In its version war spread across Europe in the early nineteen-eighties, as NATO and the Soviet Union fought over collapsing supplies, resources and territory, and Soviet forces went on to invade mainland Britain. Blaenau Ffestiniog became a Soviet stronghold holding the roads, the hydroelectric plant and the clean water. British regulars, with militia and Auxiliaries attached, fought exhausted Soviet troops around Tan y Bwlch and Stwlan, and the fighting is again called the Grey War. The Department calls it the last great battle fought in Britain before the end.

There is no officer in it, no horse and no charge. What it adds comes afterwards. For a few weeks the guns largely fell silent, "no more than around five in the account usually told", and it was not peace so much as exhaustion. Then the bombs fell.

Where the two tellings overlap, they agree.

The difficulty

This account describes an invasion of Britain, a foreign mechanised army in the Welsh mountains, and a nuclear strike on Trawsfynydd. Set against the rest of the collection, none of that fits.

The longest account of the collapse the archive holds has no enemy in it at all and does not fire a shot. The six plates do show this war, and two of them show this ground, but they are annotated 1981, 1982 and 1984 by hands that give no other information about themselves. That is now a written account and a set of photographs agreeing with one another, and with nothing on file that is independent of the men telling it.

The archive is obliged to note what that does and does not amount to. Two of the plates are the property of the men who tell the story, and an account is not corroborated by the photographs its own tellers produced. What the archive has is one war, attested twice, by the same source.

The Department's telling does not change that. It comes from the people the two men are reported to work for, and an account is not made independent by being retold by its tellers' employers.

It has no means of establishing where in the sequence any of this sits, or whether the world it describes is the world the rest of the collection describes. It has set the accounts beside each other and joined them to nothing.

Archive notes

• Oral account. Circulated widely; attributed to the two Old Soldiers in every telling but RENED's.
• Names the fighting in the district the Grey War, after the slate.
• Describes trench warfare in quarried rock, compared by the tellers to the Alpine fronts of 1914–18.
• Trawsfynydd was struck, according to survivors from the area quoted within the account.
• The hydroelectric station changed hands twelve times and remained operable after emergency repairs.
• The final action was a bayonet charge with Auxiliaries armed for the purpose, from the Rhaeadr Cymerau to the Stwlan dam.
• The officer who ordered it is said to be still riding the area, fused to his horse. Recorded as told.
• No unit records survive. The archive holds recollection only.
• Corroborated by two plates in the same tellers' possession, and by nothing independent of them.
• Retold by RENED, which sets the battle in a European war and a Soviet invasion of Britain, and puts a few weeks of quiet, around five, between it and the bombs. It comes from the department the tellers are reported to work for, and is not counted as independent.