Then redcoat infantry—living soldiery with torches blazing—trooped forth to line the first part of the route. It was a sad necessity. Newly Revived recruits sometimes chose their first breath of fresh air as the signal to mutiny, go mad or otherwise malfunction. Recycling body pits awaited them behind the Hecatomb.
Finally, to the tolling of a sombre bell, columns of new Lazarans emerged from the nest; those most complete and with best matched limbs to the fore. Conversely, the more shoddily made ‘Shamblers’ were placed at the back and shot if they could not keep up.
Fife and drum and flag parties proceeded each regiment, manfully trying to add vitality to what painfully lacked it—and to drown out the perpetual groaning.
The Lazarans’ grey uniforms were the least of their differences to the living men shepherding them along. The latter’s pale faces were just the result of lack of sunshine, the former’s the lack of something much more profound.
Down the Great West Road the Legions of the Dead marched to war. From a high window in the Hecatomb their creator watched them go.
At Longford, not a mile off, they were intercepted by emissaries so senior they could stop the column in its tracks. The colonel of the regiment didn’t like that: once you got new Lazarans going it was as well to keep them moving till they grew accustomed to military life.
Yet there was nothing he could do. The seals on the emissaries’ orders left no room for wrangling. The bugle call for halt rang out and most of the Lazarans remembered its meaning.
It was a dangerous moment. The living escorts were ordered to ‘stand ready.’
Meanwhile, the undead looked around and took in what little there was to see. God alone knew what their blank-palette minds thought, for their faces weren’t designed for expression. That quality of serum was reserved for higher grade revivals.
There’d been one occasion—and mercifully only one—when a whole corps had gone berserk and brushed aside their convoy. Acting on herd instinct they’d headed for inhabited areas and it eventually took massed cannon to stop them reaching Hampstead. Army gossip said their commander had been demoted so low he was currently saluting civilians in Shetland.
Praise be, there was no repetition now. Those who’d forgotten the stop signal were clubbed back into line and the ranks redressed with whips. Meanwhile, the emissaries reviewed this guard of no honour.
They picked a few of the best from the front: sturdy near good-as-new revivals, plus some immature specimens from the rear. Ideal candidates to become Ada’s Lovelace’s murderers and Mr Babbage’s bed-fellows. Then the silken strangers left with their selection and that was all the regiment ever knew of it.
The colonel wasn’t favoured with names or explanations: not even a receipt. Old fashioned courtesy was just another casualty of the ‘Forty Year War.’ Government by dictat was something people gradually got used to: a subset of the purely temporary suspension of democracy.
It didn’t really matter. What did matter now, save winning the War and getting through life still vaguely human? Besides, the colonel’s command would have bigger gaps than this torn from it soon enough.
‘March on!’
The colonel rode along the column, brandishing his sabre as encouragement —or something. He studied the Lazarans and they studied him.
‘I don’t know what effect they’ll have on the enemy’ he mused, ‘but by God they frighten me…’
It required a brace of ‘examples’ to be made before the regiment complied but eventually the march resumed.
Half a dozen ‘men’ down even before they’d passed Longford. It didn’t bode well.
Unfulfilled omens. Day two’s tally revealed only a couple had slipped away, off to terrorise the English countryside before the Yeomanry or peasantry hunted them down. Not bad considering.
The only fly in the ointment was a tight schedule. The necessary wide berth of London had taken longer than expected, made sticky by blocked roads. Clouds of cattle and sheep, on their way to feed the War just as the regiment was, were easily dispersed, for animals naturally sensed Lazarans and scattered. The curses of military shepherds were nothing to worry about.
Protesting Christians were more of a trial however. At Runnymede they met demonstrators. When they wouldn’t listen to authority or reason, the colonel had to resort to condign measures.
Shooting Quakers he had no problem with. Canting po-faced types for the most part, though the ladies in their prim bonnets excited not only his charity. It was the Catholics the colonel disliked dispersing the rough way. His Aunt had been a Papist and they suffered enough under the Penal laws as it was.
Still, if people put up barricades—even token flimsy barricades—on the King’s highway, they couldn’t complain when His Majesty’s new recruits were sent in. Which was ironic, considering these were the very same creatures the protest was on behalf of. Shocking scenes ensued.
Why, the colonel wondered, did Lazarans want to rape people when, strictly speaking, there was no point? They were incapable of either pleasure or conceiving children. He sadly concluded it must be something innate in human (or ex-human) nature.
Living troops mopped up any resistance with bayonets and collected the bodies for recycling.
By Kingston the colonel concluded that only forced marches would get them to their ship on time. That meant moving by both day and night and snatched sleep in the saddle for those who needed it. He posted cavalry ahead to warn the natives.
Fortunately, Surrey was mostly heath and sparsely settled once you got past the London sprawl. Very ‘light land’ as surveyors termed it. Local magistrates did a good job and sent word so that minor roads paralleling the main one were cleared. After that, they made good time without further incident.
Though the colonel never knew it, besides the North Downs, where the old ‘Pilgrims’ Way’ brushed the Portsmouth Road, a man ruling an Empire which spanned one third of the globe (though only he recognised his rule) watched them go by.
From a drawing room in Loseley House, a mansion requisitioned from its ancient but ‘unpatriotic’ family, the man trained a spy-glass on the regiment as it shambled through the—now his—hamlet of Littleton. And since no one could see him, he shuddered.
It was imperfect picture in every sense. The elegant mother-of-pearl opera-glasses were not designed for such long-seeing. They gave only a fuzzy image: which given the view was perhaps just as well.
Another thing neither parties knew was that it was from this very regiment the observer had drawn Ada’s assassins and Babbage’s boys. Again, ignorance of the connection was probably for the best and thus bliss.
The peasantry had been recalled from the fields and children from their play. Presently, they huddled behind barred cottage doors and gripped rustic weaponry. The local militia stood to arms hidden from sight behind a barn. No less frightened, the livestock had scented something and crowded against field boundaries as far away as possible. Yet the sun still shone bright, and wayside wild-flowers abounded. Together, their splendid normality almost overcame the affliction traversing Littleton’s narrow lane. Almost.
As the regiment passed his drive the man had his best view of the drab column, glimpsing details right down to paper-white flesh and dead eyes. Accordingly, the opera glasses were set aside.
‘How did things come to this?’ he reflected. ‘It really is appalling!
But that was mere emotion (high emotion by his standards) and therefore unworthy of him or any man. Plus nothing to do with anything. As he’d famously once said (and shocked his audience): ‘Thought is everything—but also leads nowhere.’