OOC: It's fascinating to see this kind of, I almost want to say orientalization, applied to ones own country.
Dressing up as a Georgian gentleman-scholar with a claymore on your back whilst you sketch a castle is a fucking performance.
I'm not sure if the author is geniunely this naive, or whether he's been ordered to give this guy a blowjob by the junta. The lip quivering suggests the latter to me. The Junta really wants to keep the Royal Government sweet, because they think they can use them as a cut out if the Spanish left comes to power and cuts them off from trade for their manifold crimes against humanity. So they're desperate to keep the royalists onside.
I'll second you on the sword thing to. Everyone just carries a rifle and a side arm. It'd doubly galling because this guy has about as much claim to the nobility as I do. Most of the actual British sword nobility died at Ypres. I'd never defend them but at least they'd have the self respect not to dress up as fucking knights. This guy's father or grandfather aren't blue bloods. They brought into the nobility with the comission on dirty Russian, Lebanese and Colombian money.
More people would survive the war in Europe in Amazon warehouses than in castles [SOURCE], but for all he says he doesn't want to "overstate their importance" he proceeds to do so at length, and subsequently build an entire fucking monarchist mythology around how important castles were.
It wasn't meaningfully a castle which saved his life, either. He's so full of shit I bet his eyes are brown. He survived by clinging like a tick to the crowned hag.
This whole section really strikes me as what I've heard called "Baracadism." where survivor communities want to establish more and more elaborate perimeters to keep out the zombies. In general a good fence or wall will do. Like, even before Plymouth was being cleared, we'd retaken the dockyard, the marine HQ and Royal Williams Yard by the simple expedient of closing the gate and doing sweep and clear through the insides. There was some things we had to do to actually set up properly tight perimeters, but it wasn't a big deal. It's just making sure you've got fence posts that will stand up to a weight of zombies, and maybe some razor wire.
You don't need a castle. The Committee of Captains proved why this is a disease on Wight.
Firstly - it was not. Windsor Castle is halfway into the town of Windsor, just across the river from Slough and barely a stone's throw from London, and has been an indefensible ceremonial palace for most of its life.
The reason Windsor Castle held out is that they weren't satisfied with all the shit they'd already spent on the "Royal Residence" - all the ludicrous crap he mentions they charged the public for to protect the royals - no, this wasn't enough. They deployed the Coldstream and Grenadier Guards entirely to Windsor Castle, and had the paras on standby through the entire war.
When you're staking a claim to be holding a propaganda piece this close to London, I suppose you don't want to risk it. God knows the footage of Buckingham Palace being overwhelmed didn't do them any favours from a propaganda perspective.
To be fair to the royalists, they were pretty clearly just trying to protect those regiments from attrition for the post war period.
You must find yourself a copy. It's a cracking good novel, based on the author's own experiences as one of the defenders of Caerphilly.
Yeah, bit of a sticky wicket that what? Those ghouls are an awful bunch of bounders.
Fucking hell dude. It's 2033. You're not in a fucking Edwardian public school novel. People don't talk like this.
Fuck Conwy.
A tiny horde - maybe a couple of thousand - was thawing out around Conwy and they weren't looking like they were going to be able to hold out - they'd sent out foragers too early the autumn before, discovered the ghouls were less frozen than they expected, lost about half their fighting fit, and then had a bad winter - so command down in Cardiff scraped together a relief force and marched them on up.
This was before my time, but by my understanding, they'd scarcely dropped the last ghoul before some pearl clutching Tory was hoisting the Union Jack above the town and taking pot shots with what was no doubt his grandfather's grousing piece.
Someone might've forced the issue, but one of the cruisers from the navy's fallback position on the Isle of Man was lurking in the area, so instead they got to keep Conwy throughout the stalemate years.
It was quite useful to them in disposing of their undesirables at first - they didn't believe we would last, so whenever someone started to cause trouble, they'd be shipped down to Conwy and pushed out the gates at speartip. That accelerated once they broke the siege of Glasgow and swelled their population with a bunch of Glaswegians; a girl in my unit - the 1st Orphaned, odds and sods from areas outside of our political control - was from Clydeside.
They stopped doing that when we took Birmingham, treated Conwy as nothing more than a military outpost - they finally used it in '26 as a friendly launch point to crush the hardliner Red Guards who hadn't seen the writing on the wall.
Funny story about Conwy.
During the stalemate period, when were were still only semi officially part of the Republic of Devon, we actually did a run up there. We made our delivery, and loaded up a bunch of stuff, but decided we'd spend the night there because there was supposedly some quite good nightlife. So, we were still a pretty informal crew but I was second in command. The Captain stayed with the boat but I was kind of riding herd, along with Sally, who was our engineer and Tee total. We used to joke she was Tee total and I didn't drink.
So we end up in this pub, and get drinking with some royal naval guys. This was pretty common at the time, even though the Red Guard and the Royalists were occasionally shooting at one another, and RoD forces were occasionally shooting at Royalist vessels that decided to "salvage" some livestock from the coastal farms. We didn't think these guys were a threat. They wanted to know a lot about our boat. Our experiences. Our technical qualifications. Kept coming back to technical qualifications.
They had a bad vibe to these guys. There were three of them and only one was doing the talking. Also, they were constantly ordering drinks for us, but they weren't drinking much themselves. The Welsh Waitress was also getting this blank look whenever she came by, and Sally told me later she thought she looked really uncomfortable.
So I'm not really the best vibes girl, so I was starting to get uncomfortable but not about to action it, when Sally excuses herself, then calls me on the radio from the bathroom to fake that we've got to go back to the ship. She'd worked out that they were a press gang and was full on for us to get out of there before we found a shilling in the bottom of our mugs.
It was a good thing to. A few months later one of our crews did get jacked in Conwy. We never went into royalist territory again after that.
Spain was a marvel. I know people have their complaints; they were always fairly surly with smugglers, and there's the perennial controversy about refugees in the Pyrenees, but it was Spanish built G36s that armed us for the big push. The advantages of there being an actually functional state in Europe cannot be overstated.
It's interesting to me the extent to which the G36K has become the European gun of choice in the way the AR-15 was the pre-war American gun of choice. You get a lot of AKs, various military bullpups, FALs and, Stens and Can't Believe its Not Stens, MP5s for the shorties. Everyone will tell you the advantage of their chosen system, but everyone does most of their actual shooting with their K. There's about a billion firms making custom parts for them now as well, and they're doing a lot of interesting stuff with them.
They certainly beat the shit out of fucking SIRs which royalist units are increasingly forced to lug around. The Paras and the Guards still have their SA-80s and L129A1s and hang onto them for dear life, the Marines have somehow managed to source AR-15 CQB guns, but all of the rest, not to mention the poor old national police are stuck lugging around those heavy ass wood furniture pieces of shit.
The last time I was in the UK I saw a country patrol of bobbies all armed with SIRs. I've never seen a more miserable group. Their weapons were rusted to shit to. Most arms merchants in Europe won't even carry them because their QC is so bad. The poor buggers. They should just issue them Stens, but increasingly everyone they might shoot at has a K and they don't want to take a 50 meter gun to a 200 meter gunfight. Though, christ knows if they're any good in that kind of fight. The National Police are only not in last place for ammo cause of the local police.
Edit: Much as I do love AKs myself, I am forced to say that if you want to buy a gun in Europe today however, the best bet is actually the G36C. Handy, hardy and well engineered, it is hands down the best small arm commonly on the market for normal civilians, militia and paramilitary groups.
