Men who had come to despise their wives gave them beatings without threat of reprisal, and women who were jealous of their neighbors’ good fortunes stood in the street and applauded the arson of their rivals’ homes. A cruelty that had been unimaginable only hours before suddenly announced that it had been silently brewing for ages.
In the battle lines that formed, there were rich against poor, and weak against strong, and young against old (but not the very old, for some odd reason that almost no one had recognized). In the forming and reforming of alliances, the battles ultimately descended into simply whoever happened to be in the proximity of reach against anyone who had anger and hatred to burn. There was no rhyme or reason to the ordering of the conflict.
Instead, there was simply breakdown and confusion, and double-crossing and intrigue. In such a situation, even the cooler minds had begun to flail in imagined wrongs that deserved redress. In this way, the Battle of Warwick was perhaps no exception to any battle that had ever been fought in a civil war in a community of humankind. It was like a nightmare born of chaos, sired by rumors and fueled by neglect.
If you had asked any one of the townsfolk what they were fighting for (or against) it would have been impossible to find a consensus. The answers would have been myriad. Country, pride, family, flag, brotherhood, freedom, jobs, religion, economy… anything. But in the innermost heart of that wide-ranging chaos, there was perhaps only one true note. Survival. Life itself descended into every man for himself and every woman for her interest. Bertrand Russell once wrote that war does not determine who has won or who has lost, but merely who is left, and this became the overriding ethic of the day’s developments.
The point had shifted from taking back the town or impressing upon others a central tenet or ideology, to one in which everyone simply wanted to live through it. Make it right, or make it good, became… just make it.
The fact that the expediencies of war quickly descended into brutality and disorder was not entirely, of course, due to a lack of effort on the part of the gang led by Mikail and Vladimir and Sergei. The triumvirate of power had spent the long previous night trying to put down the initial signs of uprising with the belief that, through a decisive show of force, they could convince their fellow townspeople to abandon their thoughts of war and reprisal and settle into their newly-established places under the leadership they hoped to provide. They believed that the control they exerted over the Spetznaz troops was a definitive advantage that they could use to put an end to the matter before it had even begun. However, here is where the differences in approach between Mikail and Vladimir came into play in perhaps its most crucial twist.
The brutish Vladimir never had any sense of the nuances or subtleties of leadership that Mikail had tirelessly attempted to show him. He’d always believed and ceaselessly relied upon the unerring superiority of physical force as a means of proving his point, and, as a result, there had been perhaps a natural split between the two and between those who were inclined to see the points that the two were each attempting to make in their own way.
Vladimir had influenced a certain contingent of the Spetznaz, even through their very brief association, to shoot first and ask questions later, while Mikail had likewise argued for a more long-term, circumspect, and perhaps more patient approach in which the influence of power could be used without actually having to resort to its display. This had resulted in the Spetznaz being divided between those who were ready to fight the townsfolk immediately in order to secure the perimeter of the battlefield, and those who were more content to simply watch and wait until the action seemed to reach its own conclusion.
The end result was that, as the townsfolk of Warwick descended into chaotic strife, and as the battles became less organized at every turn, it became less and less clear throughout the day for whom (or what) the governing authority, the group with the majority of guns, was fighting for.
Even less clear, as the townspeople grew increasingly agitated that their superior force might win the day, was the outcome that would result from the fact that the power of the government had been turned upon the people at large. To be clear, there were Spetznaz operatives who entered the battle and, as a result, there were people lying in the street bloodied and bullet-riddled. But this reality caused greater, not lesser, agitation among the people, and in those moments when the citizens forgot their differences for a moment and set their sights on conquering the soldiers, it became a question of how likely a soldier or two with a limited magazine clip could defend against an army of shovels and hammers and farm implements in the hands of people who were willing to charge into the face of danger and use them.
In short, the battle plan, if there had ever been a coherent one, was lost, as all battle plans eventually are, to the madness of conflict. The soldiers came to embrace the same survival instinct that the population did, and some simply decided that the best way to survive would be to lay down their weapons and refuse to enter a conflict that was, in the final analysis, against people not unlike themselves.
This reality, too, mirrored what was happening in many other corners of America.
The unraveling of what might loosely be called “the government” came to show, like the loosening of the bonds of civility that kept neighbor in careful compromise with neighbor in the first place, that the glue that holds society together proved itself to be thin indeed.
At some point during the day, Mikail and Vladimir and the others realized that their dreams of revolution were spiraling out of control because those dreams had not been shared in the hearts of a conclusive majority of their fellows. The fact that this is an age-old story in the history of the world made it no less true on that day in Warwick.
It was Kolya who suggested that they change to “English names.” The four had arrived successfully at the mid-point of the tunnel after having crawled into the dugout through the tunnel from the house. They’d spent a considerable amount of time covering their tracks inside the house, even going so far as to reassemble the bureau entrance and pull the drawers in after them so that the tunnel could not be easily seen from the cellar.
Then they’d prepared the dugout for comfort and settled in for a brief stay while they waited for the day’s events, and those of the following day, to unfold.
They each unpacked their packs and took out blankets and a little bit of food and lights and such. Vasily carried the backpack that belonged to the traveler named Clay, and for the first time he actually spent some time examining the contents. He found the items that he’d seen already — the fishing kit and the knife and other items — but in the thin light available to them now, he began to thumb through the books that were in the backpack, and once he did so, Kolya became very excited.
“Oh my, this is Whitman and Hemingway! I’ve been unable to get hold of these books for so long,” Kolya said, smiling broadly. “Everything good in Warwick, I was led to believe, came only through the black market, and I was told that I might be able to get things there that we couldn’t get in the stores. But, I never could figure out exactly to whom I should talk about this. I suppose that is one of the huge negatives to being considered a bookworm. People are suspicious of you if they think you might know more than they do. Believe me when I say that one of the reasons that I sought out such back alley subterfuge was that I wanted to find out who could get me more books from the outside. Ahh… these… these are two books that I dearly wanted.” Kolya’s eyes shone like diamonds as he asked Vasily if he could hold them, and when the books were passed to him he lovingly caressed them as one does a talisman. He ran his fingers across the slightly embossed lettering on the Whitman book’s covering, thumbing randomly through the Hemingway, and reading passages aloud to the others. The others sat and watched him as he turned his head away for a moment, and they noticed his faint shadow on the wall reach up and wipe a tear away from its eye.