What If Lord Voldemort Had Won?

WHAT IF VOLDEMORT HAD WON?

The Sergeant-Major saw them as they crept through the rocks. He sighed. He never liked the idea of killing children. But he had seen, several times over, what these children could do. He was a veteran of three years' standing, and had seen dozens of comrades injured or killed by apparently harmless wizards or witches.

Good thing these two seemed inexperienced. Their attempt to hide among the rocks was pathetic. The Sergeant-Major kept very still until they were in position; then he rose and let his SMG speak, briefly. Boy and girl were both almost cut in two.

It had been a long, weary, cruel war. The killing had started in Britain, spreading across Europe without logic or reason. It had taken a while before terrified governments even realized that they were under co-ordinated attack; and as for it coming from witches and wizards... that had not been admitted, not even been hinted at, until sightings and rumours had become universal, And quite right too, thought the Sergeant-Major. If, as late as three years ago, the general population had been told that wizards and witches really existed and that they were our enemies, we would all have thought April the first had come early.

Bloody Hell, we've come a long way in three years. We started with defensive measures and investigations; and these were met with wildly increased violence and terror. Each governmental measure was met by mass murder; and still we could hardly see the enemy. Even when we captured a few... which began to happen more and more frequently from 2003 on, when the new scanners had come into general use... even to keep them prisoner, by whatever means, had proved incredibly dangerous. And so had negotiating with them. The Sergeant-Major had taken part in a few of those encounters. He had the impression that some wizards, given the chance, would defect and help; but some wound up dead, and others turned out to be traitors. It was at the end of 2003, faced with the collapse of the whole system of wizard incarceration, that the order had gone out: no prisoners.

It was a long nightmare. One could never be certain that any area had been cleared of wizards. Every time that the forces moved out of a region and into the next, suddenly a city quarter would be levelled by that vicious magical fire they had, worse than napalm, or a schoolful of children and teachers were found dead with not a mark on their bodies. Helpless statisticians had piled up the numbers, loss after loss, till some areas had become nearly deserted. London had lost half its inhabitants. Leicester was virtually abandoned. Edinburgh and Carlisle no longer existed, and all of Scotland had been raked as if by the Black Death of old. Outside Britain, beautiful Bruges and prosperous Frankfurt had been reduced to ghost towns, and the raging war in the banlieues of Paris had shrunk the immense French capital by miles. Mourning, screaming, despair, were commonplace, and often not enough living had been left to bury the dead.

Bit by bit, a picture of the enemy had been formed. It was clear that the wizards of Europe were under the complete control of a monstrous being whom they did not want to name. Many were terrified of him and aching to get out from under his rule, but his supporters were practically all-powerful and any open rebellion ended swiftly and badly. It would have been useful to be able to exploit the dissatisfaction of many wizards or witches to bring them over to our side, but in practice this was impossible. The Sergeant-Major had seen it himself. They had a prisoner who had seemed promising, indeed, who had stated to befriend him. Then another man was brought in, who also seemed to want to surrender, and the two were put in the same cell. The next morning the cell was empty, except for a great splash of blood, and a number of guards and civilians had been murdered in the path of the escapee. Many other similar experiences convinced the Sergeant-Major, as they had convinced many others, that you could not safely deal with wizards at all; could not confine them, could not negotiate with them, could not treat them as equals. And the casualties kept mounting.

The Sergeant-Major snarled without realizing it. He was thinking of the pundits who even now, when reality ought to have been sufficiently clear, still argued for negotiations and peace. Who would anyone negotiate with? Nobody had ever heard of any alternative to the wizards' Nameless Tyrant; from things learned from questioned prisoners, any resistance against him in the wizarding world had been levelled long since. And who could trust any individual? No, this was war, and war to the finish.

And now the finish was very close, very close indeed. One by one, wizarding areas had been found, destroyed, or sealed off. A huge daisy-cutter bomb had destroyed the Leaky Cauldron, sealing the entrance to Diagon Alley for ever. Ton upon ton of napalm had been poured on a site in Hampshire, and a tactical nuclear device had been detonated inside a mysterious hole in the ground in London, which was strongly suspected of being the seat of the enemy so-called "Ministry of Magic". The Sergeant-Major had a man under him who had been there. He told him how the ground had shaken, and how after a while a few atrociously injured and burned wizards had come creeping out of various holes and had all been cut down by waiting detachments.

Above all, the military had learned how to locate concealed wizarding establishments. The Ministry of Magic had been little trouble: every man, woman and child within a couple of miles had been killed in various ways - they might as well have drawn a target around themselves. But now, as soon as anyone suspected that a wizarding establishment of any kind was in a given are, hundreds of troopers were spread across the area, according to a precise pattern. They were all connected to computers at Central Command. Then two things happened: either the electronic map showed an unaccountable gap among the troopers - and that was the magically protected area, which was then saturated with explosive, napalm and gas - or else a group of troopers suddenly vanished and died. And that, alas, was just as diagnostic of the presence of wizards. At least the troopers knew that they would swiftly be avenged.

One by one, hideouts and fortresses were destroyed. Slowly, the grip of terror was released from region after region. The Continent was already practically returned to normality; and London, among other places, was nervously starting to recover. Scotland - poor Scotland; Scotland had suffered worst, and there would be no end to it until the final plague spot was cleansed.

And so the Sergeant-Major crept slowly among the stones, as hundreds of his fellow-soldiers were doing across several square miles of ground. Curious, he thought, how these appallingly dangerous missions never failed to draw thousands of volunteers. Or maybe not so curious, after all. How many people had the wizards killed, after all? At least seventeen million so far? How many grieving fathers, brothers, friends, sons, cousins, colleagues, lovers, students, teachers, did that make? How many men ready and willing to risk their lives for a hope of vengeance?

His communicator beeped, and the Sergeant-Major smiled grimly. He thought of his nephew, dead among his fellow schoolchildren without a mark on his body; of his best friend's beautiful young wife, raped and tortured to death with magical images hovering over the body to show how it had been done; of a whole district of his native city, burned down with thousands of victims inside. He thought of the comrades he had left behind, dead, mutilated or mad; and of the stories he had heard. He knew that even as he turned to go back to base, the first aircraft were already taking flight from distant bases, to reach heights that no wizard could match. In a half-hour maybe - and he could hardly wait - the first waves of bombers would reach Hogsmeade and the haunted ruins beyond, to drop explosive death from the sky. The wizards would not even know that vengeance had reached them, until the first explosion. And they would be given no rest. Wave after wave of bombers would drop explosives, napalm, poison, every known kind of deadly device. And the last plane would carry a nuclear device.

There had been a lot of discussion about this, but in the end everyone had agreed. The wizards must be give n no chance to recover. Unless they were uprooted, there was no chance of peace. And peace was what everyone ached for.

THE END