Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! by Daniel S. Fletcher Page B

and capable. His name was Andrew Knaggs.
    Quite by chance, the firebrand was snared during a clandestine meeting with members of a major trade union, whom he’d been passionately petitioning to rally round to the cause; an attempt to attract more men to the growing resistance. German troops were highly trained; the ambush had been performed clinically, with all potential belligerents eliminated with ease, save the target. The small, wiry figure, bearded and youthful, had tried to commit suicide upon capture, realising that escape was impossible, but was failed by the cyanide capsule he had bitten to no avail, its expired poison utterly useless. He was made an example of.
    Spouting nothing but obscene curses and profane condemnations of the Germans, Knaggs refused to be cowed in the face of his tormentors as the Wehrmacht staged the most cursory of trials, quickly sentencing Knaggs to join Wythie on the gallows. It was with some regret that the soldiers assigned to the task sent the brave man to an excruciating, choking end, impressed as they were by his courage and the mesmerising vitality of his snarling defiance. However, every German who witnessed his fury was glad that such an enemy, one of revolutionary charisma and élan, had been eliminated from the fight.
    “Andrew Knaggs, for crimes against the German Reich and serious contraventions of the Geneva Convention’s stipulated legal code of waging war; you are sentenced to death. Do you have anything to say?”
    “Yes,” he sneered quietly, before raising his voice to the massing crowds at City Square. “Germany is a nation of fools! Fight, England, fight , and fight , and never quit, so that one day our children can live in peace–”
    The executioner abruptly interrupted his exhortations, and the partisan leader slowly choked to death on the wire, blood bursting from his eyes and orifi.
    To diminish the rebel’s continued legacy, Andrew Knaggs’ body was immediately taken down, and transported out of Leeds for discreet disposal. It was strongly rumoured the Gestapo tradition was to incinerate bodies and scatter the ashes in sewage. If this fate befell the rebel Knaggs, it is not known. The body of Leeds’ unfortunate Lord Mayor, by contrast, continued to dangle from the city’s symbolic administrative building, dangling eerily on the wire that killed him. Even in the weeks following his eventual removal, no children were to be seen for at least one mile in all directions from the great Hall.
    To the north of that city centre past the park, St Mary’s school stood as a grand red-brick testament to Victorian England, its ornate architecture rising past high window arches to gothic spires and ridges in a formidable mound, like some kind of grim municipal building of a bygone medieval power-centre or 19 th century French lunatic asylum. To the more imaginative eye, one could envision some kind of sinister ritualistic neo-pagan festival taking place in its cavernous depths, or row after row of padded cells in a labyrinthine hell; the insane screaming and babbling their disjointed outpourings in a giant, man-made testament to the darker realities of human life, shut away to spare the sane from the discomfort of acknowledging them. In contrast, the parish church nestled into a space three times smaller on the other side of the leafy lane looked a poorer representation of God’s omnipresence. Older members of the parish maintained a haughty silence on the matter, while the younger, less religiously inclined joked that only in ‘God’s Own Country’, as Yorkshire was known, could such a thing be allowed.
    In reality, the great building was host to a school of great warmth, and the invariably tentative, fearful first steps taken by five year old boys and girls into its high-ceilinged interior were for nought. Teachers here were young; so many of a lost generation had bled out their fledgling lives on the fields of Flanders, Ypres and Passchendaele that the