 The situation in the British Isles is not entirely clear in the novel , although Ireland may have escaped the worst of the outbreak . Members of the British Royal Family had fled to Ireland and the Isle of Man , following the military retreat to the <unk> Wall , and now exports oil from a reserve under Windsor Castle where the Queen held out for the war 's duration , refusing to flee with her relatives . The <unk> established a wartime refuge in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Armagh . In France , the Palace of Versailles was the site of a massacre and has been burned to the ground ; military losses were particularly high while clearing the catacombs underneath Paris because the catacombs housed nearly a quarter of a million refugees during the early stages of the war , all of whom became zombies . Iceland has been completely <unk> and remains the world 's most heavily infested country . 
