At Baker Street station they joined in an elaborate game of queuing up and filtering through entrances and turnstiles meant for a comparative trickle commuting clerks. The station itself was a box of noise, the ringing and clanging of shunting engines, the shriek of whistles, thousands of excited voices echoing like a gull colony – but above it all there was a sense of organisation. In some ways, Frank would say to me, he thought the efficiency and order of the railways, including the underground, was one of the finest expressions of our civilisation. During the first Martian attack the railways had kept functioning even after the government itself had effectively collapsed, and here they were now, an essential part of the defence of the nation.
As they waited, he got to know Verity Bliss and her friends a little better. They all knew each other; they had been ‘munitionettes’ working at the Woolwich Arsenal, where they had picked up their first aid training, before signing up as VADs together under the prompting of the government’s public exhortations.
A military bakery van worked its way through the crowd, handing out free sandwiches, cakes, hot sausages, bottles of lemonade and water. Frank even managed to nab a paper cup of coffee. ‘Make the most of it,’ a regular told them, when some of the VADs were reluctant to take the food. ‘You sleep when you can, eat all you can get, for you never know when the Army will trouble to feed you again. And if you don’t want that sausage sandwich, love, I’ve got a good home for it . . .’
It was mid-afternoon, and Frank was already tired from all the standing around, when at last they were bundled onto a train. It was a Metropolitan Line commuter special that was standing room only before it finally pulled away. Frank and his VADs, among the last aboard, found themselves close to a door through which they could see something of the stations they passed through. The mood remained cheerful enough, though the MPs assigned to each compartment kept a watchful eye. In Frank’s compartment a tommy accompanied bawdy songs with a mouth organ, and at times he heard the skirl of bagpipes coming from a carriage further up the train.
Soon they were beyond Hampstead and out in the country, passing through Wembley and Harrow. They did not stop at intermediate stations, but the train did slow, and local people came out to clap and wave flags, passing up food and apples and even postcards. Frank saw troopers leaning out of the windows, trying to grab bottles of beer. And, once out of the city, Frank saw columns of troops marching, and howitzers and field guns drawn by motor and by horses. He wondered if the farmers and publicans were having their horses requisitioned, as he had lost his car: war always demanded a great number of horses.
The general flow was away from London, towards the northwest, towards Middlesex and Buckinghamshire, a pattern that did not go unnoticed by the more experienced soldiers on the train, who spoke in a variety of accents, mostly from the rich linguistic pot of London:
‘I reck’n someone knows where they’re coming down this time.’
‘Yeah, some ast – ast – rologer.’
‘Last time they came dahn in Surrey, din’t they? Trying sumfin diff’rent this time, looks like,’ said an older, scarred man.
‘So what? Big guns would’ve knocked ’em flat las’ time, and it will this time if’n we get the chance.’
‘Won’t be like las’ time. Coming down somewhere else, in’t they? If that’s diff’rent, the rest will be. Stands to reason they’ll try something new. They lost, din’t they? They’ll learn.’
‘Huh. We don’t always learn.’
Laughter at that, and ribald comments about the failings of various commanding officers.
But the scarred man did not laugh. ‘If’n they’re smart, they’ll learn. Look at the Germans. They flattened the French in 1870, and they hit ’em even harder in ’14, and they won again.’
Nobody had a reply to that.
13
APPROACHING UXBRIDGE
The train stopped at Ickenham, and they were disembarked. This, Frank knew, was short of the terminus of the line, at Uxbridge. Here personnel were formed up and marched away, and equipment was hauled off along the roads by horses or trucks - all generally heading further to the north-west, towards the town.
Frank and Verity, herding their little flock of MOs, nurses and VADs, saw little of the village of Ickenham before they were marched out into the country. They heard mention of units of troops from all over the country: the 4th Battalion, 5th Fusiliers; the 2ndBattalion, King’s Liverpool Regiment; the 1stKing’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry. There were divisional troops too, specialists with their equipment, the artillery batteries there were Royal Engineers, the sappers. There was wireless gear and cables for the field telegraphs, such mundane gear as a field bakery, and more exotic items such as sections of pontoon bridges and the envelopes of spotting balloons.
Verity touched Frank’s arm and pointed at troops on motorcycles heading up the roads and across country, off to the north-west. ‘Scouts,’ she said.
‘Heading where they expect the battle to be joined.’
‘I imagine so.’ She shivered, and Frank imagined she was thinking that those forward units might be among the first casualties of any action – though somehow that prospect still seemed unreal.
Before very long the marching column broke up, and Frank’s group was led to a series of field hospitals, tents erected in the fields. The MP who brought them there briskly summarised orders he read from a sheet. ‘Get yourselves set up. You’ve got a water supply and oil heaters, or should do, check it all over. Tents over here, beds over there, supplies and whatnot over there. Bandages and a blood store, and knock-out drops and surgeons’ saws . . .’
Not all the medical staff were terribly experienced, Frank saw, and some of them paled as these words were delivered with gruesome relish. ‘That’s enough, Corporal, we get the idea.’
‘Then get to it.’ At the last minute the MP remembered to salute his senior officer, and made to turn away.
‘Hold on,’ Frank said. ‘What about the rest of it?’
‘What rest of it?’
‘We’ve been on our feet all day.’
‘And I’ve been walking around shouting at people, sir, and you don’t hear me complaining.’
‘We’ve only eaten once -’
‘Field kitchens over there.’ He pointed. ‘You can work out your own rota for that. Lavatories thataway.’
Frank looked around again; he had the sinking feeling he was missing something obvious, and was on the point of making a fool of himself. ‘Yes, but – where do we sleep, Corporal?’
The MP stared at him, and grinned. ‘No sleep for any of us tonight, Captain. Balloon goes up at midnight. Or rather, something big and fat and heavy from Mars comes down at midnight. Then we’ve got the nineteen-hour window, and when that’s done – why, then I reckon we’ll all be due a good kip.’
Midnight, Frank thought. So they were coming at midnight, just like before – just as Walter had noted. Looking around at the young, apprehensive faces around him – many of them could only have been children last time – he kept his sudden nervousness to himself. Nineteen-hour window, though: what could that mean?
It was late afternoon and the light was already fading. Seeing that he would get no more from the MP, he briskly set Verity, the junior MOs and the rest to organising the field hospitals and their equipment – hoping very much that he gave the impression that he knew what he was talking about – and then went stomping off to find ‘somebody in charge’, as he would later note in his journal.
He came upon a kind of command post: a lot of senior officers, and map tables and field telephones and wireless units and telegraphs, and a coffee urn. It took some moments before a young officer called Fairfield, a lieutenant-colonel, took pity on him. ‘Sorry about this, Doctor – Captain. The trouble is we are running around a bit to get organised, and you MO types don’t fit easily into the command structure.’ He was perhaps a decade younger than Frank, with a clipped public school accent and an air of wry amusement. ‘Co
ffee?’
‘No, thank you, sir.’
‘I know what you’re thinking.’
‘You do?’
‘Good job it’s not raining, what? Although it will be raining Martians soon enough.’
‘Where, sir? Where is the cylinder coming down? I know the telescopic spotters have been tracking them.’
Fairfield raised an eyebrow. ‘Not so much “cylinder” as “cylinders”, Doctor. But the one that interests us seems to be heading slap bang for the middle of Uxbridge, which is bad luck for that unlovely town. Population’s already been evacuated, by the way, off to the north, so you don’t need to worry about them.’ He glanced up. ‘Closer to the hour we’ll have planes up there, even a Zeppelin I’m told, courtesy of the Kaiser. They might give us a better fix.’ He eyed Frank. ‘To be honest I’m not sure how well you’ve been briefed.’
‘Hardly at all.’
‘Well, that’s typical. What you do need to know is that a regular arrangement for treating the wounded has already been established. You have aid posts at the front itself – that is, the site where we have our best guess about where the cylinder will come down – and behind that, within stretcher-bearer distance, you have casualty clearing stations, and behind that it’s ambulances back to the field hospitals, which is where you come in. You haven’t drawn the short straw, you see, Doctor – the forward staff, the MOs and the rest, are already at the front-line clearing stations.’
Frank nodded. ‘Thank you. That’s clear enough. The MP said a couple of other things. Nineteen hours ’
‘He has been talkative, hasn’t he? I’m told that after the first cylinder fell last time, near Woking -’
‘At Horsell Common.’
‘It took that long, you see, for the Martians to unscrew the bally thing, and for the Heat-Ray gun and other nasties to start poking out, and for those fighting-machines to climb out and stretch their legs and get to work. So this time we should have that window of opportunity, to shell the thing while they’re helpless.’
Frank felt suspicious of his confident tone. ‘If all goes as it did last time -’
‘Of course I would hope we will finish the thing off in two hours, not nearly twenty.’ He asked blandly, ‘Is there anything else, Doctor?’
‘You said “cylinders”. There was only one at a time before.’
‘Ah. Well, that is something new. The astronomers have been definite about this, if a little late in the day. Can’t blame them for that, I suppose.’ He faced Frank. ‘There are more than fifty of ’em coming in, all across this part of the country.’
Fifty. Frank remembered his brother’s talk of the array of cannons spread across Mars, firing night after night, and the fleets of cylinders perhaps forming up in space. And now that deadly barrage had crossed interplanetary space and was about to fall here. Fifty together! And from what Walter had said there would be another fifty following after . . .
The Lieutenant-Colonel clapped his shoulder. ‘Anyhow, we only have one to worry about.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Now look, if there’s nothing else urgent . . .’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Carry on, Captain Jenkins.’
Once the sun had gone down, it felt like a long wait until midnight.
Frank’s staff had got the field hospital organised as well as it could be, and he was relieved there had been no significant balls-up with the supplies. But there was only so often he could check and recheck it all. At about seven, he gratefully accepted Verity’s idea of mounting a few exercises, with volunteers playing the roles of incoming wounded. The VADs especially went at this with a will, if inexpertly. Frank knew that there could be gruesome accidents at munitions plants, but he had the impression that most of the VADs had little experience much beyond their training.
At nine he encouraged those who felt like it to use the hospital beds to nap. Few could sleep, though several lay down.
At ten he ordered his people to eat, have coffee or water. He caught one of the junior doctors with a hip flask, which he confiscated and locked away in a chest, promising to hand it back after the ‘battle’, as they were calling it – unless some wounded had a greater need of the rather good brandy it contained.
At eleven he ordered his staff to use the latrines, in a rota. He murmured to Verity, ‘But of course I’m expecting rather a few loose bladders before the night is out, come what may.’
As midnight approached, the two of them tucked in behind a barricade of sand bags, looking north-west. They both had medical bags at their sides, and they wore regulation steel helmets. The sky was clear that Sunday night, with only a light mist obscuring the stars.
They spoke little. Verity seemed too nervous to say much of herself. He did gather she was single, and had only just moved out of her parents’ home into an apartment near Woolwich with some of the other workers when the call-up came. He tried to distract her with talk of himself – or rather of his brother, whose book, he glumly suspected, had enjoyed a spike in sales that day.
Of course she had heard of Walter. ‘I was only twelve,’ she said. ‘We had been visiting family in the Midlands when the news started coming out of London. My father got us on a boat to Ireland, out of Liverpool. I missed the whole show.’
‘You were lucky. And now here you are in the opening overs of the rematch.’
‘But your brother’s book – it made it so real. I met him once. There was an illustrated edition. He came to Foyles on the Charing Cross Road to give a talk. I remember he complained about the drawings, though. I got him to sign a copy for me.’
‘Of course you did,’ Frank said, gritting his teeth.
‘Captain, you saw one fall, didn’t you? A cylinder. Last time.’
‘Yes. The sixth, that came down at Wimbledon. That was at midnight too. We were sleeping out in the open, myself and my future wife and her sister-in-law. Long story.’ He glanced at his watch; it wanted five minutes of midnight.
‘What did it look like?’
‘The cylinder? Like a falling star, sliding across the sky. Green flashes.’
‘Green? Then that’s what we must look out for, I suppose.’ She raised small binoculars and scanned the sky.
For a time neither of them spoke. Frank imagined a great circle drawn around Uxbridge, the quiet, deserted town at the centre, with its electric street lights pointlessly glowing, and a ring of troops like themselves with their guns and field hospitals and binoculars, all waiting, waiting.
‘Captain, it’s gone midnight. My watch has a luminous dial . . . Midnight plus ten seconds. Fifteen now.’
From somewhere a Cockney voice floated, singing to a carol tune: ‘Why are we waiting? Why-y are we waiting?’ Chuckles of laughter, a soft command to be still.
‘I don’t see any green flashes -’
There was a crack, a detonation high in the air above them. Then a searing light that smashed down from the sky, coming from directly above them. White light – not green at all.
Plunging at the dark earth.
‘Down!’ Frank lay flat,and pressed the back of Verity’s neck to force down her head.
Then the shock hit them.
14
THE LANDING OF THE FIRST WAVE
I learned later that the astronomical spotters had got some of it right – at least the number of projectiles, and the rough location of their fall. None had anticipated the manner of that fall.
A total of fifty-two cylinders landed on central England that night. Tsiolkovsky and co-workers later calculated, given comparisons with the 1907 assault, that they must have come in five flotillas, each of ten or so shots: launched on the 18th February, and then on the 20th, 22nd, 24th and 26th.
(The cylinders to fall the next night, at that moment still en route to the earth, had been fired off on the interleaving nights, from the 19th through to the 27th February . . .)
As Tsiolkovsky had suggested, the Martians used engines during their interplanetary flight to tweak their trajectories, th
e lead volleys slowing to allow latecomers to catch up, so that in the end all the cylinders of the first wave fell simultaneously – at least within the limits of accuracy of the timepieces of the military observers who saw them fall – at midnight of Monday, March 29. And the last cylinder to be fired, accompanied by its tardier brothers, landed on the earth four weeks and four days after its launch – the precise same timing as the cylinders launched in ’07.
(And meanwhile the second wave cylinders were still coordinating their own fall, out in space . . .)
That first fifty-two fell together in a great ring of sixteen miles diameter, roughly centred on the town of Amersham in Buckinghamshire. The circle of impacts reached out as far as High Wycombe to the south-west, Uxbridge to the south-east where Frank was stationed, and Berkhamstead to the northeast. The cylinders came down in a chain, each roughly a mile from its neighbours on either side. There were no green flashes this time, no attempts to slow the craft – if true craft they were, rather than inert missiles fitted with steering engines. Their purpose with that first wave was evidently not to deliver Martians and their equipment intact to the earth, as had been the case with the Horsell cylinder and its siblings of the First War.
The sole objective was destruction.
In their analysis of the 1907 event, Denning and others with expertise in the kinematics of meteorites had pointed out that by landing their cylinders relatively softly, the Martians had actually thrown away a kind of advantage of position – the advantage of the sky over the earth. Barringer, meanwhile, has studied the Canyon Diablo crater in Arizona, and has suggested that it may have been formed, not by volcanic action or by such events as a steam explosion, but by the uncontrolled fall from space of an iron-rich meteorite a few tens of yards across – that is, of a similar size to a Martian cylinder. A hole in the earth some half-mile across and two hundred yards deep: there you have a measure of the harm such a fall can inflict. Indeed, Walter’s account of his experience of close proximity to a cylinder-fall on the houses in Sheen gives a vivid impression of the damage done even by these relatively gentle landings.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 8
