(Incidentally one speculative writer – the man-of-the-yearmillion essayist whom Walter met in Berlin – has irresponsibly suggested that the Barringer crater was created by such a cylinder, an early Martian visitor of the remote past.)
This was the simple but cruder tactic adopted by the Martians to begin their second assault on the earth: to use the brute kinetic energy of these dummy projectiles to smash any resistance before it had a chance to escape, let alone respond.
Thus the event that befell England that March night. Consider the impact of a single cylinder. In its last seconds of its existence the Uxbridge cylinder angled in from the west, across the Atlantic Ocean. It punched its way through the earth’s atmosphere in fractions of a second, blasting away the air around it, blowing it into space, leaving a tunnel of vacuum where it had passed. And when it hit the ground, it delivered all its energy of motion as heat in a fraction of a second. The cylinder itself must have been utterly destroyed, says Denning, and a great wave pulsed outward through the bedrock. A narrow cone of incandescent rock mist fired back along the cylinder’s incoming trajectory, back through the tunnel in the air dug out in those last moments – some more distant observers thought they had seen a vast searchlight beam. Around this central glowing shaft, a much broader spray of pulverised and shattered rock, amounting to hundreds of times the cylinder’s own mass, was blown out of the widening crater. Then the shock waves came, a battering wind, a searing heat. Even the ground flexed and groaned, as a crater a mile wide was dug into the flesh of the earth.
And in that same moment the event was repeated in that grand ring, all around the target circle: seen from the air (as photographs taken the next day proved) it was a circle of glowing pits, every one still more impressive than the Arizona crater, neatly punched into the English ground. And any military units which had been within a mile of the infall were lost.
Many had believed that England would not be subject to a second Martian attack, but enough had believed it possible, and more had feared it, that the authorities had been compelled to prepare. The result had been a reconfiguring of our military and economy, a recasting, perhaps for the worse, of our international relationships, and a coarsening of the fabric of our society. All this had however delivered a much more effective home army, and when the attack had finally come the mobilisation, after years of planning and preparation, had been fast and effective.
But as a result of that promptness a little less than half the new British Army, as measured in numbers of regular troops and front-line materiel, was destroyed in the first minutes of the assault – most of the lost troops leaving no trace. And even those on the periphery of the landfalls, like Frank, endured great trials.
The violence was astonishing, overwhelming. To Frank, lying in the dirt, it felt as if the world itself were coming apart, the very bedrock shuddering, dirt thrown high into the air, his own body hurled and wrenched. Waves of heat washed over the trench above him, and then a kind of hail – fragments of hot rock, he thought, that stung where they hit him. The contrast with a moment before was astounding – the orderly processes that had led him to this point smashed and shattered in a moment – as if he had suddenly been born into some new, primordial realm, a helpless mote.
He lay flat on his belly, face pressed into the dirt, hands over his head. He stayed down behind the sandbags until the ground had stopped shaking, the waves of heat and noise had roared past them, and the thin hail of hot rock fragments had ceased to fall.
Then he dared to look up, over the parapet. There was only billowing dust, as if the world had been erased.
Verity’s face was a coin in the gloom, as blank and bewildered as he felt. When she spoke it sounded as if she had had the breath knocked out of her. ‘What was that? The HeatRay?’
‘Not that . . . I don’t know.’ Frank stood up. ‘A terrible disaster.’ He glanced around. He saw the camp in disarray, tents blown over, even a great field gun toppled on its side. Officers stood over communications specialists with their telegraphs and field telephones, striving to no avail to contact lost units. And Frank saw now that his field hospitals were blown down, the beds and other supplies scattered. ‘This will take some clearing up.’ His very words seemed foolish as he spoke. How could any human agency cope with this?
There was the sound of a motorcycle revving. Verity pointed. ‘Look.’
A scout, goggles and gas-mask fixed, headlight bright, rode a motorcycle into the billowing smoke: immediately heading into the zone of destruction. Soon more prepared to follow.
‘That’s where we need to be,’ Frank said. ‘Where the wounded are – if any survive at all. Come on. Pick up your bag.’
‘But the hospitals -’
‘Plenty of muscle here to put all that back together. What we must do first is to find our patients.’
He led the way beyond the parapet, digging a torch from his pocket to light the way. They both donned their gas-masks, meant for protection against the Black Smoke, but now the goggles and filters served to protect eyes and lungs from the dust of the shattered landscape. Glancing around, Frank saw that more of the VADs were following their lead, carrying torches and lanterns.
‘We must go in,’ he said.
The staff around him, MOs and VADs, all terribly young, terribly scared, only looked at him. He had to take the lead, he saw. He turned into the dark, took one step, two. They followed.
The ground was broken, as if a great wave had passed through it, pocked as if a hail of meteorites had struck. And it was littered, he saw, littered with wrecked guns and vehicles, and with human remains. A limb here, an open hand there, a detached skull: some of the more complete bodies lay draped over the parapets of trenches. Disarticulated: a clinical word that floated to the top of Frank’s stunned mind. Not even burned, most of them, just torn apart. Yet he saw movement, obscured by dust, a little deeper into the zone.
Verity stood at his side, her gloved hand over her mouth. ‘Perhaps this all seems very small, if you’re looking at it from Mars.’
They came upon a couple of soldiers, one dragging the other, who appeared to have a broken leg and was badly burned on the face. Frank and Verity ran to the men, and helped lower the wounded fellow gently to the ground.
‘It’s nothing,’ the man said, his speech distorted by the damageto his face. ‘A cushy. Nothing . . .’
‘Don’t talk,’ Frank said.
The soldier who had been doing the carrying didn't seem badly injured. He just stared, apparently unable to speak.
‘Shock,’ said Verity briskly. ‘Nothing to be done for him now. Just take him back.’ A couple of VADs took the shocked man in hand and led him away.
Verity briskly examined the wounded man. ‘He’s bleeding out. He needs a tourniquet on this leg. Cold water for the burns on his face. Get the leg set and splinted . . .’ She looked at Frank, her uncertainty evident despite the masked face. ‘If you agree, Doctor.’
‘Of course. Go ahead.’
As she worked, Frank stood and looked around once more. The dust was clearing a little now. Still a tremendous heat came from the direction of the cylinder’s fall – whatever was left of Uxbridge must be burning vigorously, he thought, and the fields and the forests around the town. From the camp, others were coming out, medical staff but also common soldiers, NCOs, even the officers, meeting the handful of men and women who came limping out of the disaster. Frank already had an intuition that the percentage of survivors would be small, that the wounded they encountered from the periphery of the infall.
One older man, an experienced MO, bent over and vomited helplessly. When he straightened up, wiping his mouth, he said, ‘What can we do here? It’s a butcher’s yard.’
‘Yet there is life.’ Frank pointed. ‘I saw movement, there.’
Verity walked that way. ‘It is a horse. I think its back is broken.’ She took her revolver, and, hesitantly, but murmuring words of comfort, she pressed it to the animal’s temple and pulled the tri
gger. The report seemed shockingly loud. ‘Never had to do that before; I’m no country girl.’
‘What can we do?’ the older man asked again. ‘What can we do?’
‘Medicine,’ Frank said, as determinedly as we could. ‘Whatever we can. Come, Follow me. Fan out . . .’
So they found their patients, among the dead. Most of the beds of the field hospital remained empty. But throughout the night Frank and his team went back into the broken landscape to seek survivors, or at least to tend the dying, over and over. All this was lit sporadically by torchlight and lanterns: human forms coming together, dimly glimpsed in air laden with soot and smoke.
15
MONDAY IN LONDON
Monday morning has never been my favourite time of the week. Especially if one is tied to the routine of an office and the commute, it is a grey dawn on the brightest of days, when a lazy Sunday evening at the end of which one somehow feels as if one is oneself again is revealed to have been a deception, and with a hurried breakfast heavy in the stomach, there’s nothing for it but to swarm ant-like to the great hives of the office districts. And bit by bit one’s own identity is shed for the duration. But there can scarcely have been a more dreadful Monday morning to wake to than that of the 29th March – in London not since the days of the First Martian War itself, perhaps, or in Paris since 1914 when the Germans came to town. And many of us were already awake, I suspect - it had been a sleepless night for me ever since midnight, and the Martians’ first landfall.
I had reached central London from Stanmore, not without difficulty. I stayed in a hotel on the Strand. I had taken the room at an exorbitant cost – everything had been heroically marked up in those final days and hours – but, unexpectedly free of the burden of my sister-in-law and being a journalist, I had determined to be in the thick of things: the story of London in the Second War, whether the Martians got that far or not, would be a tale for the ages. Bluntly put, I expected a retrospective commission from the Saturday Evening Post to boost my savings.
Before Sunday was over the telescopic spotters had done their work, and the government and the military authorities had already alerted the people through the papers and the Megaphones and the loudspeaker vans that the Martians were on the way, that this time they were heading for Middlesex and Bucks, well away from the city – that the Army was on the move and ready to deal with them. They were coming back! It was terrifying; it was thrilling – thrilling if we really were ready for them, at least.
What did I expect, that Sunday night? Perhaps to see a falling star or two, as when, under a starry sky on a short June night, Frank had watched the sixth cylinder of the ’07 wave fall towards Wimbledon, while my sister-in-law and I dozed – a green flash, falling silent beyond the hills - a gentle landing by comparison, as we know now. And then there would be the clatter of distant artillery as our boys got their revenge for what had befallen their fellows the last time.
Not a bit of it. As Churchill would put it later, the dastardly Martians returned to the pitch, but refused to play the game by the rules.
So there I was at midnight, fully dressed, waiting for the show.
And - peering from my sixth floor window towards the north, for I had made sure I got a room with a view on that side - I saw what appeared to be a sudden storm: tremendous flashes of white light like bolts of lightning that reached from the ground high into the air, miles high it seemed to me, and not a bit of green about them, all in a kind of eerie silence.
Then, a full minute later, the sound broke, like tremendous claps of thunder falling on the city; I heard the smashing of windows. There was a deep shuddering of the very fabric of the hotel too, and I sensed tremendous energies pulsing through the earth beneath us as through the air. (I was some ten miles from the nearest landfall of the Martians’ dummy projectiles, as I learned later.) It was over in a moment, though the horizon continued to burn red.
In the returning silence I heard people call, distantly, ‘Quake! Earthquake! Get out, get out!’ I had met survivors of the San Francisco event of 1906, and I could sympathise with the anxiety in that voice – though I strongly suspected this was no earthquake.
And then the hotel’s fire alarm bell was rung with vigour. I heard footsteps running in the corridors, voices calling for the building to be evacuated – and we were to take the stairs, not the elevators. Again I suspected this was unnecessary, but I was ready to go. I grabbed my rucksack, packed up as ever, and left my room, pocketing the key, and joined the swarms for the stairs.
Out on the street there was a surprisingly large amount of traffic, mostly motor-cars but a few horse-drawn chaises, most of it heading east towards Aldwych, away from the ‘storm’, and disregarding the traffic lanes despite the efforts of a couple of special constables near the hotel to impose discipline. I was one of a flood of guests spilling onto the pavement from the hotel, most of them in night-gear and overcoats, for the March night was chill. But people looked bewildered and a little shamefaced, for that tremendous light show, the terrifying noise, the shaking of the ground had already ceased. Aside from a suspicious redness to the sky off to the west, there was nothing to be seen. People speculated aloud about what had happened – had the Martians been shot down even before they landed? There were wild rumours of super-guns carried aboard German Zeppelins, and so forth.
But one old fellow with a Kitchener moustache held forth: ‘I tell you what we don’t hear, and that’s artillery fire. I was in Rye during the Battle of Paris in ’14, and even from that distance we could hear the bark of the Germans’ howitzers as they advanced to the centre. Middlesex is a lot closer than that. Now, whatever that herculean storm was, we don’t hear our boys’ guns firing in response, do we? So what’s going on? Every one of ’em spiked already, eh?’
It is telling of the temper of the cowed Londoners of the day that his wife plucked his sleeve to hush him, and others looked away uneasily, or glanced for special constables and the like who might put a stop to his demoralising words.
Well, with the show apparently over - and the hotel not shaking to pieces or bursting into flames - we guests were encouraged to return inside. A fair fraction seemed over-excited and unwilling to retire to their rooms. In an imaginative move the manager opened up the restaurants and bars; there were drinks to be had, and soon a cold buffet was laid on, with coffee and tea. I heard grumblings from the staff, roused from their own beds: ‘Wish them blessed Mar-shins would come in the middle o’ my shift and not at the end of it.’
I stayed a while, drinking strong coffee and trying to find any news. Every room private or public had a Marvin Megaphone, of course, but they brought nothing but bland assurances that the enemy had landed just where the astronomers had predicted and our forces were vigorously engaging them – just that, no specifics, amid lashings of uplifting patriotic music. I tried making a few calls to contacts in Middlesex, but all the lines that way seemed to be down. I even called the Observer, for that paper has run a few of my cultural pieces from New York, but the duty editor said the telegraph lines were down too, and there was no news by wireless.
Eventually I filled my pockets with sandwiches, attracting odd looks from the hotel staff, and retreated to my room. I thought I should stay until the dawn, even try to sleep. I lay in my bed, clothed save for topcoat and shoes; at least I got warm. I heard nothing more from the war front, if such it was – no more thunderous detonations, and no clatter of gun-fire, as the old soldier had pointed out. It all seemed alarming and mysterious and not at all what we had expected. It was as if not a Martian but some tremendous unpredictable god had stamped on the earth.
The sky was lightening, as seen through my open window, when I was woken by the smell of smoke.
That was the end of the night for me. I washed hurriedly, grabbed my coat and bag – slurped a last mouthful of cold coffee from the cup I had brought with me from the restaurant – and hurried out of my room and once more to the stairs.
In the street, there was a
faint light to the east; looking along the Strand I could glimpse Nelson silhouetted on his column. But the dawn was matched by a lingering red glow in the darker sky to the west. The wind, though gentle, blew from that direction, and that was the breeze that brought the stink of smoke to my nostrils. I imagined the whole of Middlesex was ablaze, and as it turned out I wasn’t far wrong.
The street had been transformed since I had come out at midnight. There were roadblocks and temporary gates all along the Strand now, manned by special constables, most of them identifiable only by the arm-bands and tin hats they wore over their civilian clothes. No vehicles moved, and those few parked in the street had been slapped with military requisition notices, if they didn’t have them already: some new set of regulations had been hurriedly brought into play, evidently, a new phase of a well-rehearsed plan.
Yet amid all the restrictions people were up and about. Some had the look of office workers to me, early birds perhaps even now expecting a normal day in the office, while Middlesex burned. Others were evidently on the move; they brought children and old folk with them, some in prams or walkers or in bath chairs, and they could be laden with goods, with suitcases and packs on their backs. These were sights that brought back to my mind once more the ghastly days of ’07, those hot summer hours when Frank and myself and my sister-in-law had been caught up in a panicky, uncoordinated evacuation.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 9
