But this was different, it seemed, so far. The government had not yet given up. The special constables and fire wardens and others were standing their ground, and even exhorted people to go back to their homes, to do their duty. Individuals could be singled out. ‘You, man – that’s the arm-band of a firewatcher. St. Martin’s, that’s where you should be, with your whistle and your bucket of sand, not running like rabbits.’
A few argued back, in that dawn – the absconding firewatcher, for one. ‘Come off the high horse, Ted, you’re a doorman at the Rialto, not Winston bloody Churchill. The guv’mnt ’ave took my motor-car, they’ve took my dog cart, and if it had occurred to ’em they’d have took my mother-in-law’s wheelchair too – no, no, Ma, don’t try to get up, you keep it – but they can’t yet reck-wee-zish-un my two poor feet, and if you’ve got any sense left you’ll join me.’
Even I was picked on for not carrying my gas-mask – in fact I had it but not on show, it was in my rucksack. ‘You’ll regret not having it to hand when the Black Smoke comes, missus.’
If this was going on in the West End, I imagined the same scene played out across the city and the residential suburbs: the authorities struggling to keep the city’s shape with their rules and regulations and an appeal to duty, and no traffic moving on the streets save for military and other official vehicles. And yet a trickle of dark, struggling dots must already have been filtering through the streets and alleys, laden, on foot, yet making their clumsy way, a trickle that was the people of London swarming and converging and massing, I guessed, in the great trunk roads leading south and east – opposite to the direction from which the Martians, this time, would surely come.
And, even in the Strand, even at this very early hour, in amongst the gathering crowd of evacuating residents I saw already folk who had evidently come much further, and were travelling into London. Some walked only with difficulty; they had scorched clothes, blackened faces. These were families, with old folk and little ones, all on foot – and all much less heavily burdened than the Londoners who were only now beginning their journeys, and I imagined a litter of abandoned suitcases and trunks and valuables lining the roads out of Middlesex, just as in Surrey thirteen years before. There was a first aid post in the hotel, and VADs came fluttering out to offer assistance to the worse-off of these poor wretches; waiters and bell-boys came out too with cups of water. These first refugees, it would turn out, were survivors from residences on the fringe of the Martian landfall, driven out by the fires, or the collapse of their properties, or just sheer terror – those much further in had not survived at all. I guessed as much but could not confirm it at the time. I longed to talk to these refugees, to learn a story or two from individuals, but the special constables, ever vigilant over morale, kept us apart.
Restless, impatient, I gave up on the hotel and struck out myself along the Strand, heading for Trafalgar Square.
Charing Cross station was closed entirely now, barricaded with barbed wire; the rail lines, like the roads, had now been requisitioned for official use. It was still early but a few stores were open; I saw fist-fights in a grocery. And queues formed outside a bank branch with its door barred and firmly closed, behind an official notice proclaiming that all banking would be suspended for the ‘duration’; as the Bank of England had already suspended specie payments, the other banks had no choice but to close. That was the first inkling I had that the new Martian attack already had global implications; with the closure of London’s investment markets, through which in those days flowed much of the world’s money, there would be an instant financial crisis.
In the Square itself I stood on the balcony of the Portrait Gallery and looked out, with Nelson, at this great confluence of the city’s highways: the roads becoming steadily more packed with pedestrians, only a handful of vehicles, police and military, pushing through the crowds and the roadblocks. Even here, as the morning light gathered, I sensed a steady drift eastwards, an instinctive flight away from the glowing enigma to the west. The walls and lampposts were posted with fresh proclamations from the government, and a few fragments of news. The Chief Commissioner of Police urged us to keep public order. Parliament, the Privy Council and the Cabinet councils were all in session, we were told, and communications with the military commanders in the field were being kept up. In more than one message Marvin himself, handsomely portrayed, encouraged us to stand fast and do our duty. I saw one version of Marvin given a crayoned suitcase labelled ‘Berlin bound!’
About eight in the morning the newsboys appeared with their first specials of the day, and were mobbed; small fortunes in pennies were handed over in minutes. I did not join the scrums around the boys, but waited a few minutes until I could get my hands on a discarded but mostly intact copy of the Mail.
Hastily printed, heavy on headlines but short on images, the rag contained what seemed like authentic news to me – and I silently praised the publishers for defying the government’s ban on the truth when it mattered most. Major movements of troops and materiel were being reported from Aldershot, headquarters of the Army and home of three divisions, and north of the Thames out of Colchester, and special trains were carrying stocks of weapons and shells out of the Woolwich Arsenal. The Royal Family was no longer in London; even before the weekend they had boarded a warship that would take the King to the safety of Delhi. Evidently rumours of the Martians’ projected landfall, to the north-west, had leaked out in the final hours, and I read about fighting, the evening before, for places on the last publicly available trains heading to the south: the Great Westerns to Cornwall and Devon, the Brighton Line to Sussex, the south-east lines to Kent. Meanwhile food stores across the city were already depleted of stock because of panic buying, and the government was halting the inflow of fresh supplies from the countryside, diverting it to special warehouses with locations unspecified, to be doled out as the basis of a rationing system.
And, in screaming headlines, there were scraps of news from the front itself.
HUGE DISASTER IN MIDDLESEX AND BUCKS
‘HALF OF ARMY LOST IN MOMENTS’
A few words, a handful of facts – alarmist, you might think, but, as I would learn later, the essence of the case was there, in a dozen words.
I read the paper twice, then gave it to a man begging to see it in turn. Restless, aimless, I walked, letting instinct guide me.
I went down to the river and along the Embankment – or at least, along the narrow strip of walkway still permitted to the public. I looked on the ugly bunker that had replaced the Palace of Westminster, and I thought that if war was coming perhaps its architectural strategy had been a sound one after all. I crossed Westminster Bridge, and there, on the river, for the first time I glimpsed large-scale military movements in the city itself. I saw military vessels pushing up-river. Some appeared to be barges laden with troops, but I thought I recognised the low profile of torpedo rams, like the Thunder Child which thirteen years before had done so much to preserve my own life. Such a boat, I realised, would be able to pass under the bridges and reach further into the upper stretches than most capital ships. I also saw what appeared to be heavy naval guns, dismounted and being lugged upstream on smaller boats and barges. I resolved to make my way to the Pool of London, further downstream, to witness the gathering of warships that must be clustered there – surely an inspiring sight. That, though, was a destination I was not to reach.
From the river I walked down the Bridge Road and then south of Waterloo. In Lambeth’s narrow streets, though the government’s proclamations bloomed as dense on the walls and lampposts as elsewhere, there was comparatively little sign of the alarm that was gripping the West End. When you had little, I supposed, you were even less motivated to abandon it. On the Cut the food stores were shut up, and I saw one had been looted, its smashed window left gaping like a missing tooth. Before the homely grandeur of the Old Vic I found a handful of children on the step, barefoot and begging. I gave them pennies, though much good it would do them
with the shops shut up.
I wondered how quickly Marvin would get his new system of ration distribution up and running: quickly, I prayed, for in places like this hunger was only a meal-time away. Indeed, during the First War, even as the Martians rampaged in Surrey, the police had struggled to contain food riots in areas like this. That had consequences; Frank had been among the first of the medical teams to go into the East End after the War, and had never abandoned his mission – and the police, battle-hardened, had never softened.
One man, in his sixties perhaps but not much less ragged than the children, stopped me and asked if I had kept a copy of a special. I had not. But he asked me if it was true that the King was on his way to Delhi; I said that was the fact as far as I knew. He went off nodding in satisfaction: ‘As long as they’re out of it and safe, bless ’em.’ To me the King was nothing but a stampcollecting dullard, but I was often struck in those days by the ardent loyalty to the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas of their most disadvantaged subjects – even those who despised Marvin’s government.
And as he had asked about the King’s family, I wondered what had become of my estranged husband, somewhere in Middlesex. Indeed, I had already begun to wonder if he was still alive.
16
INTO THE CORDON
As Frank would later record in his nascent journal, he and his medical staff were told they were to be moved some seven hours after the first Martian landfall – a little after dawn that Monday morning.
But where Frank had expected the surviving units to be pulled back in the direction of London – and the wounded had already been taken that way, in ambulances, or the walking wounded on foot, all evacuated but for the moribund who waited to die in tents in a farmer’s field – now, so LieutenantColonel Fairfield came to tell Frank and Verity in person, a percentage of the surviving force was to be moved inside the Cordon.
‘Which is what we’re starting to call the great circular earthwork the Martians have created, all in an instant. Or a "marswork" perhaps,’ Fairfield said with a smirk, exercising his sometimes laboured humour.
The three of them stood in hot, murky air; smoke had swirled all night from the burning countryside around them, and some had tried to sleep in their gas-masks. Even now the westerly breeze was only slowly dispersing the smoke, and Frank had to blink to keep the grit out of his eyes. Overhead, aeroplanes buzzed like gnats. Frank had had a chance to shower, at least, and to change his clothes – he hadn’t slept – and yet he had an odd sense of unreality, as if the daylight was a sham, as if his hands and arms were still steeped in the blood and ordure of dying men. He had to concentrate hard to follow what Fairfield was saying.
Fairfield showed them aerial photos of a ring of craters, fifty-two in all - wounds executed with surgical precision, Frank the doctor thought.
‘It looks,’ said Verity Bliss, studying the photographs, ‘as if someone pressed a string of pearls into wet clay, and carefully lifted it away again.’
‘I suppose it does rather,’ Fairfield said. ‘But it’s difficult to get the scale of the thing. This is a composite photo, you know. The chaps worked through the night to assemble such images, and maps of the new terrain – and that’s not to mention the peril to the flyers who took the shots. Each of these craters is all but a mile wide, and it butts up against its neighbour, neat as a geometry exercise. Not that I was much use with the compass and straight-edge in my days at school. This smudge,’ and he pointed to a blur at the very centre of the circle, ‘is Amersham, a fair-sized little town. All but lost within the perimeter – see the scale of it?’
Frank recalled that Walter had spoken of a hundred cylinders on the way; only fifty or so had landed yet. ‘The second wave,’ he said. ‘That’s what comes next. All this is just a stage-setting. The next will be the war craft, like the cylinders of the last invasion. That’s the thinking. But where will these next cylinders come down? Can we say, yet?’
‘With some degree of certainty; they’re only eighteen or so hours out now. Some will hit the interior of the Cordon, landing a little later than the first lot, and the locations there aren’t secure yet. But others, the first to fall, will hit -’ He jabbed at the photograph with a forefinger, following the curve of the arc of craters. ‘Here, here, here . . . In the existing pits of the perimeter, you see. Not every crater will be targeted, as you can see, but a respectable number will get a new visitor.’
Verity seemed baffled. ‘Why would they land on terrain they already churned up?’
‘Because they smashed up any resistance there first, before they began to unscrew a single cylinder,’ Frank said. ‘Now they think they can land in peace.’
‘That’s the idea,’ Fairfield said. ‘But there’s still a flaw in their thinking – a loophole. They didn’t get us all, and we’ve time to respond – to bring up more troops and guns from the rear and from the reserve divisions. Surround them even before they land.’
‘“Surround them”,’ Verity repeated. ‘Which is why we’re going inwards.’
‘That’s the idea. The thing is, one of the cylinders appears to be coming down right on top of us. So we’re taking a fighting force inside the Cordon, you see, through the craters and to the relatively unharmed land within, so that there will be a welcoming party ready on all sides of the cylinder when it comes down. And meanwhile fresh troops will be brought up to plug the gaps we leave and wall them in from the far side.
‘And you’ll be coming with us. So I’m afraid it’s to be a day of walking for you, walking and digging in – it’s not far, but tricky countryside, as you can imagine. The scouts and sappers have gone on ahead.’ He eyed Verity. ‘I’m not ordering you to do this, Miss. You VADs are volunteers. If you wish to be released -’
Verity said boldly, ‘When the fun’s only just started? Not on your life, Lieutenant-Colonel.’
Fairfield grinned. ‘Carry on, then.’ He snapped out a smart salute and walked on down the line.
‘Brave of you,’ murmured Frank.
She snorted. ‘You should see the alternative – if I skulk away from here I’ll have to go back and face my mother, who says she once met Florence Nightingale. Sooner the Martian horde than that. Come on, Doctor Frank, let’s get our things packed up.’
Frank had always kept himself reasonably fit. After that confrontation at High Barnet he had taken up his school-days boxing again, since the skill had proven so useful in a crisis, and later he had responded with reasonable enthusiasm to the demands of the Fyrd trainers for their recruits to achieve physical readiness.
Even so, he would write, he was already exhausted by the time they had got the field hospitals and their ancillary stations emptied out and torn down and stowed away in motor-wagons and horse-drawn carts. At that, the equipment he and his medical staff had to handle was a good deal easier than the heavy weaponry, ammunition and other gear that the regulars had to manage. ‘I never saw a bunch of men look less fit than a random selection of British privates,’ he told me. ‘But give them a task of any dimension and they get it done, grumbling as they go – smoking, swearing, complaining, every one a miniature Hercules.’
In fact, at the time, he found the demands of the physical work a relief. Better to be engaged in the outside world than in the contents of one’s own head.
There was a brief respite for lunch at midday, of cold meat and bread supplied by the field kitchens. And then, in early afternoon, the column formed up to make its way north-west, and through the devastated area of the Cordon. Frank imagined the scene as viewed from above, like Fairfield’s photograph mosaic – perhaps as seen from one of the Martian cylinders that was falling to the earth even at that moment – the great circular scar in the landscape, and all around men and their machines and horses, creeping towards the barrier of smashed earth from both sides, and crawling gingerly through it. Fairfield and other officers walked or rode alongside the marchers and the vehicles, and scouts zipped up and down the line on motorcycles, fairly bouncing over the broken ground
.
As Frank understood it, they passed through the Cordon at a point where two of the Martians’ craters, side by side, abutted each other. Here was to be found a ridge of relatively undisturbed ground – relatively, but Frank soon learned it was littered with smashed buildings and tumbled trees, or simply churned up to expose the chalky bedrock of the country, rock the colour of bone. In the worst of it the sappers had laid tracks of canvas and planking, but that was meant more for the benefit of the vehicles than the walkers, and Frank and his team, each laden with a pack, had to plod carefully. Smoke drifted everywhere.
And, every so often, they came upon horror. At the centre of each of the Martians’ craters, any building, any human being – any living thing – had been smashed to atoms, leaving no residue. But at the periphery of the craters it was different, the damage partial. They came to houses like shells, with one wall left standing and the interior floors, unsupported, hanging limp; broken water pipes leaked slow floods into the heart of the ruins. And here the destruction of the bodies had not been total. Frank imagined he could smell putrefaction in the air, the stink of rot under the lingering smoke. In one place he saw a splash of blood, a slumped form, where a child had been hurled against a wall, perhaps by the air shock, and, it seemed, had simply burst open, like a balloon full of water.
‘Eyes forward,’ Fairfield said sternly, as they passed such scenes. ‘The scouts and the sappers have been through this place. Nobody left alive, or they’d have brought them out. Eyes forward now, concentrate on your own destiny, not theirs, for there’s nothing we can do here . . .’
They had bypassed Uxbridge, or the site of it, when, close to a sign for a place called Denham, they came to a flood. The Grand Union Canal, badly disrupted by the Martian assault, was drowning the countryside.
The sappers had put together a pontoon bridge over which the vehicles were driven or dragged. The foot-sloggers had to walk through thickening mud, though. Frank soon found it wasn’t the wetness that troubled him but the way the mud sank under every step and clung as he tried to lift out his feet, draining what little energy he had left. Around him, all the mudspattered individuals started to look alike, officers and men, volunteers and regular, women and men. Just lumps of clay and mud, struggling on.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 10
