Frank and his group of medics came to a group of soldiers, as mud-covered and unrecognisable as the rest. They were working on an overturned cart; a bored-looking horse stood idly by. One of them called for help, and Frank was surprised to recognise a German accent. ‘Can you help us? . . .’
As a nod from Fairfield, Frank went over with a couple of his junior doctors, and a handful of VADs. They all took a break for a smoke and a sip of water from their flasks, and, standing in the mud, inspected the damage. The cart was undamaged but it had tipped over in a hole hidden by the brown flood, and it had dumped its cargo, a large and impressive-looking machine gun, into the water.
‘Even when we get it out,’ said the German who had called, ‘it will take us an age to clean it – but we must get it done, for we have an appointment with the Martians.’ He stuck out his hand to Frank. ‘My name is Schwesig. Heiko Schwesig. My rank is Feldwebelleutnant; I am in charge of this weapon and this team – we are on detachment from the imperial army, as is this fine G8 . . .’
Schwesig’s unit had been assigned to guard duty at the German consulate in London - in those times it was necessary for an embassy from that power to a friendly city like London to be heavily armed. When the Martian threat had been announced, as a gesture of friendship between two allies, this unit and others had volunteered to bring their weapon to the fight. ‘The Martians are not waging war on Britain after all,’ said Schwesig in his precisely accented English, ‘but on all mankind. Of course we must be here.’
Verity, with a dubious eye, was sizing up the challenge of the stranded gun. ‘Never mind cleaning it, it’s going to take an effort just to haul the thing out of the mud.’
Frank flexed muddy fingers and laughed. ‘A bit of exercise – just what we need today.’
‘Need a hand?’ This was a brisk female voice.
Frank turned to find himself facing a sturdy woman of perhaps fifty, evidently muscular, her face broad and weathered, her legs in what looked like fisherman’s waders, leather coat buttoned around her barrel of a body, greying black hair tied back in a scarf. Behind her, its engine turning over – unnoticed in the general din of the day – stood a hefty-looking tractor.
Schwesig grinned. ‘Madam, you are the least muddy person I have met all afternoon.’
‘I should hope so too, or my husband will never forgive my loan of his leggings. But he’s had no time for his precious fishing that since he was called up by the reserve, and left me to run the farm for him.’ She pointed with a thumb. ‘Said farm being a few miles back that way, near a place called Abbotsdale if you know it. And this sort of pickle is the precise reason I thought I should bring Bessie out to meet you fellows.’
‘And glad we are of it too,’ Schwesig said, and he shook the farmer’s hand. She introduced herself as Mildred Tritton.
With Mildred’s expert handling, it was the work of a moment for ‘Bessie’, the tractor, to free the gun from the mud, get it loaded in its horse-cart, and on the move again. Then Fairfield briskly commandeered the tractor and its willing driver for more pressing assignments.
Verity watched her go with a sigh. ‘And there was me hoping for a lift. Never mind. On we go, Captain Frank . . .’
It wasn’t far to their final position, as checked by Fairfield on the mud-spattered, hand-marked map he carried. The medics weren’t the first to arrive, in this farmer’s field; already troops were digging in, setting up trenches and latrine ditches, and building parapets of hastily-filled sand bags facing back the way they had come. They had come far enough behind the cordon for them to find themselves in what felt like unsullied British countryside, a place of green hills and hollows and hamlets. A heron skated low over open water nearby. Dairy cattle were being shooed from a field to make way for the soldiers; they lowed in apparent irritation. It was still early in the day, comparatively, only mid-afternoon – they had come only a few miles from their old position.
They were all exhausted to some degree, Frank thought. None had slept much, if at all, last night. But still they were put to work, straight away. Frank observed an awareness of time, a sense of urgency. ‘Midnight they’re coming,’ went the whisper, in the trenches, the hastily erected field kitchens, among Frank’s own staff, the doctors and orderlies, the nurses and VADs. ‘Midnight, coming again, the Martians. Got to be ready . . .’
They had all seen the sheer blind destructive power so casually wielded by the Martians just the night before. They had all been briefed on the Black Smoke and the Heat-Ray. And here they were, the first line of defence for England and all mankind. Frank heard Fairfield and other officers and the bristling NCOs uttering exhortations as they worked their way along the line, urging on the work, but Frank scarcely thought it was necessary. They all knew.
At six they were fed, but they kept working. By now, despite the ‘nineteen hours’ window of opportunity still anticipated after the landings, a fight was expected, and the medics were set to digging their own protective trenches. The field hospitals were well back from front-line troops and the expected landing site of ‘their’ cylinder – marked as ‘No. 12’ on Fairfield’s map – but the Heat-Ray was known from the last War to have a useful range of several miles. So, trenches it had to be.
They ate as they worked, taking breaks of only a few minutes from the digging and hauling. By seven thirty the sun was down. Frank and Verity made a final tour of their installation.
‘Looks rougher than the first set-up,’ Verity said. ‘But then everything’s been dragged a few miles through the mud – as have we all.’
‘It looks fit for purpose,’ Frank said, trying to project a confidence he did not truly feel.
‘So it did last night,’ Verity said bleakly, ‘and we were all but useless.’
‘We’ll do all we can.’
She laughed. ‘Now that is a doctor’s line! Comforting and meaningless. You’ve been in the job too long, Captain. . .’
Night fell. The clocks worked their way towards midnight. Later Frank could not decide if the time had crawled or flown.
Fairfield, on his last tour of inspection before the deadline, wasn’t terribly sympathetic over the medics’ anxiety. ‘Had a couple of operations in my time,’ he said. ‘Bullet in the shoulder, picked it up in the Sudan. When you’re waiting for your turn on the slab – that’swhat this is like. Now it’s your turn to wait for the surgeon’s blade, Doctor!’
Frank used the latrines at ten, and again at eleven when they were getting more crowded. This routine reminded him uncomfortably of the night before, as if he were stuck in some over-scripted play that he must rehearse over and over.
A last cup of coffee, which he took to his position in the trench. He clambered down a short wooden ladder and settled behind a sandbag parapet, wondering if he would ever climb back up again. In fact he found it hard to imagine a time, any reality, beyond the midnight cut-off. In the dirt at his feet, gleaming in the light of the oil lamps strung along the trench, he saw a flint nodule, creamy white with a rich black interior.
‘Chalk country, Doc,’ came a familiar voice. ‘Sappers know the landscape. ’Ave to. Nat’ral geologists, you could call ’em.’
Frank turned, startled. ‘Bert Cook!’
Cook was wearing a reservist’s uniform, as muddied as the rest. Under his steel hat, Frank saw, he had blackened his face with burnt cork. The officers had suggested it, but most of the troops hadn’t bothered; Martians brought no snipers. ‘Hello, Doc,’ Cook said. ‘Heard you were ’ere – with this unit. Made my way along the perimeter to find a friendly face.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Just in time for the late sitting of the show, eh?’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised you’re here, Bert. I suppose you would always come back.’
‘“As a sparrow goes for man”, as your brother quoted me.’ He sounded charged, excited – yet calculating, Frank thought. ‘And here I am, right underneath ’em. This is what I’ve been waiting for, ever since the beggars died off in ’07 – waiting
for them to come finish the job they started.’
‘You say it with such relish, Bert. You are a riddle.’
‘I’ll give you a riddle. What’s green and flashing and flies like a bird in the sky?’
Frank stared at him.
Cook grinned, and pointed upwards.
17
CYLINDER No. 12
It took Frank some time, with the help of other survivors, to put together a coherent account of what followed. But then, as it turned out, he would have the time – plenty of it.
It was at the stroke of midnight that Fairfield’s Cylinder No. 12 made its entrance, with a vivid flash of green overhead, and then a concussion, a slam on the ground. Frank, huddled down in his trench, felt it as a shuddering in the earth, and a gust of air that knocked the breath out of his chest. In the trench the duckboards creaked and cracked, some of the loosely constructed parapet of sand bags collapsed, and here and there people whimpered and huddled. It was a great blow, as if the earth had suffered a mighty punch – not as great as the calamitous infall of twenty-four hours earlier, Frank realised immediately, but nearer.
Then, just seconds after the cylinder’s fall, Frank heard shouting. ‘Advance! Advance!’
‘Bring those bloody guns up!’
‘A light here, throw a light!’
Frank stood on a firing step and looked ahead, out of his trench. He saw a greenish glow coming from a hole dug new into the churned-up ground, with earth scattered around, and small fires in the nearer distance where there were trees and grass and buildings left to burn. Men and field guns were silhouetted against the eerie green glow, and picked out by wavering torchlight, already advancing towards the new pit.
And, from somewhere far behind, Frank heard the cough of artillery: the big guns firing from behind the lines, the giant eighteen- and sixty-pounders. The plan was that those great shells would smash up the cylinders before the ground troops even closed.
Frank’s new friend Feldwebelleutnant Schwesig and his gun crew, mobile, fast, and well-trained like all German troops, were among the first to reach the perimeter of the new pit. Later Schwesig told Frank what he saw. There was the cylinder embedded in the earth, standing vertical, a great pillar of steel some thirty yards across – and, no doubt, a hundred yards long, as it had proved when the inert craft were finally dug out of the ground after the First War. Schwesig and his crew prepared their G8 gun for what seemed to them the remote possibility that anything from within that cylinder should survive the blast of the field artillery already being trained on the target. There was no rush; they had nineteen hours’ grace before the Martians could move out in force, so they believed.
But the rules of the game changed again. There was a crack, a flash of greenish light. Schwesig saw it as a band of light around the top seam of the cylinder, under its flat lid.
Then that disc of metal, itself weighing perhaps five thousand tons, was suddenly detached and cast aside like a straw boater, to fly across the pit. No hours of patient unscrewing this time! The cylinder had not waited inertly for the human attack, not for nineteen hours, not even for nineteen minutes.
Then, in another instant, a kind of tentacular, metallic arm lifted out of the craft bearing a compact device not unlike a moving-picture camera: a device that Schwesig remembered well from his briefings. It was a Heat-Ray generator. Schwesig hurled himself flat into the dirt. He saw a ghost-pale beam of light pass not feet over his prone body, and thought he felt the air itself blasted to a tremendous temperature. Around him men who had not been so fast to react flashed into white flame, as the Ray swept like a hose around the perimeter of the pit. All this in mere seconds after the opening of the cylinder.
Nineteen hours!
Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield was a little further back, on a slight rise, observing. He could not see the heat beam itself, or indeed the projector being wielded from the suddenly open cylinder, but he saw men, machines, vehicles and horses incinerated in a glare of light, all around the pit. Then he saw more beams, coming presumably from projectors within the cylinders themselves, reaching up into the sky, pale, barely visible in air that was already filling with smoke. He looked up, wondering – and saw detonations, high in the air, almost like fireworks, he would say later. These were the artillery shells, incoming from the remote big guns, on their way to smash the Martian cylinder before it ever opened – that had been the theory. None of them reached the ground, never mind its target. A few spotter planes too were caught like moths in an invisible flame, brief flares against the midnight sky.
And then, rising out of the pit, above the smoke, he saw a great cowl, like a bronze helmet, lifting smoothly three unfolding legs. It was a fighting-machine – a great tripedal engine of war, returned to the earth after thirteen years, rising out of the smoke, above the disintegrated corpses of hundreds of men. All this and not yet a minute since the cylinder had landed.
Fairfield saw it in an instant. If we had deduced that the Martians were at their most vulnerable on first landing, so had they themselves, and they had done something about it.
Verity Bliss, in the medics’ ditch with my brother, was too far back to see any of the first moments of the conflict in detail, but she quickly got the general picture – so she would tell me later. The Martians, who were supposed to be dormant in their pit, were fighting back; the soldiers were dying. And that great cowl of the first fighting-machine was already advancing, looming out of the pit. Verity grabbed my brother’s collar, and hauled him by main force out of the trench. ‘We must run! It is the only chance!’
Frank had heard the cries of freshly wounded; in his head he had been frantically preparing to go over the top, to help who he could, he and his staff. Back into the horror. But he could see he had no choice but to agree; the whole position would soon be overwhelmed. Out of the trench he came, and he and Verity rounded up the rest of their staff, yelling and pushing: ‘A doctor’s no use to anyone fried! Run, scatter!’
But even as Frank ran away from the pit – heading deeper into the Martian Cordon - Frank saw that others were running forward: gunners scrambling to man their weapons, even individual troopers hurling themselves into trenches and taking pot-shots at the Martian with their rifles. And Frank saw, looking back over his shoulder, that the Martian was advancing remorselessly into the fire. He saw again that peculiar threelegged motion of the thing, this mobile war-machine without wheels. It was a tripod, like a milking stool tipped over and bowling along at a tremendous speed – a traumatic memory of thirteen years before, he told me. But even as it advanced the fighting-machine kept its upper body steady, that great cowled ‘head’ a superb platform for targeted fire. And it was already picking its targets precisely, Frank saw: weapon emplacements, ammunition dumps, vehicles. A stray pass caused Frank’s field hospitals, a row of muddy tents, to flash into flame. A bit of him mourned, but at least they had been empty. Individual soldiers fled in terror, but they were generally spared - though any who shot back got a dose of that ghostly, lethal beam as it raked the trenches and dugouts.
Then Verity gasped, pointing back to the pit. ‘Here comes another fighting-machine. And another. How can they come so fast?’
‘Down, you fools!’
A firm hand in the back forced Frank to the ground, with Verity sprawled alongside him. Frank twisted to see the sootsmeared face of Bert Cook, grinning, his teeth white in the light of Frank’s torch. ‘Sorry about the rough handlin’, Miss.’ Frank protested, ‘Bert –’
‘Lie still, I say!’
And Cook kept them pressed down even as a fightingmachine swept over them.
Frank, twisting, saw one immense leg, the best part of a hundred feet tall, swing through the air over him, as the cowl far above twisted this way and that. And Frank saw the metallic net on the thing’s ‘back’, a detail with grisly associations. Though the Heat-Ray stabbed this way and that, it never came close to the three of them. He survived – they survived – and the Martian passed.
‘Can you see the pattern?’ Cook yelled in Frank’s ear. ‘They’re going for equipment, guns and ammo – and men who fight back, they’ll get a lick of the Ray too. But if you submit – well, you might get stomped on accidental -’
‘They’re leaving us alive,’ Verity said.
‘’Course they are. That’s why they’re not using the Black Smoke, I imagine. And we all know for why, don’t we?’ He smacked his lips, as if hungry. ‘They’re harvesting. And you know why? Because we’re defeated already. Already. Oops – here comes the second machine – down!’
Again he pressed their heads into the dirt, as hundreds of tons of articulated metal waved in the air above them.
And then came a third fighting-machine, and a fourth.
‘This is the life!’ yelled Bert Cook, through the din. ‘This is the life!’
18
THE FLYING-MACHINE OVER LONDON
On the Monday night I had slept badly.
Before midnight, when the next batch of Martians were due – so the rumours had it, and by now they were well informed - I had returned to the West End. I had been out on the Strand, in fact, in the night air. With the restrictions on traffic the city was free of engine noise, and I could clearly hear the voices of people out and about as I was, and somewhere the clank of a train leaving Charing Cross, perhaps a troop-carrier. And to the north, I thought by Covent Garden, I heard voices raised in revelry, even the shrill sounds of a ragtime band, and then a thin police whistle. Marvin’s regime had not quite sucked all the gaiety out of the city, then; not even the Martians had managed that.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 11
