As the dawn gathered that Wednesday morning, the Martians took their time to form up. In the First War, in striking from Surrey towards central London, they had been observed making a crescent formation, advancing bow first: an arc of armour and firepower whose flanks it would be all but impossible to turn, military analysts had since concluded, and not unlike the Prussians’ advance towards Paris in the war of the 1870s.
Now again they formed a crescent as they came out of the Cordon, with its prow pushing along the Western Avenue over the ruins of Uxbridge, its arcs reaching back beyond West Drayton to the south and Bushey to the north. And this time there was no mere handful of machines; observers counted at least fifty during the course of the day, perhaps a fifth of the entire force that had been landed in the heart of England in this new armada of cylinders.
Thus they advanced. All across a swathe of the western suburbs of London the alarms started to sound, and Army units, men and materiel, scrambled to their positions.
And we, my sister-in-law and I, were in Stanmore, to the west of the great improvised barricade that had become known as the King’s Line. I could not see the action yet but I could picture it: to the west of us the Martians, to the east of us the British defence line, and we two between them – caught in a closing trap!
Alice had indeed returned from Buxton, where she would have been safe, for now, but her instinct was to come home. I had made what preparations I could for our evacuation. I was determined that we would use our bicycles first, so that we could flee as fast as possible – but that laid a constraint on how much we could carry. Since my arrival on the Tuesday, I had kept my rucksack packed, and with every means of persuasion short of physical force I had induced Alice to compress her essentials into a single suitcase – she would have used more space for family jewellery and photographs of George than for underwear, which tells you all you need to know of her priorities. And she would chatter on about her spa holiday –who had said what to whom. That had taken all evening, until it had been too late to leave on the Tuesday night, and I had watched with envy and a kind of shame as the neighbours had one by one slipped away, a few in motor-cars somehow not requisitioned by the government, the rest on foot.
And all that day, as best I could, I followed the news of the Martians’ attacks on targets around the country: fast, precise, evidently ruthlessly planned.
On the Wednesday, we woke from a restless sleep to the sound of church bells and sirens and police lorries with loudhailers urging those remaining to hide in cellars or to flee. I learned that the Martians were moving this day on London, I felt profound regret that I had not succeeded in getting us away earlier – and a deepening fear that whatever we did now would be too late.
Even so I had to shake my sister-in-law out of her bed. ‘George would not want us to run like rabbits,’ she said, as I argued with her over the necessity of brushing her hair.
‘We should go north,’ I said, thinking fast. ‘If we can get to the Midlands towns there may be trains further north, to the Lakes, to Scotland even -’
‘George and I – this was our home, his library is still here, his surgical tools.’
‘George is thirteen years dead! It’s up to us now, Alice. We must save ourselves, for George can’t.’
‘France.’
‘What?’
‘Not Scotland. France. George had a patient there, a man from Nantes, came to England for treatment. He wrote to me after ’07, and said that if the Martians should come again to England we should go back to France - to him.’
‘France, again . . .’ Even then it occurred to me that there was no reason to believe the Martians would spare France, any more than they had England. Where was safe? And even to get to France we would need to reach the south coast. To cross London! ‘Alice, the city’s going to be a boiling ant-hill today. We cannot -’
‘We must,’ she said. ‘Or I won’t go anywhere.’
And that was the compromise we came to; I could not shift her. We would flee, yes, but only by plunging into the capital on this day of turmoil.
We left the house at last, with the sun rising on a pointlessly clear and fine spring day – the last day of March. The house was near the station, and I remember those big beautiful villas all shut up, their owners long gone, their windows blank rectangles with the curtains closed and the low sunlight glinting. Alice told me that some of the residents had boasted of burying hoards of coin or jewellery, like Saxons before the Vikings. At my insistence we cut north at first, for I knew that the King’s Line did not extend far north of Edgware, and at its terminus we might be allowed to pass, and then turn south.
Thus began our flight. And meanwhile, to the south-west of us, the Martian front was approaching the King’s Line. Already we heard the boom of guns, like gathering thunder.
24
ON THE KING’S LINE
When the Martians had imposed their Cordon in Middlesex and Buckinghamshire, Eric Eden, formally restored for the duration to his rank of Major, had happened to be outside the perimeter, rather than trapped inside, and he and his fellows had been hastily ordered back.
But now Eden found himself once more on the front line of a Martian war.
This time he was in an entrenchment that had been hastily cut across the line of Western Avenue, close to the junction with Hanger Lane, just north of Ealing – a section of the King’s Line. He was standing on a fire step, peering over a parapet of sandbags and looking west, the direction from which the Martians would come. His view was impeded by a heavy gas mask, and he held his rifle in his hands, tipped with bayonet. With the goggles, and with the roar of the guns opening up behind the lines, he could see, hear very little.
And yet he was confident, for he knew that at this point, where since the landings it had been expected any Martian advance on London must first come, human resistance had been made the strongest.
Winston Churchill himself, Secretary of State for War, had patrolled the lines the day before, even as frantic construction works had proceeded. It was said that he had been the most senior figure in the government to have stayed in the city, and had done much to organise its defences. If ever there was a time for a man like Churchill, it was on the eve of a war. I have always wondered since if he stayed in London that day in a kind of bold, all-or-nothing personal gamble, of the kind he had made all his life; if Churchill survived, whether the city stood or fell, he would be a hero forever. And he deserved to be. Now, forty-five years old, tall, bold, more soldierly than ministerial, he had stood on the trench parapet, fists on hips, mud on his shoes, and pronounced, ‘Break them here, men, break through their thin crust, and we’ll break them everywhere. For there aren’t so many of them. And if you should go down into the sleep of the just, take one with you. Hundreds of them, millions of us: we cannot help but prevail!’
That had won him cheers aplenty. He was a man to lead you to triumph or disaster, but at least to lead.
And Eden knew that there was cause for optimism beyond Churchill’s public words. Because of his own special experiences, Eden was among a privileged few to have been told that a little further behind this line, should it be breached, along with more artillery and machine-gun nests and troops, there was a most secret weapon.
At last the time came for all these hasty plans to be put into operation.
It was still early morning when the guns started firing.
It began with an artillery barrage launched from deep behind the lines. The heaviest weapons were some miles back – some were Navy guns, dismounted and transported on lorries and railway carriages. The shells flew over the King’s Line, over the manned trenches, and pounded the ground ahead, to the west, like tremendous footfalls.
Eden, cautiously poking his head over the parapet of his trench, could see the shells falling, and the sprays of dirt rising from the shattered ground, the fires starting in abandoned properties, and the scraps of forests and parks and common churned up and ablaze. He knew the plan: there would
be a ‘creeping barrage’, as the great guns were tilted up, and the lines of shell-fall worked steadily back over the ground, as if to clear it. The Martians were not immune to shell-fire, as was well known from the First War. The plan was that the bombardment would do most of the work; the great fighting-machines would be smashed and toppled, and then it would be the turn of the troops to rush ahead with automatic weapons and rifles, to pick off individual Martians as they tumbled from their broken craft.
Even as the shells fell, Eden looked around, to left and right. The trench line twisted and turned out of his sight line; it was built in a zigzag scrawl so that the blast of a detonation could not spread far along its length, a lesson the British had picked up from the Boer resistance fighters in South Africa. Everywhere men were lined up, on the firing steps and on the duckboards behind, ready to go over the parapet, and spotters peered through binoculars into the wall of smoke and flame. This was a war machine, he realised, the entire set-up, a unified system of men and machines and earthworks dedicated to a single purpose – planned and set up in mere days.
And now, at last, the cries started up.
‘There!’
‘And there!’
‘Yes, yes, I see – all along the front – here they come!’ There was a stir all along the line, the men on the fire steps pointing.
Eden wiped mud from his goggles and peered hard into the swirling smoke. And he saw them come, the triple narrow legs spinning and flexing, the great feet falling to the ground, and the knot of equipment above – the cowl, the dangling metallic tentacles - with, somewhere within each one, a living Martian. They seemed to coalesce from the smoke itself, as if emerging from a dream, and they came in great lines, a leading rank with more visible behind. Even at first glance the Martians towered over the human works, giants in the mist. They made no sound that Eden could detect– there was only the clamour of the guns still firing.
And now the fighting-machines responded to the barrage. Eden saw how, even as the machines walked forward with that peculiar bowling gait, their bronze cowls turned and twisted, and their agile appendages aimed Heat-Ray projectors this way and that, with dazzling speed. And one by one artillery shells that had travelled miles from their guns popped in the air, breaking into harmless shrapnel above their targets. He wondered what miraculous spotting technology the Martians must have to be able to snatch the shells from the air so systematically.
But the spotting was not perfect; even the Martians were mortal. A big round smashed one Martian square in the ‘face’. A great howl went up from the trenches, and Eden saw fists waved. The fighting-machine staggered, its hood now a tangle of twisted metal and crimson – perhaps the splash of Martian blood. The balance was lost, the controlling intelligence gone, and it staggered and fell, tumbling against one of its fellows, and the two of them began a stiff-legged tumble to the ground, like great trees falling.
‘Two!’ cried a young private close to Eden, his face hidden by his mask. ‘Two!’ He stood up, waving a gloved fist.
‘Down, you fool!’ Eden grabbed him by the scruff and dragged him below the parapet.
The Martian hit the ground. There was a detonation as if a fifty-pound shell had landed not yards away, and Eden, huddling, felt a surge of intense heat, as if the door of a great oven had been opened. There were screams, now, as men not in shelter were struck by this fiery pulse.
When he dared glance over the witnessed one of those remarkable cooperation and aid among the Martians which had struck observers during the First War. Even while the artillery barrage continued, even while men behind the trenches brought up field guns and howitzers for some close-in turkey-shooting, other Martians broke off their advance. Some leant over the wounded, making a kind of tall tent over the fallen ones, even as they continued to shoot the shells out of the sky. They were so close parapet again, Eden instances of mutual that Eden could hear the rattle of shrapnel harmlessly hitting their hulls. And meanwhile others bent over the fallen, and with extensions of their long metallic tentacles began to drag the wounded machines back from the line of fighting. If precedent was followed, Eden knew, the fallen Martians and their machines would be taken all the way back to their pits inside the Cordon.
But all this was a sideshow, Eden saw. Most of the Martian line came on unscathed, and now moved beyond the artillery barrage; the curtain could not be drawn further back without the shells landing on the British lines themselves.
Eden heard the men around him muttering their dismay and fear, and he felt his own tension rise as those great feet steadily approached the trench system.
Still the troops held their position, or most of them, with a rattle of automatic fire, even snipers’ bullets, pinging harmlessly off the legs of the giant machines. But now the Heat-Ray generators were free to play on the ground positions almost at their feet. The fighting-machines raked their beams along the lengths of the trenches, systematic and calm, as a farmer might sluice out a drainage ditch with a jet of water. Eden had to watch men not yards away from him caught in the beam and erupting into flame.
Eden himself held his ground, waiting for the lash of the Heat-Ray on his own back – but when at last the whistles blew and the bugle sounded, and the NCOs began to yell ‘Fall back! Fall back!’, he did not hesitate to follow.
The over-eager young man whom Eden had already saved once jogged alongside him after they had scrambled back out of the trench. ‘Next stop Shepherd’s Bush,’ he said. ‘That’s where we’ll stop ’em.’
And Eden, who knew more than most, said through his mask, ‘Maybe we will, Tom. Maybe we will.’
25
HOW THE RETREAT BEGAN
The Martians advanced along Western Avenue towards Wormwood Scrubs. Even as the Martian wedge drove into the great thick curve of the King’s Line, everywhere the Army fell back, heading for deeper, prepared positions.
And where the Army retreated, so perforce did what was left of the civilian population.
That dreadful morning I and my sister-in-had ridden our bicycles as far as we could, my sister with her suitcase slung over her shoulder with a bit of rope. Then when the roads got too busy we abandoned the cycles and trekked, making southeast, heading steadily for central London.
We passed down the Edgware Road, through Colindale and West Hendon and Cricklewood. We had to fight our way – often literally – through a wash of refugees heading generally eastward, rather than south as we were. There were some grand folk who even now insisted on carrying valuables, either in carts or wheelbarrows or even on the backs of servants – and some more pathetic types, such as a middle-aged woman I saw who was struggling to push another lady, much older, jaw sagging, in a bath chair, a mother or an aunt perhaps. I would have stopped to help but Alice hurried me on, and perhaps it’s as well she did. And just behind this froth of civilians came the military: ambulances and lorries and omnibuses carrying the wounded, and a few units dishevelled but apparently unwounded, some walking in neat formation but others more or less running, their discipline already gone. We had some difficulty, then, and lost a good deal of time, before we reached town.
From Paddington we hurried through the densely-packed streets south of the Marylebone Road until we reached Marble Arch. Here there seemed some semblance of civil order still, though there was a thickening flood of refugees coming down the Bayswater Road from the west and into Oxford Street. Specials and a couple of regular police were on duty at the Arch, and in Hyde Park the camps that had been set up for the soldiers were open to the newly displaced, and signs promised tea, water, food, rest, medical care.
Alice was unduly impressed. ‘Oh! The spirit of London - the great city is not done yet. Can we not stop for a while, Julie? We have walked so far already today. A cup of char would be a tonic!’
But I heard gunfire coming from the west, and thought I smelled burning. ‘We may have little time,’ I urged my sister-inlaw. ‘Come, stick to the plan. We must press on.’ So I urged her, and won the day by sheer
persistence.
And it is just as well that I did, for I think that by that hour – it was still early morning – the Martians were already at Wormwood Scrubs.
26
THE MARTIANS AT WORMWOOD SCRUBS
In the last stretch of the retreat down Western Avenue, the order came filtering down to try to slow the Martians’ advance before they reached the Scrubs. Eden knew something of what was at stake. He passed on the new orders; he turned and pushed back himself, shouting, arms waving, ordering the men to hold.
And the Martians came again, advancing out of the west from under a lurid, smoke-laden sky. By now they had pushed past the positions of the great guns themselves – every weapon that had not been removed was savaged by the Heat-Ray - and now they came into London itself, towering over the rows of houses, the heat beams casually flickering to and fro, each ironhot lick causing houses and vehicles and people to burst enthusiastically into flame. Now they were so close that Eden seemed to see every detail of the Martians’ construction clearly, even the chains of metallic rings that comprised their supple tentacular upper limbs, and he felt again a shudder of horror, an echo of those long hours when he had been trapped in that cylinder on Horsell. And yet he walked towards this army of monsters even so, as did the men around him, firing rifles, hurling grenades. One man commandeered an empty ambulance and drove it into the whirling legs of a fightingmachine; the Martian stumbled but did not fall, and then kicked the ambulance across the road as a boy might kick a can, and moved on. A few seconds’ delay of a single machine’s advance, bought at the cost of a man’s life.
When the Martians drove into the tangle of streets just south of the green spaces of the Scrubs itself, a bugle sounded, calling a general retreat. Eden waved to his men. ‘Fall back! Fall back!’
But even as the retreat began, glancing to his right, Eden saw the looming walls of the prison – a gaol hastily commandeered by the order of Churchill as the King’s Line was established in the last hours and days – and he saw great doors opening. A group of lorries towing flat-bed trailers burst from the gates. On the back of each truck were devices covered in tarpaulins, and men and women in protective suits. Careless of the men who scrambled to get out of the way, these vehicles lined up, taking positions that roughly blocked the road before the Martian advance. As soon as the lorries were stopped, their drivers dived out of their cabins and ran back to the protection of the prison.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 14
