Before the day was much older we were driven from the house and back into town to the rail station, and loaded up on a train filled with anxious troopers, novices and veterans alike, returning to their duties. We three, Lane, Gray and I, shared a compartment with a dozen of them, who crowded the seats and sat on the floor - one fellow even stretched out on the flimsylooking luggage rack overhead - and they filled the little cabin with their cigarette smoke.
We slowed as we passed another train, coming down from London, and I peered curiously. The train was splashed with paint, black and brown and green – camouflage colours. I saw troops in there, grimy and exhausted, many sleeping. Cars marked with red crosses were like mobile hospitals, and there were cars crammed with civilians too, men, women, and children, many of them as grimy as the troops, blinking in the light – and in the case of the children, staring in wonder at the green countryside, which perhaps they had never seen before.
Ted Lane, by the window, amused himself by pulling faces at the little Londoners and trying to make them smile.
I touched his arm. ‘Is it always like this?’
‘Oh, yes, Miss,’ he murmured. ‘Seven million or so trapped on the day the Martians came, I believe, and you don’t shift them in a hurry.’
Gray said, on my other side, ‘The Londoners do what they can for themselves – backyard allotments and the like. But there are whole populations left behind, some in hiding in tube tunnels and the like – and every so often they have to be shifted as the flood waters rise.’
At that time I knew nothing of London’s floods – I would see enough later.
Ted Lane was still pulling faces and waving. ‘Seven million,’ he muttered. ‘And every one of them a life to be saved.’
I felt obscurely proud of him.
Later we had a pause in our journey. The train simply stopped in open country, somewhere near Alton I think. The locomotive was shut down, and workers in khaki - they may have been military swarmed along the carriages dragging tarpaulins loosely over the roofs, and our view from the window was obscured.
Lane touched my shoulder. ‘Martian about – or so some spotter will have called in, and the message sent on to the signalmen.’
‘Probably a flying-machine,’ Gray said. ‘They come out for the odd raid, as if testing our defences. And they cut the rail links if they see them. So you conceal the tracks by splashing them with camouflage-colour paint, though that has to be renewed as it gets rubbed off by passing stock. And the trains too, the roofs of the carriages painted, a bit of tarpaulin to blur the outlines. Wouldn’t fool a human spotter, but might a Martian. And we have to be still. A moving train -’
‘Why are we whispering? The Martians might see us, but they can’t hearus.’
He grinned. ‘Natural reaction, ain’t it? Anyhow you started it.’
Of course he was right.
We were held for hours before at last we moved. In the interval we had none of us spotted a flying-machine.
11
MY RETURN TO LONDON
The train journey ended south of London, at Clapham Junction. Here our train-load of troops was exchanged with another lot, evidently fresh from the front and ready for their bit of leave, the men mostly in khaki uniforms and greatcoats, and women in the uniforms of nurses or VADs. The relieved troops were all grimy and damp-looking, their clothes and kit shapeless and well-worn, even mouldy in some cases. The dominant impression was of exhaustion. Nevertheless these hollow-eyed troops had greetings ready for their replacements. ‘Hello! Nice haircut, mate, but the Heat-Ray will give you a trim for nothing. Got a fag to spare?’
‘Look at that one, Fred. Ruddy like a raspberry and as full of juice. Them Martians will have a fine time sucking you dry, you mark my words, suck and suck and slurp! . . .’
I suppose it has been the way of soldiers to goad each other this way, back to the days when Caesar came with his legions, perhaps to this very spot. But I saw that while this badinage was continuing, the nurses and MOs stood with men and a few women in a worse condition: walking wounded, festooned with bandages, on crutches – there was a line of men who seemed to have lost their sight, all standing with one hand on the shoulder of the fellow in front. All looked exhausted, bewildered, shocked, and those who could see were blinking in the light. It was not a promising welcome committee. And still I was far from the Martian centre, the cause of all this.
We filtered through the station, hundreds of us, to the gulllike cries of the NCOs and MPs.
Once we were out of the station we joined a unit of troops, laden with kit, already formed up. And then we set off on foot. We walked out to St John’s Hill and turned right, towards the river. It was my first return to London since I and Alice had fled from the first advance of the Martians from Uxbridge, more than two years earlier. Falling back on my journalistic experience, I tried to keep my mind open, my reactions fresh.
To begin with, I had oddly positive impressions. I heard little but a lapping of water somewhere nearby – that puzzled me – and the singing of birds, and the quiet voices of the men as they walked along. The air smelled clear if a little stale – like a blocked drain, I thought. I saw a stretch of blue sky above. Many of the buildings had a peculiarly streaked effect on their grimy surfaces, pale stone showing under the black. The coming of the Martians had extinguished London’s smoking chimneys, and the rain had weathered away some of the grime, centuries thick, from the faces of the buildings. I wondered what was going on in the parks – if the trees and birds were flourishing, if wildlife had come in from the country. It was a Wednesday in May; I felt a burst of absurd springtime optimism.
And then – too soon! - we came to the river. But not to its old bank.
Where the water lapped, I saw from the signs, was the York Road. To our right was a small park area, sodden and flooded. And before us was the river itself, evidently spread up from its course and over the feet of the buildings. I looked out across a stretch of grey water, to the silhouettes of buildings on the far shore, their foundations drowned as on our side.
Where the cobbled road surface ducked under the water there was an improvised jetty. Here a series of rowing boats waited for us, with more standing out on the river. The NCOs spoke their orders, and we shuffled down towards the water. Once in my boat I sat cautiously at the prow, beside Gray, while Lane sorted out men to take the oars, and a rough type in a heavy waterproof leather coat sat at a tiller in the stern and glowered at us.
I murmured to Gray, ‘What is this vessel?’
He shrugged. ‘Scarcely matters, does it? Might even have been a lifeboat from one of the warships the Martians smashed up in the Pool . . .’ He fell silent, watchful, as the boat inched its way down the flooded street, and over what I supposed to be a drowned embankment. ‘Always the trickiest part, over the streets, there’s all sorts of hazards – was on a boat once that got spiked by a smashed lamppost, sharp as a bit of broken bone, and that was no fun.’
We joined a line of such boats. The oars lapped, and gulls wheeled overhead, cawing, perhaps seeking food. The old route of the river was easy to make out as we progressed, for I could see the spans of bridges, every one of them broken as if snipped with scissors: Battersea Bridge, Albert Bridge, Chelsea Bridge. But the far bank was as drowned as the Clapham side, or more so; the river, vast and extensive, seemed to spread far inland to the north and east, over Chelsea and Westminster. The river itself was scummy, dirty, and scattered with debris – bits of wood, the remnants of clothing, dead birds and animals. And it was littered with wrecks; the heat-twisted hulks of battleships protruded, rusted and pathetic, above the lapping water. And it smelled foul, even in the middle of the river. It was hard to believe this was the river of empire.
Gray was watching me, as if interested in my reaction. ‘More marvels for your newspaper stories, Miss Elphinstone?’
‘Hardly marvels . . . The flooding. Is that the work of the Martians?’
‘Not directly. Indeed I doubt the M
artians, from their arid world, know enough about hydrology to have managed this deliberately. No, this is all accident and neglect; nobody is in a position to maintain the drains and the flood gates and the pumping stations. So the Thames is regaining its old banks: flooding lost lagoons at Hammersmith, Westminster, Bermondsey, the Isle of Dogs, Greenwich.’ He smiled. ‘The old rivers are coming back too, bursting out of the culverts under which we buried them. I have a friend who swam down the course of the Fleet, for a dare, from St Pancras to Blackfriars . . . Of course as much damage is being done underground as over.’
‘The flooded Underground tunnels.’
‘An awful lot of people sought shelter from the Martians down there, for an awful long time.’
So much damage had been done – so much suffering! I felt ashamed of my own self-absorption.
Now followed perhaps the most extraordinary part of that strange urban journey. We cut in from the river’s true bank, and rowed our way cautiously north-east – I think we followed the line of the drowned King’s Road, through Chelsea towards Belgravia. Our pilot navigated cautiously, peering to left and right and every so often calling a halt if he suspected we were to encounter some submerged obstacle. To my right the broad, placid river; to my left I thought I glimpsed the great museums of South Kensington rising pale. And ahead, the jagged ruins of General Marvin’s new Palace of Westminster protruded from the water like the skeleton of some vast aquatic mammal.
Still on the river, we passed Buckingham Palace - its roof was melted and skirted the Victoria Memorial, and our pilot seemed to make his way more confidently over the drowned St James’s Park. At last we came to Trafalgar Square, which rose up out of the water, and along with the boats that had preceded us we berthed on the Gallery steps; iron posts had been driven into the stone for the purpose. Once I had climbed out onto the steps, looking away from the water, I had a brief, odd feeling of normality, of routine, despite the khaki-clad men all around me. But a glance down Northumberland Avenue showed the waters of the swollen river, glinting in the sun between the buildings, its surface littered with unidentifiable debris.
Gray came to me. ‘Now we have lunch.’
‘A little late for that.’
‘You’re in the Army now, Miss Elphinstone; you eat when you’re fed. And then it’s a walk for us, I’m afraid.’
‘Which way?’ I knew my destination was to the west and the Cordon, eventually.
But he pointed east, along the Strand. ‘That way, along the new shore. Dry enough, if we cut up a couple of streets. The Strand, you know – a Saxon word for “beach”, and that’s no accident, for this was once the bank of the ancient river.’
‘How far?’
‘All the way to Stratford.’
‘Stratford? East, then, not west, to where the Martians are – I imagine there’s a plan.’
‘As much as the Army ever has.’
12
FROM ALDWYCH TO STRATFORD
So that extraordinary day continued. We walked, but I am used to that, and was glad of the exercise after days of travel on boat and train. We headed along the Strand - where, as I have previously remarked, I had the opportunity to inspected the war wreckage of landmarks familiar to me – and then through Aldwych and around the London Wall to Aldgate, and then on up the Whitechapel Road to Stepney and Bow. As we progressed the scouts would peel off to the locations of telephone equipment, left by those who had come this way before; they checked the gear and made hasty reports. The engineers suspected that the Martians could detect our wireless transmissions, and could track us that way – but they could not detect our telephone calls.
As we walked, though we saw little evidence of fire, we passed tremendous craters in the ground – as if great bombs had fallen. The Heat-Ray will incinerate a human in a flash, and demolish a building – but such is the density of energy it delivers that the fires it sets, in urban situations anyhow, tend to blow themselves out. So London had been spared the great firestorm that many had predicted when the Martians brought the Heat-Ray back to the city.
But what the Martian assaults had done, by breaking the skin of modern London, had been to reveal the medieval bones and guts lying beneath. I was fascinated to learn that the Martians’ destruction of the Guildhall had revealed the remains of a Roman amphitheatre beneath, a structure long hypothesised but its existence never confirmed. Gray told me that even as the Martians still strutted over London in the present, archaeologists came to study what was exposed of the past. ‘Makes you proud, doesn’t it? That we still have such a perspective, even in this . . . Do the Martians seek abstract knowledge? If not, then that separates us from them.’
Now I saw that the men around me, on a murmur from their officers, were raising handkerchiefs and scarves to their faces, and Gray quietly advised me to do the same. He pointed to a churchyard, not far off the road. The church itself had been smashed, and the ground around churned up too.
‘The graveyards?’
‘In some of the older churches there are plague pits. Best to be cautious.’
We walked on.
You might ask where were the Londoners in this, those millions who still remained. Hiding– that’s the short answer. I learned that the surviving population had learned to stay back from the main thoroughfares, and inhabited the great warrens of back streets, especially in the East End rookeries – that was if they hadn’t found shelter underground, in the sewers or railway tunnels that were not yet flooded. Thus they avoided the Martians, with their Heat-Ray, and their harvesting.
And they did what they could to keep themselves alive, and not just on the rations the emergency government managed to provide; they foraged in the wrecks of stores, where tinned goods and so forth could still be found, and they grew vegetables, even kept chickens and a few pigs, in gardens and allotments and the smaller parks.
The government kept an eye on the population. A system of ration cards was one way of ensuring every man, woman and child was logged in a great register somewhere. The police still functioned, after a fashion, augmented by Special Constables; crime levels were lower than you might have expected – because, it was said, the rations doled out were more nutritious than the diet of many East End Londoners before the Martians came. And people were put to work, on one project or another: on salvage work, or maintaining the surviving sewers, for example, as I was to discover for myself.
Hidden the people were, but as we walked, occasionally children would peek out from an alley or the doorway of an abandoned shop, with grimy, rat-like faces, and big eyes. The soldiers threw them bits of chocolates , even a few cigarettes. ‘For your mum and dad!’ The children would grab the treasures and scuttle back into the shadows.
‘Poor little mites,’ Gray said neutrally. ‘After years of this they don’t know whether to fear us or the Martians.’
Ted Lane growled, ‘I had family living around here – came to London to make their fortunes, if you can believe it - all evacuated now. A summer’s day like this isn’t so bad, but the winter’s a misery. Nobody dares burn a fire, see, for fear of the Martians seeing the smoke. The sooner we put a stop to this business the better.’
‘No one will disagree with you there, Sergeant,’ said Ben Gray.
We reached Stratford, an area I did not know well. It seemed to me that the stroke of the Heat-Ray must have been heavy here. The streets were mere mounds of rubble in rows, with the names picked out by hand-painted wooden signs, if at all. In some places the damage was such that the very cobbles had been smashed and lifted. But life persisted, as it always does, and green sprouted in the lee of the broken walls. I remember particularly rose bay willow-herbs standing proud in the wreckage of parlours and kitchens.
We came to a manhole cover.
The file broke up from its rough marching formation, and the NCOs gave brisk orders to the men to disperse – to find cover in the safer of the surrounding buildings, to take a sip of water from their canteens and to have a fag. ‘If you’
ve any tanks that need emptying, do it now. Then we’ll be going down the rat-hole one at a time, so get ready.’
It was the work of a moment for a couple of men, hastily volunteered, to brush the cover clear of debris, and to get it lifted. Beneath, I saw rusty rungs leading down into the dark.
I faced Lane and Gray, who were both grinning at me. ‘Is that -?’
‘A sewer,’ Gray said. ‘A marvel of Victorian engineering.’
Lane sniffed. ‘And a couple of winters’ rain will have sluiced it nice and clean.’
‘There is that.’
I glared at them. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
They glanced uneasily at each other.
‘Well,’ Lane said hesitantly, ‘I suppose we thought – if you’d known -’
‘What, I would have had a fit of vapours? Just as Major Eden decided I had to be tricked into my mission. Oh, for God’s sake -’ I pushed my way to the open manhole mouth, grabbed an electric torch from a startled corporal, and looked down into the pit. ‘Tell me where this goes.’
Lane explained, as best he understood it himself. This great drain was part of the Bazalgette system, devised and built in Victoria’s reign to clean up London. Once London’s drains, all along the course of the river, had flowed more or less direct into the Thames by the shortest route. It was when the filth and stench had driven even the Parliamentarians indoors – the water was foul well upstream of Westminster by then – that it had been determined something must be done.
‘So,’ Lane said, sketching maps in the dirt. ‘Bazalgette drove great transverse “intercept” sewers from west to east, running parallel to the river’s course and cutting across all the other big north-south conduits. The idea being, you see, that the flow of water should be diverted east, so that the big discharges into the river itself would come much further downstream – further than Westminster anyhow. One of these transverse channels runs from Chiswick eastward. But the big one, the high level sewer, runs from Hampstead to Hackney to Stratford – to here.’
The Massacre of Mankind Page 21
