So they dashed out of the apartment, into a daylight already so bright it made Tom wince. And they ran directly south, towards the walls of the Inner City.
The heart of Peking, Tom told me, was a place of nested rectangles, each with its walls. You had the Inner City, a domain of aristocrats, officials, soldiers – with, in recent decades, the grudgingly admitted foreigners in the Legation Quarter - and within that the Imperial City with its extensive water gardens, and within that in turn the Forbidden City itself, protected by a moat and three sets of walls. There was also an Outer City appended to the south wall of the Inner, a tremendous annex stuffed with enormous temples. Of course since the fall of the Qing even the Forbidden City was forbidden no more, but every foreign visitor knew that the best view of Peking, and the countryside beyond, was from the city walls.
And it was onto those walls that Tom and Li climbed now. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of cordite, and a coarser stink of burning, and as he breathed deep from the climb Tom found himself coughing.
They soon made the top of the wall. The city from up here was always an odd sight, almost a sylvan scene rather than urban in the western sense, with the green of trees punctuated here and there by the egg-yolk yellow of the domes of palaces and temples.
Peking itself seemed at peace, but the countryside was not.
When Tom and Li looked east, into the rising sun, they saw the fighting-machines, silhouetted, their slim shadows long before them. It was a sight Tom immediately recognised from images of the British landings. Tom says he was struck by the sheer animal-like grace of the great machines, as are many observers on their first encounters with Martian technology. It was remarkable to see them suddenly superimposed onto this Chinese landscape, a world away from England.
And there were many of them, the machines marching in what looked like a grand crescent, heading for the city. Li tried to count them: ‘One, two, three, four . . . eight, nine, ten, eleven . . . many.’
There were attempts being made to resist the Martians’ advance, Tom saw. Weapons fire sparked around their footfalls, and shells burst close to their hooded carapaces. That was no surprise; Tom imagined that aside from the Germans’ front in Russia, this must be one of the most militarised places on the planet. And he wondered if the warlords were cooperating, for once, against this common enemy.
Even if so, they were doing no good. Just as was seen around the world that day, the Martians applied the lessons they had learned in England about the danger of our artillery, and simply shot the shells out of the air. Tom could see military vehicles, cavalry units on stocky horses from north China – even men riding camels from the Gobi – all scattering at the feet of the advancing Martians. And here and there men and animals and vehicles were incinerated in silent bursts of flame: moths before welding-torches, Tom thought, appalled.
Meanwhile, behind the machines a kind of corridor of smoke was rising, as the countryside the Martians had already crossed began to burn.
‘We must get out of here,’ Tom said. But he raised his camera and captured hasty images.
‘Magnificent sight.’
Tom glanced at his friend; Li’s face was shining. ‘You sound as if you are enjoying this.’
‘China flat on her back,’ Li Qichao said. ‘Foreigners everywhere. Russians want Mongolia. British want Tibet. Japanese want Manchuria. Americans – Americans just sell stuff. Government a joke, country full of warlords. And yet, and yet,China still a great country. Even Martians see that!’
‘They’re attacking you, and you see it as an endorsement?’
‘New age starts,’ Li said. ‘I, I will go east and south, find the Kuomintang. Sun Yat-Sen. It is said the Emperor will join us.’
‘What Emperor? Puyi? He’s just a kid.’
‘Let Martians drive out foreigners. Then Chinese drive out Martians. We survived Genghis Khan. Will survive this. And then . . .’
But already the Heat-Ray, with a range of miles, was licking at Peking, and buildings in the outer suburbs were flashing to flame.
Tom closed up his camera. ‘OK, Qichao. But for now let’s just make sure we live to see some of that future.’
Li grinned. ‘Come!’
They made their way around the wall parapet, away from the Martian advance, as the destruction of the city began in earnest.
14
THE MARTIAN INVASION OF MANHATTAN
The dawn of Saturday in Peking was around midday of Friday in New York. And through that long Friday afternoon Harry Kane and Marigold Rafferty watched the Battle of Manhattan unfold.
From Battery Park the end point of their flight south, it was hard to imagine a better view, Harry thought – if ‘better’ was a word to use on such a day. The Park itself was on a rise, and to get an even more favourable viewing platform they had managed to break into the Park’s Monroe Tower. Dating back to 1910, such towers had been set up all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts at a time when German aggression had appeared to threaten the US itself, as well as to breach the long-held Monroe Doctrine of non-interference by European powers in the Americas. The Towers, intended for spotting warships at sea, had seen no use in anger, and had quickly become obsolete as aeroplane surveillance technology had advanced. But the Battery Park Tower offered an unparalleled viewpoint over south Manhattan, and had become a popular tourist spot. Of course that morning it was locked up; it had been the work of a moment to break in, and it took only a little longer for the two of them to scramble up a spiral stair to the spotting platform, an electric elevator being out of action.
And there was Lower Manhattan laid out before them, a great reef with its excrescence of tremendous buildings - like trees in a forest, Harry thought idly, competing for the light. The complex fretwork of docks and wharves around the island’s shore added still more organic character. It was magnificent, Harry thought, the windows of the buildings sparking in the sun, the elegant, rectilinear simplicity of the street plan – the sheer vigour of it all, the newness – though you could see even from up here the extremes of wealth and poverty, the towering palaces a short walk away from the darker warrens of a deprived polyglot population.
But now an interplanetary war had come to Manhattan. The fighting, in fact, had begun even as the Martians waded across the East River, dozens of them coming across from all along the Brooklyn shore. The Navy tried to hold a line at the river. A handful of destroyers bore down on the wading fighting-machines, but even before they closed the Heat-Rays had wielded their invisible energies; the ships, their hulls melting, their stores of fuel and armaments exploding, were turned to helpless hulks.
One, however, a slim ghost with four funnels spewing smoke, somehow survived to slide under the legs of the great machines. The Martians had been packed so dense that once she was among them the Fox could barely fail to find a target.
It somehow did not surprise Harry that Marigold kept a small set of binoculars, like opera glasses, in her jacket pocket. Now she studied the distant action. ‘I think that’s the Fox. Oh, so brave – she’s firing! Aiming for the machines’ cowls – got one! Two! And another! . . .’
Even with the naked eye Harry saw fighting-machines stagger and fall, each like a man shot in the eye - and each casualty took others out of the fight, he realised, for, just as had been observed since the Martians’ first incursion into England, when one Martian fell, its fellows would retrieve it. But the Fox had only minutes to make her mark on the war before multiple Heat-Ray projectors were brought to bear, and she exploded in a flash.
Harry had his notebook out now and scribbled notes and impressions. ‘From the Thunder Child to the Fox, a line of brave fighting ships that have stood up to the Martians . . .’
‘Men and women, not ships,’ Marigold said heavily. ‘Make sure you write that down. More than a hundred souls on that lost vessel alone. At least it will have been quick, I suppose.’
And now, with the brief naval battle won, the remaining Martians had landed on Manhatt
an’s eastern shore unimpeded.
As they began to make their way into the island’s interior, they were like skeletal figures looming over the buildings – like medieval visions of death, Harry thought. And they deployed their scythe, the Heat-Ray. Buildings simply shattered, collapsing in clouds of glass and brick and smashed concrete, plumes of smoke and dust blossoming. Harry was too far away to see the fate of individual people; surely it was only in his imagination that he heard the screams. Now battle was joined by the military forces on land. Harry saw and heard the big guns in Central Park open up, and the clatter of small-arms fire; he imagined Woodward and his buddy Patton leading brave charges against the advancing machines. On the river, too, the remaining big battleships brought their guns to bear again.
‘But it’s not enough,’ Marigold said, pointing. ‘Look, more Martians are coming over the river, even now . . . I’ve been trying to count them. There are so many, and they move to and fro, like shadows.’
‘And don’t forget the handling-machines,’ Harry said grimly. ‘We won’t even see them from up here.’
‘Nevertheless you can see there are distinct formations . . .’
She was right, Harry thought, watching carefully, trying to be analytical. One large battle group was already towering over Central Park, where, it seemed, much of the city’s armed forces were still concentrated. More were moving northwards, just as Woodward had predicted, forming up onto a great crescent, no doubt in search of easy pickings on the mainland, in upstate New York and beyond.
And another large group was splitting off on the south side of the pack. They scattered along the streets below Central Park – the 57th to 53rd, perhaps. They quickly formed into a crescent, with the bow leading and trailing flanks. This was the classic fighting-machine formation the Martians had deployed fifteen years earlier, against London – and now, no doubt, this dreadful day and night, a formation they were using in their assaults on human communities all around the world. And even as they walked they deployed the Heat-Ray almost casually. Many of the towers of central Manhattan loomed even over the fightingmachines, but the beams swept the faces of the great buildings, as if mining the walls of a canyon. Concrete and steel buckled and smashed and melted, and glass rained down. Harry could see the people fleeing now, in the streets; he saw them not as individuals but as swarms, like ants before men with flamethrowers.
So they marched through downtown, heading straight for the Monroe Tower, or so it seemed.
Harry grunted. ‘So much for our theory that they wouldn’t come this way.’
Marigold said, ‘They have the machines to spare, I guess. At least we’ll get a good view.’
She sounded remarkably unafraid, Harry thought. And yet he himself felt little fear; perhaps it was simply exhaustion after a night without sleep and the slog of the evacuation, or perhaps his capacity for fear was overwhelmed by the remarkable spectacle he saw unfolding before him.
Now one pack of machines veered off to the Martians’ left, some making for the navy yards on the East River, others pushing into the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. There were no tall buildings there. The Martians towered, the Heat-Ray played easily, and whole blocks were blown apart by the fire.
Meanwhile a central group had reached the financial district. Harry himself saw the destruction of City Hall, and with the smashing of the seat of the city’s government, he supposed, organised resistance, what there was of it, would begin to crumble. The Woolworth Building, still the world’s tallest building nearly a decade after it was completed - nearly seven times as tall even as a fighting-machine - seemed to attract particular attention. Marigold loaned Harry her binoculars so he could see handling-machines swarming up the sides of the building, rapidly reaching its upper levels, where they began the demolition of the building floor by floor, working their way downwards, so that rubble cascaded down into the streets below.
‘It almost looks beautiful as it falls,’ Harry said. ‘Like an opening flower.’
‘They seem to have targeted it. Maybe they could see the Woolworth from Mars. They might think it has some military function.’
‘I’ve drunk coffee in there,’ Harry mourned.
‘We’ll build it again – bigger and better.’
But, after all he had seen that day, Harry wasn’t so sure.
Now the lead Martians were already approaching the southern shore, and the big military forts at the mouth of the harbour, Fort Tompkins on the New Jersey shore and Fort Hamilton on the Brooklyn firepower to the fight. But side, were adding their own Harry saw that yet another detachment of fighting-machines had walked down the Brooklyn shore and were already lashing at Hamilton with their Heat-Rays – and the weapons had the range to take on Fort Tompkins too. One fighting-machine, Harry saw, had waded out to Liberty Island, and climbed up onto the dry land. For a moment, perhaps a third the height of the statue, it rested there, and it appeared to look around at the battles underway on land and sea. Harry heard its eerie cry: ‘Ulla!’ Then, evidently having decided the statue was not worth the trouble of demolishing, it waded away.
Marigold touched Harry’s arm. ‘We must go. They’ll be here soon.’
‘Ulla! Ulla! . . .’
Harry imagined that same cry echoing all around the world, that terrible evening. Dazed, he allowed Marigold to take his hand and lead him to the stairs to ground level.
15
WALTER JENKINS IN DAHLEM
Eighteen hours after the Martians had first fallen on Long Island, Walter Jenkins was still at his self-constructed monitoring station in Dahlem – by his clock it was after eleven p.m. He had been sleepless for more than twenty-four hours already. He assuaged hunger and thirst with flasks of coffee and packs of biscuits, assembled before the vigil had started. And yet, he hoped, his concentration and powers of analysis had not faltered.
Walter thought he was seeing the strategy. As the cylinders had continued to fall, a rain of aluminium and fire around the world, his attention had turned from the astronomical to the geographic, from the reaches of interplanetary space to the ground. He referred frequently now to a big Mercatorprojection world map on which he had marked, in vivid red ink, the fall of each cluster as it was reported in. It was clear by now, of course, that the Martians were making landfall at local midnight, wherever they fell. He pictured those cylinders still out in space, hanging over the earth as it turned beneath them, like a stream of bullets from some tremendous machine-gun.
But those volleys had clearly been planned to land, not simply according to a geographical pattern, but at key human targets. The Martians seemed to be making for all the world’s major inhabited landmasses, from Asia to Australia. And in each assault they came down close to a key city. The first wave of dummy cylinders would smash down to sterilise the terrain, and within six hours their battle groups were out, mounting large-scale, coordinated, lightning-strike assaults on the cities and their supporting facilities, fuel stores, transport links. And, by means of this brutal decapitation of human society – wrecking capital accumulated by an industrial civilisation across centuries - it seemed the Martians might be striving to win their war quickly.
Yet it was a war Walter knew that mankind could not afford to lose. For, with the whole world smashed as England had been over the last two years – with stores depleted, manufacturing capacity gone, governments dissolving – we would not get another chance. The massacre of mankind as an independent species would be completed in this generation. And for the children of the future – like the wretches in the Martians’ cylinders - only a million years of slavery.
Walter concentrated on the immediate situation. The first landings had been scattered, at New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Peking, Bombay – one per midnight band. Now, though, in the last hour – and even as he had listened to wireless reports of the devastation of Peking - the pattern had changed, with no less than three targets at the same longitudinal meridian being selected: St Petersburg in Russia, the Ottoman ca
pital Constantinople, and Durban in South Africa – the latter the first Martian footfall in that continent. And given the operational pattern so far, Walter could predict to the hour when the major assaults on those centres would begin: at six in the morning, local time.
Then, through his window, Walter saw a flash of green light, in the darkened sky. He glanced at a clock. In Berlin, it was midnight.
16
A SHADOW PLAY
‘Ulla! Ulla! . . .’
In a strange, lonely dawn, Emre heard that eerie cry echo over Constantinople, even drowning out the muezzin calls.
Emre Sahin was, by inclination and training, a soldier, but a decade before, in the wars against the Balkan League, a Greek cannonball had neatly detached his left leg and the lower part of his right. He had been just twenty years old at the time. Now Emre had become an accidental journalist, and he would leave one of the more compelling accounts of the Martians’ action in Constantinople, for the benefit of myself and other historians.
But as it happened, in the days before the Martians came, Emre, anticipating the ending of Ramadan a few days hence, had been preparing a shadow-puppet play.
Emre had always enjoyed the end of Ramadan: the threeday celebration that followed a month of fasting, when family would visit to exchange gifts of sweets and tobacco and perfume and porcelain, and there would be happy gatherings in the coffee houses, and in the open spaces there would be a bayram, a fair with amusements for the children. And Emre, after his injury, had got in the habit of mounting shadow plays: his own adaptations of traditional stories for his nephews and nieces and their neighbourhood friends, and bawdy shows for the adults. His art was simple but his storytelling good, and the work gave him and his family a good deal of pleasure. And it had been a key part of how he had rebuilt his life.
Emre had perforce come to spend much of his time in the home of his parents, deep in the heart of that ramshackle part of Constantinople south of the Golden Horn which foreigners then called by the archaic name Stamboul. Life after the injury was difficult, of course. But there were consolations. Emre was blessed with loyal brothers and one sister, all older than he was, and a rising generation of nieces and nephews. That was how the writing began; as well as making up shadow plays, he assisted the children with their own writing exercises, and wrote out the stories he made up for them. Some of these he placed with a Stamboul newspaper, whose editor encouraged him to do more. His mother, who had survived her husband, probably thought it a foolish endeavour and a waste of time - but then her crippled son, largely bedridden, now had nothing but time, and why not let him waste it?
The Massacre of Mankind Page 40
