The Massacre of Mankind

by Stephen Baxter

  That morning, as a first stop, I intended to get to Stanmore to my sister-in-law’s home. Since the death of her husband, my brother George, on whom she had always depended, Alice had become more distracted, more vague, reliant on friends and relatives on whom she would inflict silly, selfish, neurotic talk that was ever laced with phrases like, ‘If only dear George were here it would all be all right.’ For better or worse, part of my motivation for my flight to America had been to get away from her cloying dependency. She was only five years older than me, but it was like having to care for a somewhat dotty aunt. But I had returned a few times to help Alice through various genuine crises – illnesses and such. And, I admit, there had been times when she had supported me in turn.

  Frank approved my plan readily enough, for he had seen Alice crumble in many a crisis, beginning with the greatest of all, when we had met during our flight from London during the First War. But it was a question of, ‘Sooner you than me.’

  Frank himself still lived at our old house in Highgate, north of London, the base of his practice and now home to his second wife and their son; he had bought me out. Now Frank intended to drive back to Highgate, and he offered me a lift to Stanmore not much of a diversion for him. I agreed, though we haggled until I forced him to accept half the petrol cost. It was a playful fight but with an edge; that’s as good an outcome as you can expect from the most amicable divorce, I suspect.

  So we said our goodbyes to Ottershaw and our friends. Frank’s cousin Philip was heading back to his own family, who had settled on the south coast after the destruction of their home at Leatherhead during the First War. Bert Cook and Eric Eden asked only for a lift to the station for a train to London, from where they would find a way to their respective regiments. Though neither of them was any longer a serving officer, they were confident they would be taken back in the course of the new emergency. London, Cook said, would soon be like a ‘great clearing ’ouse’ for troops and equipment, to be deployed wherever the Martians finally decided to come down.

  As for Marina Ogilvy, she decided to stay put in Ottershaw, only a few miles from the Horsell pit where the first of the last wave of invaders had fallen to the earth, on the basis that ‘lightning doesn’t strike twice’. I hope she was right. I never heard from her, or news about her, again.

  So we drove, Frank and I, heading for the north of London.

  We decided to avoid the direct route which would have taken us through the militarised Corridor with all its complications, and took a wide detour. We went west as far as Bagshot, and crossed the river at Windsor. I remember the drive through towns and villages going about their regular business, a very ordinary scene, even if there were rather more Union Jacks and military uniforms in evidence than in the old days. Windsor, with the royal castle at its core, bristled with security.

  We took a hasty lunch at an inn outside Slough. We sat near a gaggle of young mothers, and working men who spoke of the coming FA Cup quarter-final between rival teams of marines and sappers, and a few solitary drinkers flicking through copies of the Daily Mail, its cover adorned as usual with images of Brian Marvin doing something magnificent or munificent. The day was bright, bathed in the light of a clear and pleasant sky – it had been a late spring, and Frank said there hadn’t been much warm sunshine in the year up to that point, so we were lucky.

  Lucky!

  ‘How eerie it is,’ Frank murmured to me. ‘To be one of just a handful in England to know the truth.’ I thought he shuddered.

  I put my hand on his. ‘We made it through before. So it will be again.’

  He nodded. Then, awkwardly, he withdrew his hand.

  Before we left the inn Frank made another call to his home, having spoken to his wife from Ottershaw early that morning with a cryptic warning. This time his maidservant answered, saying that his wife and child had already left, driven in the family’s second car. ‘Making for our beach cottage in Cornwall,’ Frank reported to me. ‘Which we took in the first place as a bolthole in case – well, in case of a day like this. And near enough to Falmouth if we needed to get out of the country in a boat, like last time.’

  I said firmly, ‘You should go to them.’

  He shook his head.‘I have my duty. I’ll go home – having dropped you off – and shut the place up. The maid has a sister in Wales; I’ll bundle her onto a train before the flight from the capital gets underway – as we both know it will, don’t we, as soon as Marvin makes his announcement? Then I’ll make for Bloomsbury, tonight.’ He meant, I knew, the apartment off Gower Street he had once shared as a medical student, and had later bought outright to serve as a pied-a-terre when he needed to stay in the city. ‘From there I can walk to the barracks at Albany Street, where I’ll be called to join up.’

  ‘Nothing I can say would persuade you to do something more sensible, will it?’

  He grinned. ‘You’re a journalist. When you’ve sorted out your sister-in-law, do you expect me to believe you’ll find some hidey-hole while the greatest story of the century breaks around your head?’

  ‘We’re both idiots. Or neither.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ he said, raising his pint mug.

  He dropped me at Stanmore without incident.

  I had a key to the house. I found my sister-in-law was already away, according to the neighbours - ‘taking the waters’ in Buxton with a like-minded old lady – and so, I hoped, safely far from the action to come. She was, however, planning to be home ‘in only a few days.’ Well, there wasn’t much I could do for her now.

  I stayed in the Stanmore house that Friday night. I dithered over my next step. I could make for London, the cockpit of the last War. Or I could flee – maybe I could even still get back to America.

  And while I hesitated, the next day, at about lunch time, the nation finally heard – by newspaper specials, by posters and proclamations, by loudhailer vans, and from Marvin himself, speaking into our homes though his Marconi-wireless Megaphones – the news that a new ‘flight’ of Martian projectiles had been identified, and was now confirmed as heading for central England. The country was immediately put on an emergency footing, a mobilisation order was declared for all regular forces, reserves and the Fyrd, and so on. The pronouncement was topped off by a bit of booming Elgar. Even the privileged few like myself who had advance warning of the new invasion, this coldly stated news, the reality officially confirmed, came as a dreadful shock.

  My own necessary course of action now seemed clear. I was a witness, a journalist; I had been a participant before. I must go to the action: to London. Hurriedly I packed my rucksack, and hoped I was not too late to be able to get a train.

  Before I left Frank gave me a quick call. I remember his words very well, for although I was later to learn what became of him from his own account and a detailed diary he managed to keep, this was the last I was to hear of him for more than two years.

  ‘My God,’ he said. ‘My brother was right!’

  11

  IN LONDON

  Frank, so he would tell me later, stayed in his apartment on Gower Street much of that Saturday. His only visitor was the postman, who brought, as Frank had expected, his call-up papers and joining instructions for the next day, the Sunday.

  Frank had prepared, as best he could. In the morning before the pronouncement, and so before the rush, he had done a little shopping for pocket-filling essentials any soldier would require, even a medical specialist such as himself: a loaf of bread, cheese, packets of biscuits and dried fruit and a water flask, spare socks, bandages and blister ointments for his feet, and suchlike. He had never smoked, believing the habit, against most advice, to be deleterious to the health, but he would later wish he had bought cigarettes even so, for they served as currency among soldiers. With the banks still open, he withdrew a healthy amount of cash. And he bought a commonplace book, a thick block, and pens and ink and pencils. It was this pad, casually bought for a few pennies, that would become his chronicle for the next years, fi
lled with the smallest handwriting he could manage.

  When he went out again after the pronouncement he would be surprised to find rationing already imposed.

  In the late afternoon of the Saturday he took a walk - there wasn’t a free taxi-cab or omnibus anywhere – across a city organising for war. At the great rail termini, at Charing Cross and Waterloo, barbed-wire barricades had already been set up, the entrances manned by soldiers and police. It seemed that only a handful of civilians were being allowed onto the trains today, whether they held tickets or not, and there were angry exchanges and tearful scenes. But behind the wire Frank saw soldiers massing, great crowds of them being moved from one part of the country to another. And at Victoria, Frank glimpsed a train of huge guns being manoeuvred towards the station. From the bridges too he saw how the river was thick with gunboats. As it always was, London was the centre of it all, a great switching-centre for the country, just as Albert Cook had predicted.

  There were soldiers everywhere. The parks of London had been given over as temporary camps, vehicle depots, and grazing for their horses. In the streets he came across columns of troops marching in cheerful mood, being greeted by catcalls from the urchins and blown kisses from strolling girls. Once Frank saw a detachment of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, marching off to their own oceanic battlefield. And on the steps of St Paul’s, under a dome still bearing a Heat-Ray scar, while a military band played, a senior officer, he thought a colonel, harangued the crowd, picking out men in civilian clothes: ‘Will you join up? Will you?’

  Frank sensed no real fear, no apprehension, not that day. Rather there was a sense of excitement, if anything. In a way, he says, it was as if everybody had been waiting for this since ’07. The country might face a struggle once more, but it had prevailed before – why not again? Certainly he saw no signs of large-scale flight, as he might have expected. Indeed, around the recruiting pitches, even outside the stations, there was a kind of carnival atmosphere – the crowds, sweethearts strolling to see the spectacle, vendors of hot food and fruit and lemonade, the newsboys barking out the headlines of the latest specials. Frank thought all this could be regarded as a triumph by Marvin and his government. However cynically motivated - for the years of militaristic harangues of the government had surely had much to do with control of the populace - and however misguided and brief this sense of exhilaration would prove to be, better to be optimistic at such a moment; better to be purposeful, rather than afraid.

  And Frank would write in his diary, one of the first entries, of how he had marvelled that the post offices were open – on a Saturday! ‘It must be a national emergency,’ he noted.

  Towards evening he laid out his uniform. He didn’t brag about it – even I didn’t know much about it - but Frank the doctor, though a mere Fyrd volunteer, held an honorary rank of Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He would tell me he was proud of wearing the polished badge, the Rod of Asclepius, on his dark blue beret.

  He says he slept well. This was despite the din outside, the unending traffic - as day turned to night, and despite official restrictions, some informal, unplanned evacuations had begun, people just driving or riding or walking out of the city – and there was too the noise of a few wild celebrations across the city on this last night of peace.

  I have no reason to doubt him, though I slept badly, in the sylvan calm of Stanmore.

  12

  THE MOBILISATION

  Frank was woken at six in the morning by a clamour of church bells, as we all were across the country, that Sunday morning. In London there followed whistles and shouts, and the squawks of loudhailers from trawling vans.

  Frank had laid out his breakfast the night before, expecting an early start. He did not turn on his own Megaphone, though he suspected he was breaking some minor ordinance by not doing so. He washed, shaved, donned his uniform and boots and greatcoat and blue beret, shoved his toilet kit into his backpack – he holstered his service revolver – and he turned off the gas and electric, pocketed his papers, and left his flat.

  Outside, Gower Street was transformed.

  Police and military seemed to be everywhere. New posters on walls and lampposts and placards on patrolling vans declared the imposition of emergency regulations: martial law, a curfew, rationing, various restrictions on movement. And a boy was selling papers just outside Frank’s building, yet another Daily Mail special – on a Sunday - with an image of Churchill, Marvin’s minister of war, rolling up his sleeves sternly over a bold declaration:

  THEY DARE TO COME AGAIN WE HAVE PREPARED WE HAVE A PLAN THEY SHALL NOT PREVAIL LET’S GET ON WITH IT!

  Frank did not trouble to buy a copy. Nor did he pay much attention to the exhortations of a government that was probably already in flight to Birmingham once again – Churchill might be an honourable exception, as he had been in the First War – along with such foreign diplomats as had not fled to the ships and overseas, and, probably, the rich and influential in general.

  Though there were pedestrians everywhere, there were very few civilian vehicles on the roads. The reason became obvious when Frank reached his own car, which had a military requisition notice pasted to its windscreen, along with a reclaim docket. Frank just laughed and pocketed the reclaim slip. He would manage to keep this docket safe, in fact, throughout the Second War, but he never saw his car again, nor received a penny in compensation. However he had plenty of time, and the walk to Albany Street, his muster station, was short. It was quite a contrast to the day of the great panic in which we had both been caught up in the last War, when the Martians had advanced on the capital. There was no panic this time, no sense of feverish unpreparedness. He had the general impression that, like himself, people seemed to know where to go, what to do – there was an air of purpose, not the collapse of order.

  In another echo of his previous experience he walked across to Great Ormond Street, meaning to spend a few minutes in the chapel of the Foundling Hospital there – it was after all a Sunday. In the grounds the Boys’ Band played martial tunes. Frank knew that many of the boys who passed through this place went on to the armed forces, swapping one institutional life for another, and he wondered how many old boys might be preparing to face the Martians that morning. Inside the grand two-storey chapel Frank found a service in progress; a notice claimed there would be services all day.. Rather than listening to the rector’s words, Frank spent much of the service staring at the grand portrait of Christ with a child that hung on the wall there – he can’t remember the artist, and when he returned to the Hospital after the War he found the chapel destroyed, the painting gone.

  From there, with no more prevarication, Frank marched direct to Albany Street. In this broad residential street of grand terraces, now hastily boarded up, he found himself part of a growing throng – he said it was like joining a crowd for a football match, save that all were in uniform, or else were sweethearts or mothers or children clinging to someone in uniform. They were regulars mostly, but some were reserve or Fyrd, as Frank was. Some were kilted – they were men of the Argylls and the London Scottish – and there was a detachment of what he learned were Guards, even a troop of marines in their blue war-kit.

  But there was organisation imposed on the throng. Military policemen had fenced off the street and, armed with clipboards and pencils, they briskly read each newcomer’s call-up notice and directed him to his station – or her, for there were many women in uniform throughout the crowd. A bleak moral victory for the suffragettes!

  Thus, gradually, Frank was filtered to a crowd of medical types gathering at the junction of Albany Street and Albert Road, male officers wearing blue caps like his own, and women of the Imperial Military Nursing Service in their nurses’ uniforms and capes. They joined a column forming up inside Regent’s Park itself; they would be marched across the Park to Baker Street, for transport to ‘your position at the anticipated front’, as an MP put it. From this Frank deduced that by now the cylinders’ fall must have been predicted
quite precisely.

  Once in the column the medical types again congregated, as if for mutual support, regulars, reserves and volunteers alike. One young woman in uniform and topcoat bravely approached Frank. ‘You must be Captain Jenkins?’

  Frank stood a bit straighter. ‘Only a Fyrd volunteer – feel something of a fraud – but, yes, that’s me.’

  ‘My name’s Verity Bliss. They put me in charge of this lot.’ She indicated a group of shy-looking women behind her. Verity looked mid-twenties, with a sturdy, sensible face, and short-cut brown hair. ‘And that chap over there,’ she pointed to an MP, ‘tells me that you’re in command of us, at least until we get off the train.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you know - the train to where, sir?’

  He grinned. ‘I didn’t even know we were taking the train. VADs, are you?’ The VADs, for Voluntary Aid Detachments, were unpaid nursing volunteers recruited through the War Office and the Red Cross.

  ‘That’s it, sir.’

  ‘Good for you. But, look – the “sir” doesn’t fit comfortably. How about it’s “Frank” and “Verity” until we’re off the train, eh?’

  She grinned back, but said, ‘Not in front of the MPs, sir.’

  The column, gathered inside the park rail, was almost lined up now. A senior officer – a Brigadier-General perhaps, Frank was too far away to see his rank, but he looked old enough to have served in the Crimea, let alone the First Martian War – climbed on a box and called out in a ringing voice, ‘Well, it’s your time, men – and women. I know you’re mostly reserve and Fyrd, but you’ve units of the Guard with you, and you are honoured to fight alongside such men. Now give me a British cheer, and have a good go!’

  Well, they all cheered, of course.

  And then Frank and Verity and the other doctors and the nurses and the VADs all marched with the rest across the park. Now it was Frank’s turn to have flags waved at him by schoolboys, and kisses blown by a few girls, and to have ribald comments bellowed: ‘Don’t forget to turn over when them Martians put you on the griddle, laddies!’ Frank was in his thirty-eighth year. What he had seen of war personally had horrified him, and like most intelligent British folk he had a healthy cynicism of Marvin and his war-mongering, and the militarisation of society. But he had a feeling he would remember this as one of the proudest moments of his life.