‘Still not quite dawn,’ Frank said. ‘But it’s as if the sun has come out. Thank you, Mildred.’
But she seemed distracted. She said softly, ‘What strikes me is how deuced young your people are.’
‘Indeed. Well, nobody old is foolish enough to go to war.’
20
AN OCCUPIED COUNTRYSIDE
After a hasty breakfast, and with the cart loaded, Mildred snapped her reins, the horses pulled with a patient, heavy plod, and the cart headed across the rough ground of the field. Frank himself rode up with the farmer – somewhat reluctantly, while there were others of his people who had no place to ride at all, but his more experienced subordinates insisted that as commanding officer he should take the lead. It felt very odd, even dream-like, to be out of cover, even if there were no Martians in sight.
As they rode they spoke softly, with Mildred asking Frank about his own background. She was interested to find out about his relationship with Walter, and had read his book; Frank later told me he felt the typical younger brother’s jealousy at this, even in such circumstances.
A hundred yards off across the field, a cluster of cows lowed mournfully. ‘I’m sure Jimmy Rodgers won’t neglect his milking, Martians or no Martians,’ Mildred said sternly.
They hit a particularly deep gully in the field, and the cart jolted violently.
Frank said, winded, ‘So you’re not troubling to use the roads, Mildred?’
For answer she pointed into the distance ahead, misty with the dawn. Now Frank saw Martians, two fighting-machines walking in the greyness, astonishingly tall – like church steeples come to life in this English countryside, Frank thought.
‘That’s why,’ Mildred said. ‘They’re everywhere – coming in from the pits at the perimeter and from those in the interior – they’re cutting roads and rail lines and the telephone wires best to stay out of the way of them altogether, don’t you think? So we’ll stay off the roads, and bypass Gerrards Cross, and then Knotty Green, Penn, Tyler’s Green, Holmer Green, on the way to Abbotsdale. It’s up hill and down dale all the way. . .’
Mildred turned out to be right about that. Even crossing the fields, the going was steep, all dips and climbs. The landscape had a closed-in feeling to Frank. It was like a vast green mouth, on this cold March day. He supposed a military man would fret about the lack of long eye lines.
Mildred eyed him. ‘You don’t know the Chilterns, do you?’
He laughed. ‘Less than the Martians do already, I suspect.’
She gestured. ‘Sixty miles of high ground, from the Goring Gap in the south-west where the Thames passes, to the Hitchin Gap in the north-east – as I am sure the military planners in London and Aldershot and wherever are working out as we speak. It’s like this all the way, chalk country, lots of crowding hills and narrow valleys. It seems evident to me that the Martians have seized this place to serve as a sort of base of operations. A fortified perimeter from which they can strike out elsewhere – at London, presumably. And in the meantime we’re all stuck here.’
‘We? But who is “we”?’
‘That’s one of the questions that needs to be discussed. Here’s the brief. I’ll drop off your troops in Abbotsdale, and I’ll take you to the Manor – it’s not far.’
‘The Manor?’
‘Where you will be the guest for the day of the Dowager Lady Emily Bonneville. She has your Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield already, and other senior officers from this part of the Cordon, and she has summoned other significant figures from Abbotsdale and nearby villages – the local bobby, the postmaster, the bank manager, that sort. Jimmy Rodgers, with the largest land-holding hereabouts -’
‘There’s to be a gathering hosted by the Lady of the Manor?’ Frank had to laugh. ‘It’s all rather medieval, isn’t it?’
‘Look around you. You’re on a horse and cart, crossing a field! There may be interplanetary engines stalking around, but I rather think we are somewhat medieval now, don’t you? As for Lady Bonneville, I suspect she will have more of a problem with the Germans in your units than with the Martians. Old school, you see. On a more practical note, we have to think about the welfare of your toy soldiers. Hundreds of them, I imagine.’
‘Thousands, probably, if they survived.’
‘There’s an awful lot of you, and a lot of empty bellies. I don’t imagine you brought over much in the way of supplies?’
He thought about that. ‘There were field kitchens . . . No, I don’t suppose we brought a great deal. A day or two’s worth, perhaps.’
She sighed. ‘I thought so. You expected a short campaign in a well provisioned countryside, not a siege. In the short term we’ll have to rely on our stores. But soon enough – these men of yours. Mostly young, yes? Strong, fit, used to discipline.’
‘If we can maintain it.’
‘Oh, they’ll maintain it when I have them ploughing my fields.’
Frank felt bewildered. It was only a few hours since he had been cowering in a scratch trench under attack from an invading force from another world - and now here was this remarkable woman with her talk of ploughing fields. ‘You’ve thought it out, haven’t you?’
‘Ploughing?’
‘We can’t use tractors, of course; the Martians evidently won’t allow us to use motors. Hard work. And we will have to clear the fields, or some of them.’
Frank glanced around with, he would later admit to me, a town-dweller’s blank incomprehension of the countryside. ‘Don’t you feed yourselves now?’
She smiled. ‘Not for, oh, thirty or forty years I think. Not since the imports of cheap grain from Europe and America began, and the farmers went out of business. So the land was turned to foresting, or dairy cattle. Well, no more American grain for us for a while. Lucky for us that a lot of the folk around here remember the old ways . . .’
They spoke on of other practicalities. The stranded troops had some medical supplies, but there were injured among the civilian population too, and the stock of the pharmacies; what they had would have to be pooled and rationed. Electricity hadn’t yet reached many communities out here anyhow; the Manor had its own generators, but they would require fuel which would be irreplaceable. Water would always be an issue, but there were old wells in Abbotsdale that could be opened up with some muscle . . .
As the journey wore on, Frank felt himself weakening. He had after all missed two nights’ sleep. He fought not to shiver; he wrapped his arms around his chest. And he felt aches and pains that he hadn’t noticed before – a pull of one ankle, a wrenched shoulder.
Mildred watched him. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Reaction setting in. Nothing a stiff whisky won’t cure . . .’ He heard these words as from a distance. The world, the green country around him, seemed bright as ever, and yet he had a growing sense of unreality, as if all of this was a sham that might be ripped aside at any moment, to plunge him back into those midnight scenes of smashed bodies and broken minds.
To his horror, he found he was weeping. Mildred Tritton pulled up the cart. Verity scrambled up beside him, and held him.
Mildred snapped the reins, and the cart rolled on slowly. After a time, with Verity at his side, the weeping receded, and he fell into a half-doze.
21
AT ABBOTSDALE
They approached the village at last. Frank looked dully on a church no more than fifty years old, a new school, a scrap of common land that had been spared enclosure. This was no suburb, but the social and technological progress of the nineteenth century had wrought great changes on places like this.
The cart slowed at the gate of a handsome manor house, a much older building, set back from the road. Outside, weapons rifles and revolvers and even flare guns - had been heaped up and covered by a tarpaulin, hidden from Martian eyes, Frank supposed. As the MOs and VADs and nurses clambered out of the cart, the manor gates opened and two scouts emerged, riding safety bicycles. They rolled off in the direction of Amersham, wobbling as they went, to
a chorus of catcalls from the MOs: ‘Put your back into it, lads!’
‘Missing your motorcycles? . . .’
Mildred clucked at the horses, and turned to Frank. ‘Well, here we are, for better or worse. Now look, don’t be alarmed when I take you into the house, the spaniels are perfectly harmless even if there are rather a lot of them . . .’
Frank joined Fairfield and other officers, gathered together by Lady Emily Bonneville over coffee in a grand but musty dining room. Fairfield detached himself to greet Frank, barely interrupting the earnest talk.
Fairfield eyed Frank with a kind of brutal honesty, as if he could see inside him – knew about Frank’s bout of weeping, of which he was now, foolishly, ashamed. ‘I always thought I was the strong one of the family,’ he would tell me, much later.
‘Now you know,’ Fairfield said to him softly. ‘Saw it all before on the Russian front – save it’s even worse here. I have every confidence in you, Captain Jenkins. Now – let’s get to work.’
As for the immediate situation, a priority was simply contacting all the surviving units in the Cordon, and finding them all shelter and provision. With that in mind the main topic was, not surprisingly, communications. A simple Marvin’s Megaphone wireless receiver would pick up the government’s broadcasts from the Marconi station near Chelmsford, as long as there was power, and already there had been broadcasts on the public wavelengths aimed at those trapped inside the Martian Cordon: ‘You are not alone.’ Frank was assured that later it would be possible to rig up ‘crystal sets’ which could detect wireless signals without any external power supply at all. Getting messages out was another issue, however; the small field wireless kits were limited in range, and there had been little success so far. But a lieutenant of the sappers spoke of tunnelling all the way under the Cordon perimeter itself and laying cables.
As the morning wore in, there was some news from outside. On this Tuesday, their first day on the earth, these new Martian invaders had already left their vast encampment. The cylinders having landed at midnight, the fighting-machines had moved out a mere six hours later, in the dawn. The first sightings had been by units within the Cordon, and according to reports from the exterior, once out of their perimeter the Martians had fanned out quickly in groups, evidently heading for specific targets. There were a lot of fighting-machines on the earth now, estimated at more than two hundred if the capacity of the fortyeight crewed cylinders was similar to the fleet of ’07; there were dozens of machines in these early attack groups.
And attack they had. They had struck at bases at Colchester and Aldershot, the very guts of the Army. They had gone too to Salisbury Plain where the military training ground had been used to amass reserve troops; the slaughter had been great. (After the War, Frank was astonished to be shown dramatic pictures run in the Mirror of a fighting-machine looming over Stonehenge; of course there were no newspapers in the Cordon.) The big Navy dockyards at Chatham and Portsmouth had been hammered too, though many of the capital ships had been able to put to sea – that was thanks to quick thinking by Churchill, who overrode the Admiralty to get it done. And throughout the country, wherever they roamed, the Martians routinely cut road and rail links and bridges, and telephone and telegraph wires, and blew up gasometers, and even fired coal resistance, and a couple of fighting-machines had been got by lucky shots from artillery pieces, but that was all; they were too fast, too destructive. This time the Martians had done their homework, Frank realised; they were hamstringing Britain. Among the over-excited, over-tired officers in that dining room there was much speculation about further regional targets: Liverpool Docks, perhaps, or the great fuel stores at Cardiff and Llanelli, or the manufacturing centres of the Midlands like Stafford, Burton, Leicester, Northampton.
And when, on the Wednesday morning, the Martians moved at last on London, of all of us – all of my scattered and broken family – it seems to have been Frank who was aware of it first.
22
HOW THE MARTIANS MOVED OUT OF THE CORDON
As the most senior of the medical officers who had made it to Abbotsdale, Frank had been offered a room in the manor house. But Frank is nothing if not a man of conscience, tedious company as that makes him at times. So he bedded down on a straw-filled mattress in the Abbotsdale village hall with his junior MOs and the nurses and the VADs, men and women separated for decency by a big old canvas curtain used in the annual pantomime – he told me it was crudely painted to look like a fairy castle, which after the unreality of the last few days struck him as somehow appropriate. For a while he was kept awake by the uneasy joshing of men as exhausted and disturbed as he was,. But he snuggled under a blanket and a heap of his clothes, and was soon out like a snuffed candle.
He was woken by a drone of aircraft engines.
He sat bolt upright, in pitch dark broken only by cracks of flickering orange light coming through imperfectly fixed curtains. Around him men were stirring, muttering. That deep thrumming gathered in intensity, coming from the north and east, he thought. Aircraft, undoubtedly; he recognised the humming of the big screws. With the wariness of the war veteran he had so suddenly become, Frank had kept his trousers and socks and shorts on, and he was glad of it now as he felt around in the dark for his jacket, boots and revolver.
At last somebody ripped aside a curtain, exposing a window facing north. The sky was full of drifting orange sparks: Very lights, flare shells, falling slowly. In the hall, all the faces turned that way, shining like orange coins.
‘My God,’ said one man. ‘Somebody’s put on a firework show.’
‘That’s Amersham way, I think,’ said another. ‘And – look at that! The big shadow, like a man on stilts! Martian on the move!’
There was a hand on Frank’s shoulder: Verity Bliss. She was fully dressed, with her steel hat fixed over her hair. ‘It’s all kicking off. Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield sent me to fetch you.’
He pulled on his boots. ‘Come on, then.’
They pushed their way out into smoke-tinged air. In the road, men and women stood around, excited, pointing. The orange glare of flares in the direction of the Martians’ central Amersham pits was strong. Frank saw there were villagers among the khaki-clad crowd of troops, boys and girls scared but excited, wide-eyed to be up before the sky was properly light.
And – yes, Frank could see it now – there were the fightingmachines, tall and stately, casting shadows in the flare light like scaffolding around church spires. The Martians formed up and began to stride away, to the east.
Verity said, ‘Maybe we should count the machines. One, two,three . . . The shadows make it impossible.’
‘Don’t worry,’ came a cultured voice. Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield joined them, dapper in his peaked cap and topcoat – although Frank noticed outsized carpet slippers on his feet. ‘We’ve got scouts out, and we’re trying to get signals to the commanders outside the Cordon.’
Frank pointed to brief explosions of Heat-Ray fire. ‘The chaps sending up the Very flares seem to be getting it.’
‘Yes. Brave men, volunteers all. But we thought we needed to get a good look at what was going on, whatever it cost us. For it’s not just our Martians that are on the move. They seem to be converging from around the Cordon – we’ve had sightings from as far south as West Drayton, north as far as Bushy and Hemel Hempstead. Flocks of the things on the march, and converging thataway, towards Uxbridge.’ He pointed east. ‘I’m afraid there’s not much doubt about their target this morning.’
‘London,’ Verity said breathlessly.
The aircraft noise rose to a deep grumbling roar, and they had to shout to make themselves heard.
Fairfield said, ‘And up there’s the other reason we’re lighting the Martians’ pits with our flares.’
Frank grinned, suddenly exhilarated. ‘To guide in the bombers!’
‘That’s it!’ Fairfield took off his hat and stared into the sky.
And there they were, Frank saw, coming in low from the
north, illuminated from beneath by the orange gleam of the flares. Frank suspected they had flown out of Northolt, the base of the Royal Flying Corps. They were huge, heavy aircraft, beefy biplanes. These were not RFC craft – the British military had no such planes – these were German bombers, Gothas and Giants, craft crash-developed in the crucible of the Russian front, some of them immense with multiple engines fixed to their wings. It was a sight that could scarce have been dreamed of ten, twenty years before.
Now they began to drop their bombs, big heavy pellets that sailed down through the air. Slam! Slam! Even from Abbotsdale the detonations felt heavy, like physical blows, and Frank fancied he saw destruction in those distant Martian pits, fragments of smashed machinery wheeling in the air. He had seen for himself how a decent human weapon, a Navy gun, could down even a fighting-machine.
But the Martians fought back. Frank saw the pale gleam of the Heat-Ray lancing up from the ground, and the fightingmachines turned armoured heads, even as they marched on the Cordon perimeter. The German bombers were heavy craft and slow to turn; one by one they were caught by the Heat-Ray and erupted into flame, and some exploded spectacularly as their bomb loads detonated in the air.
‘Bats, flying into a flamethrower,’ Fairfield murmured.
‘Yet still they come,’ Verity said. ‘Still the Germans come! Trying to smash those Martians before they even climb out of their pits.’ She took a deep breath. ‘To think, if I hadn’t joined the VADs, I could have missed all this!’
Fairfield nodded. ‘Well, there’ll be plenty of work for you, given the way the Martians are chucking the Heat-Ray around. You’d better get organised, Captain Jenkins. And see if you have any German speakers to hand, in case we find any air crew.’ He glanced east, where the sky was brightening. ‘Nothing more we can do for London now.’
23
OUR FLIGHT FROM STANMORE
The Massacre of Mankind Page 13