They did have an old Marvin wireless receiver, the worse for wear but serviceable, and we listened to the news from the government station. It Bulletin read out in gramophone, which they wound up to play sentimental songs from musical-theatre shows I had not seen.
I got a little restless as the evening wore on, and when Eden checked in on me about nine o’clock I swallowed my pride somewhat and requested his permission to go for an explore. He frowned, and I am sure he would have preferred me to stay was little more than the National sonorous tones. And they had a where I was, under his nose. But to my relief he put a call in on the telephone, asking if Sergeant Lane was free.
Then Eden bade me goodnight, and left. It was an informal parting. I was not to know that it would be months before I saw him again, in a transformed world.
Ted Lane turned up outside the tamboo not five minutes later. He carried an electric lantern and a torch, and I saw he had a candle stuck in his pocket, in case, I supposed, all else failed – the kind of instinctive planning that gives you the measure of the man.
‘I’m sorry to drag you away from your free time, Ted.’
‘Not at all, Miss. Mind your step, now . . .’
We clambered down a ladder; he insisted on going first in case I fell.
I would not claim that the late spring twilight made the bottom of that ditch a magical place. That could hardly apply to a gully where a couple of dogs, whimsically called Lloyd and George, ran after rats with the inhabitants placing penny bets on their success, or where a ‘sanitary man’, an older soldier with a pronounced limp, worked his way along the duckboards, emptying brimming latrines into sump holes and spraying them with creosote and chloride of lime. But the lanterns hung prettily from the terraced wall rising steeply above me, giving it something of the look of Amalfi, as Gray, better travelled than I have ever been, had perceived. As the light faded, even the searchlights that raked the darkling sky, looking for Martian flying-machines above or fighting-machines on the march across the ground, had an oddly jaunty air, I thought.
Heaps of stores sat in boxes and crates, waiting for sorting. I saw that some had come from Germany, and some from America – our transatlantic cousins were staunch allies in a pinch, disapprove of our accommodation with the Kaiser as they might. There was a kind of library, heaps of battered, muchread editions that included some classics and quality literature, not all of it William le Queuex and other of the lowbrow entertainments you might have imagined - Ford Madox Ford was a particular favourite, I had time to observe. And there was a post office marked by red and white flags; there were, I learned, several deliveries a day, the mail from home being considered a cheap but essential boost to morale.
We passed medical stations – ‘casualty clearing stations’, they were called. If you were injured in combat, you would be taken first to an aid post in the front-line ditch, and then sent back through a communication tunnel to this, the support ditch. Here, there would be a kind of triage process: you could be treated in situ; you could be shipped out to hospitals in places like Windsor or Aylesbury – or, of course, you could be patched up and sent back into the fight. We did not see many badly injured that night; with some days since the last contact with the Martians, we were told, those who needed better treatment had already been removed.
We came across groups of enlisted men in the gully, sitting together outside their shelters, patching clothing or writing letters and talking softly, even music from singing by one fellow with a mouth-organ, and a better performance it was too than my pet officers’ gramophone records. Those gully promenaders were mostly men, women being largely confined to the medical posts as nurses, or as cooks or clerks or drivers or in other support roles, even construction work – anywhere save the front line - and the men seemed inhibited by my presence. But they opened up to Ted Lane, especially when he offered them cigarettes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told me when I commented on this largesse; ‘I got a packet from the Major for the purpose; I wouldn’t be wasting my own.’
So I learned something of the structure of this strange society. Of course the basic military hierarchy was in place here. As one man explained it to me at Lane’s prompting, ‘You got your privates, which is us poor slobs, and you got your NCOs lording it over us, no offence, Sarge, and you got your officers lording it over them, and then your staff officers, and you got your generals above them. And every one of us complains about the sheer bleeding incom-petence o’ all the rest above and below, and it’s a wonder anything ever gets done around here.’
‘But it never does, Sid!’ someone called.
However, I learned, cutting across this familiar ladder of rank were the specialisms. The Trench system itself had mostly been constructed by recruits with appropriate civilian experience, by agricultural workers, and ‘navvies’ and ‘gangers’ from the railways, and bricklayers and carpenters and concretemixers, all under the command of the Royal Engineers. I learned new bits of language. An electrical worker was a ‘sparkie’, the ‘toshers’ kept the rudimentary sewage system working, and every man had a ‘banjo’, a shovel, for the times when the rains came and threatened to flood or collapse the whole affair, and it was a case of everyone digging to save the day. Even on this calm night, I could see the work of maintaining the system continuing, with workers labouring at the drainage of that lowest walkway, or at the revetting of the walls, or repairing sandbag parapets.
Yet the unity was something of an illusion, I would learn. There were many colonial troops serving on the Trench, especially Indian, and the latter had had to be kept apart from the British regulars, because of taunts of the ‘It’s your turn now, sahib!’ kind. Meanwhile Ted politely steered me away from some less salubrious districts of that great circular city – such as a place they called ‘Plug Street’, semi-officially sanctioned brothels.
I tried to gather my impression of the place. ‘This whole great earthwork is like – what? Like one vast body, this Trench curled like Ourobouros around the Martian canker, and these soldiers toiled like antibodies in the bloodstream to keep the whole intact and healthy.’
Ted Lane pulled a face. ‘That’s a bit poetic for me, Miss. It’s the best we can do, that’s all. We have to try to contain the Martians. It’s that or let them rampage around the countryside as they choose.’
As I thought it over that night, I did wonder about the wisdom of the stratagem. If these Martians had come here to learn about us – to learn the craft of war against humans, in order to complete their failed conquest of the earth – then here we were providing them with a kind of idealised training ground, as we sat there and threw the best we had at them, and let them learn how to counter it. But then, what else were we to do? As Lane had said, we couldn’t simply wave them through.
I was to remember these reflections on the Martians’ potential adaptability the next morning.
On the way back to my tamboo I saw a man tending a row of pea plants, growing out of the earth under shoved-aside duckboards. This was a Tommy garden, as they called it. When your eye got attuned, you saw them all over the face of the Trench, splashes of homely green.
16
A TUNNEL UNDER THE TRENCH
I slept well enough; by this stage in my odyssey I was too exhausted not to. But I was woken once in the night, by the firing of a single gun somewhere on the earthwork, an artillery piece that coughed over and over, and then the whistle of the shells fading in the night, the crump of explosions. I had no idea what strategic purpose could be served by rounds from a lone gun. It seemed madness to me, and perhaps so it was.
I’d been told I would be roused by a bugle. In the event Ben Gray came in the dark and shook me awake. ‘Get dressed. I’ll get your pack.’
I stirred reluctantly. Beyond the curtains of the tamboo’s windows, I saw greyish daylight, and I could hear shouting, running footsteps. ‘What time is it?’
Gray was gathering my gear and stuffing it without ceremony into my rucksack. ‘Early. Not yet four a.m.’
>
I pushed my way out of my bunk. The young officers were already gone; a half-drunk bottle of whiskey and scattered playing cards stood on the table. ‘But we aren’t meant to be travelling until seven a.m.’
Gray looked me in the eye. ‘The Martians have decided not to follow our plan. Now get your boots on, empty your bladder, and meet me outside. That’s an order.’
‘Where’s Eric Eden?’
‘Fighting the Martians. Now come on.’
Outside the tamboo, boots and hat on, rucksack over my shoulders – I had lingered long enough to make sure Walter’s packet of sigil sketches was safe in there, for as far as Ted Land and Gray and others knew, to deliver the sketches to the Martians was still the plan - at first I stood astounded by the sight before me. In the grey dawn light, the great ditch swarmed with activity.
On the far wall, the steeper eastern face, I saw people clambering up or down the ladders, even scaling the stabilising netting, the main priority seeming to be to get off the face and to shelter. Lodes of materiel were suspended from the pulley cables, apparently abandoned. In the deep gully, and all across the terracing of my inhabited western face, people ran, some without their proper uniforms – some even barefoot – grabbing weapons and ammunition packs as they went, and dashing to their stations. Lanterns shone everywhere, and searchlights mounted on the parapets raked over this great linear hive of activity. There was a barrage of noise too, whistles, bugle calls, shouts, though the human sounds were dwarfed by the great scale of the ditch.
But now I heard the crack of an artillery gun, a huge pounding that shook the earth. All around me people stopped in their tracks, and looked up at the lightening sky. I twisted my head, and looked up too, up, up past the terraces and the rows of tamboos.
And I saw it loom over the parapet of the western face, coming out of the Cordon: a cowled hood, a flash of bronze, tentacular appendages clutching what might have been a heavy camera.
‘Down!’ That was my own cry, I think; next thing I knew I had shoved Gray down and lay half-across him with my hand on the back of his neck. That was the veteran in me. Yet even now the journalist in me longed for a Kodak, to capture the sight!
And the Heat-Ray spat. I saw the thread of it, the characteristic pale distortion of its guide-light in the air. It swept over the sheer eastern face, and where it touched, climbing men and women and bundles of materiel flashed to flame and vanished, human beings popping like pockets of flammable gas.
I was distracted by the sound of guns barking now, coming from behind our lines. Shells flew over our heads. In ’07 the Martians had come to an England where the most advanced weaponry on land was horse-drawn guns. Now we had motorised artillery, and were able to respond much more rapidly. But while some of the shells splashed against the face of the Trench itself, creating peculiar angled craters and adding to the din of noise, none reached the Martian itself. Then, like a man stepping cautiously into a stream, the Martian folded its great legs, and pivoted, and stepped down into the gully itself. Once all three feet were down, it swivelled its cowl this way and that. Now that ghastly beam raked the gully itself, and the inner face of the Trench. I saw structures detonate and collapse across the wall, and people running like ants from a kettle of water. It all came back to me; I had seen such scenes before, in ’07 and indeed in ’20. I wished with all my heart at that moment that having escaped the Martians twice I had not been so foolish as to return to give them a third go.
Gray grabbed my hand and pulled me away, heading for a ladder downward. ‘Miss Elphinstone – Julie – we go now.’
‘Where?’
‘Into the tunnels, of course!’
Our port of call was what looked like a manhole cover, set in the duckboards of the gully. Of course Ted Lane was waiting for me there, with a party of soldiers – only a handful of men, armed with pistols, rifles and shovels.
I inspected the cover. ‘That looks it came off a sewer, like the one we climbed down at Stratford.’
‘It probably did. Let’s get on with it.’
Lane and one of the soldiers hauled the cover aside, to reveal a shaft with iron handles set in the walls, just like Stratford. That was where the similarity ended, though, as I discovered as I followed Lane down, with Gray right behind me. The tunnel we entered was deeper even than the great sewer had been, and faced with sapper-applied concrete, not neat Victorian brick. Electric lights had been fixed to the walls, along with cables and wires and copper pipes. And where the sewer had been half-flooded, this tunnel was all but dry, with only a smear of damp mud at its lowest arc. All this, of course, had been constructed since the landing of the Martians.
At the bottom of the shaft, Lane grabbed a steel combat hat from a stack and crammed it on my head. Without further ado, we ran for it.
The tunnel was straight and true, as far as I could see it, heading dead west. It was awkward work to run in there, for the rough-finished roof was too low for comfort standing up, even for shorter folk than me.
At least we seemed comparatively safe in here, out of reach of the Heat-Ray, and the clamour of the guns was muffled. But we were burrowing underground at the feet of the Martians, like big rats, just as Bert Cook had predicted. Indeed, as we scurried through that tunnel I thought the soldiers ahead of me had a pale, rat-like air. I felt an intensification of the deep dread that had not left me since I began this journey – for I was like a plague rat myself, scurrying off some ship into a crowded medieval port, my blood foul with disease.
Lane called back, ‘We’re passing under the Trench now. This passage goes on, at about this depth, all the way under the broken ground where the Martian cylinders landed -’
The soldier ahead of him called back, ‘And tough work that was. Those blessed cylinders smashed up the very bedrock when they fell. You try digging all that out by hand while them Martians stomp about up top – it was enough to chill the blood.’
Ted Lane said, ‘Pity you didn’t make it big enough for a normal person while you were at it, mate, I keep banging my nut.’
‘Huh. That’s doing no harm, unless it’s to my precious wall.’ Gray called forward, ‘Shall we save our breath, lads?’ At length the NCO who was leading the sappers ahead of us held up his hand, and slowed. ‘Rest area.’
We had come to a place where the concrete walls were wider, if only marginally; there was room to sit, a water tank with a spigot. On the floor I saw crushed cigarette stubs, what looked like empty food tins, and a covered hole for a toilet. The men stopped, dropping their kit with grunts of relief.
I, with Lane, walked through this area and just past it into the tunnel beyond, to make room for the rest. Gray, behind me, hung back, in the middle of the rest place. All of us were ducking our heads. I describe this quite precisely because our disposition at that moment was to determine life and death for all of us.
It had been only minutes since the alarm had roused us, but I for one was shaking and breathless and needed the rest. ‘Just a breather, lads,’ the NCO said. ‘I know we just started, but it was all of a rush, and now’s the time if you’ve got a boot on backwards or your corset’s too tight -’
The tunnel wall imploded.
I saw it come in from my right hand side, the concrete wall shattering into a hail of blocks and rubble and dust that slammed across the tunnel and into the far wall. The noise was tremendous; my ears rang with it, and the grit got in my eyes - I suppose it was a miracle the electric supply kept working, so any of it was visible - but I saw how a couple of men, caught in this lethal wash, splashed like bags of crimson paint against unyielding concrete. Despite my experiences in the First War, I had never witnessed such immediate and violent death before, not close to.
The surviving soldiers reacted immediately, and faster than I did. Ted Lane grabbed me around the waist and pulled me back into the tunnel. Gray and the sappers formed up in rows, across the width of the rest area, with revolvers and rifles drawn. The NCO was yelling orders, and Lane was shouting in m
y ear as he pulled me backwards, but I could hear nothing but a muffled roar.
And then I saw the Martian. Long tentacles came through first – I say ‘tentacles’; they were metallic limbs, multiply jointed and flexible, with every appearance of life despite their surface artificiality. These limbs pulled at the broken tunnel wall, widening the aperture. Then through came one leg, two, long, insectile, powerful. And then a broad body, like an upended saucer - like a crab but made of some metallic material – it was pulled into the tunnel by those limbs. A third leg through, a fourth, a fifth. And riding that eerie carriage I saw a thing like a sack of leather, glistening wet and pulsing, with a scatter of concrete dust sticking to the moist flesh – very like the targets I had seen used for bayonet practice in the grounds of the house in Hampshire, but alive, visibly so, pulsing and quivering like an organ, like a great lung dug out of a chest. It was a handling-machine, of the kind I had seen innocently manufacturing aluminium in the Surrey Corridor, with, on its back, a Martian. Later I would learn that this was the first time a handling-machine had been seen used in this way, as a weapon in direct conflict. But Walter Jenkins had foreseen it: as he told me in Berlin, the Martians weren’t likely to modify their machines, perfected as they were by a million years of use, but they were certainly capable of inventing new ways to use them.
And cradled in the limbs of this machine, as it clambered free of the hole it had made in the wall – ‘Heat-Ray!’ I tried to yell the warning, but could not hear even my own voice. ‘Heat-Ray!’
The men stood their ground and fired. I could barely hear their shots; I saw the bullets splash off the metallic hide of the machine, but they could not reach the living Martian. Lane pulled me back further, and I did not resist; I had no weapons and could contribute nothing to the fight. And the Martian wielded its Heat-Ray, at last. One man gone! Two! I heard their despairing cries as they died, and I could feel the waves of heat, intense, shocking.
The Massacre of Mankind Page 23