The Massacre of Mankind: Authorised Sequel to The War of the Worlds

1 A CALL TO ARMS

To those of us who survived it, the First Martian War was a cataclysm. And yet, to minds far greater than our own and older even than the Martians, minds who regard our world from the cold outer reaches of space, that conflict must have seemed a trivial affair indeed, and unworthy.

Since the First War, and indeed before it, the nebular hypothesis has become familiar enough to the newspaper-reading public, and over time has been amply confirmed by the scientists. The sun is the father and mother of the solar system. From its mass periodically are expelled tremendous blasts of matter, belts of gas and dust and complex elements baked in that hot hearth, which coalesce across millions of years into globes: these are the planets with their retinue of moons, which, cooling, then recede slowly from the central fire. It follows that the further a world is from the sun, the older it must be – that globe and its cargo of life – and cooler. Thus the earth is older than hot, fecund Venus; and Mars, austere and chill, is in turn older than our temperate globe. The outer worlds, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, are ancient indeed and locked in the stasis of time and cold. But Jupiter – king of planets, more massive than the rest combined, and older than Mars as Mars is older than our world – is, must be, host to the gravest intellects of all.

We know now that these minds have long watched us – humanity, the Martians, even innocent Venus. What can they have thought of our War? The fragile sparks crossing the night, the flares of fire on the green skin of our planet, the splash of ink-black smoke – the swarming and helpless populations… They looked on all this as a silent god might regard his flawed creations, perhaps, their reflections disapproval profound.

And yet, claims Walter Jenkins, provides the context within which we, who once believed we were lords of creation, must live out our petty lives. Our petty lives and – as the Martians inflicted when they made their second crossing to this earth – our small deaths.

Walter was right. This mighty context was to shape everything about the Second War, and indeed the most important moment of my own life. On the other hand, I myself, like most people, stay sane by generally not thinking about it.

And speaking of grave scrutiny, as I commence this memoir of my own, I cannot help but acknowledge the long shadow cast by that tombstone of a volume which everyone knows as the Narrative, the history of the First War penned by Walter, my esteemed brother-in-law – if he can still be termed such after I divorced Frank, his brother – a work that, as Walter’s therapist Freud might say, has burned a particular perception of the First Martian War into the public subconscious with the intensity of a Heat-Ray. Let me warn the reader from the off that if it’s the grandeur of the cosmos that you want, all told in the lofty prose of a man who was once paid to scribble such stuff, then it’s another correspondent you should seek out. And indeed if you want the self-portrait of a soul undergoing psychic shock and disintegration, which in the end made Walter’s tome of more value to the bump-feeler than to the historian, go to him. On the other hand if it’s an honest, factual account of my own experience you’re after – a woman who survived the First unimaginable Martian War and had her life pulled to pieces in the Second – then I humbly submit this, history as I saw it.

Although I admit it is an irony that my experience of the second conflict should begin, long before a Martian again set foot on this earth, with a complicated series of telephone calls from Walter himself, emanating from the hospital in Vienna where he was being treated at the time. I, who was patiently building a fresh life for myself in the New World, wanted nothing to do with it. But I have always had a sense of duty. I answered the summons.

A dotty-house, to Jupiter! From the beginning it was a tangled tale indeed.

2 A MEETING OF VETERANS

My first inkling of the impending storm came in fact in New York, specifically at the Woolworth Building, when Major Eric Eden (retired) asked to meet me.

My young colleague Harry Kane insisted on accompanying me. Harry was of that breed of brash American journalists who are always suspicious of all things European – he would have been even before the Schlieffen War, I think. I suppose Harry came as a kind of moral support, but with a morbid curiosity too about a Martian War that to him had been only a distant spectacle of his youth.

So we made our way. It was a brisk mid-March day in the year 1920. Manhattan had suffered what everybody hoped would prove to be the last snow storms of the year, although the main hazard on that particular morning turned out to be the slush piles alongside every sidewalk, ever ready to soak an unwary ankle. I remember that morning: the swarming, cheerfully ill-tempered traffic, the electric advertising hoardings that glowed in the greyness of the day – the sheer innocent vigour of a young nation – in those last hours and minutes before I was dragged back into the affairs of gloomy, wounded old England.

At last Harry and I pushed through the doors into the Woolworth. The air in the lobby, heated and scented, hit me like a slap in the face. In those days the Americans liked to be very warm indoors, and that was one transatlantic cultural shift I had yet to get used to. I pulled open my coat and loosened my headscarf, and we walked across a floor of polished Greek marble that was speckled with melted snow and grit from the street. The lobby was busy, every one of its transient, swarming inhabitants intent on his or her own destination. Harry, with his usual air of amused detachment – an attractive trait in a man a few years younger than me, even if it doesn’t sound it – said to me over the noise of the excited, chattering crowd, ‘I take it your Major Eden doesn’t know the city so well.’

‘You can say that without ever meeting him?’

‘Sure I can. If you don’t know Manhattan, where else do you set up a meeting but here? In London an American would meet you at St Paul’s – that’s the one with the hole in the dome, right? And a British in New York – well, here we are, in the tallest building in the world!’ He pointed. ‘And there he is, by the way.’

The man he indicated stood alone. He was slim, not tall, and wore a morning suit that looked expensive enough but dowdy compared to the peacock fashions around him. If this was Eden he looked younger than his thirty-eight years – six years older than me.

‘And that must be Eden because—’

‘He’s the only one looking at the artwork.’

Indeed, hands in pockets, oblivious to the crowds, the man was staring up at the ceiling, which (had I ever noticed this before?) was coated with mosaics that looked Roman, perhaps Byzantine. That was the Americans for you; in this new monument to a triumphant Mammon, they felt the need to reach back to their detached European past.

Harry strode across the floor, muttering, ‘Could he look more the Englishman abroad? If this is the best he can do to blend into the background, no wonder the Martians caught him.’

That made me snort with laughter as I followed. ‘Hush. You’re terrible. The man’s a hero.’

Hero or not, Eden looked rather nervous as we bore down on him, and he couldn’t help glancing down at the practical trouser suit I was wearing, as was my custom. ‘Mrs Jenkins, I take it—’

‘I prefer Miss Elphinstone, actually, since my divorce.’

‘My apologies. I imagine you recognised me from the posters in the bookshop windows.’

Harry grinned. ‘Something like that.’

‘It has been a well-announced tour. Just Bert Cook and myself for now, but we should be joining up with old Schiaparelli in Boston – discoverer of the canals, you know – in his eighties but going strong…’

I introduced Harry quickly. ‘We both work for the Post.’

‘I’ve not read your book, sir,’ Harry admitted. ‘It’s kind of out of my sphere. I spend my time fighting Tammany Hall as opposed to men from Mars.’

Eden looked baffled, and I felt moved to interpret. ‘Tammany Hall’s the big Democrat political machine in the city. Americans do everything on a heroic scale, including corruption. And they were not men in that cylinder, Harry.’

‘However,’ Harry went on, unabashed, ‘I’ve been known to dabble in the book trade myself. Sensational potboilers, that’s my line, not having a heroic past to peddle.’

‘Be glad of that,’ Eden said, softly enough.

A line which seemed to me the embodiment of British understatement! Eric Eden was, after all, the only living human being who had actually been inside a functioning Martian cylinder – he was captured in the first couple of days in ‘07, as the military, in their ignorance, probed at the first landing pit at Horsell. Having been kept alive, perhaps as a specimen for later examination by the Martians, Eden had fought his way out of a space cylinder with nothing much more than his bare hands, and had ultimately made it back to his unit with invaluable information on Martian technology.

He said now, ‘Miss Elphinstone, Walter Jenkins did warn me of your likely – ah, reluctance to get involved. Nevertheless Mr Jenkins did press on me the importance of the contact, for you, the rest of his family. He seems to have fallen out of touch with you all. Indeed that’s why he had to make such a circuitous attempt to contact you, through myself and Bert.’

‘Really?’ Harry grinned. ‘Isn’t this all kind of flaky?’ He twirled a finger beside his temple. ‘So the man wants to contact his ex-wife, and the only way he can do it is by contacting somebody he barely knows, with respect, sir, on the other side of the world, in the hope that he can talk to his brother’s ex-wife-’

‘That’s Walter for you,’ I said, feeling oddly motivated to defend the man. ‘He never was very good at coping.’

Eden said grimly, ‘And that was presumably even before he spent weeks being chased by Martians across the countryside.’

Harry, young, confident, was not unsympathetic, but I could see he did not understand. ‘I don’t see what favours Jenkins has done you either, Major Eden. I saw the interview you gave to the Post, where you attacked him for claiming to have seen more of the Martians than any other eyewitness, when they were at loose in England. As you said, you certainly saw stuff he never did—’

Eden held up his hand politely. ‘Actually I didn’t say that, not quite. Your reporter rather gingered it in the telling – well, you have to sell newspapers, I suppose. But I rather feel that we veterans should, ah, stick together. And besides, if you take a longer view, Jenkins did me a favour. One cannot deny that his memoir is the one that has most shaped public perception of the War ever since its publication. And he does mention me, you know.’

‘He does?’

‘Oh, yes. Book I, Chapter 8. Although he does describe me mistakenly as “reported to be missing”. Only briefly!’

I snorted. ‘The man’s in the dictionary under “unreliable narrator”.’

Eden laughed, not very sincerely. ‘But he never related my own adventures, as he did Bert Cook’s, say, and so I got the chance to tell it myself – and my publishers to label it as an “untold story”.’

Harry laughed. ‘It’s all business in the end? Now that I sympathise with. So what’s the plan, Major Eden? We gonna stand around gawping at frescoes all day?’

‘Mosaics, actually. Sorry. Miss Elphinstone, Mr Jenkins wishes to make a telephone call. To you, I mean.’

Harry whistled. ‘From Vienna? Transatlantic? That will cost a pretty penny. I know we’re all excited by the new submarine cable, and all, but still…’ The cable had been planned as part of a global alert system in the aftermath of the Martian War – although in the event the cable was not laid in place before the Schlieffen War had broken out, that entirely human affair.

Eden smiled. ‘As I understand it Mr Jenkins is not short of pennies, thanks to the success of his book. Not to mention the rights he has sold for the movie versions.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Anyhow, Jenkins will make the call to our hotel suite – I mean, mine and Bert’s. If you wouldn’t mind accompanying me there—’

‘Which hotel?’

Eden looked faintly embarrassed. ‘The Plaza.’

Harry laughed out loud.

‘I myself would have been content with more modest accommodation, but Bert—’

I said, ‘No need to apologise. But—’ I looked Eden in the eyes, and I recognised something of myself in there – something I could never share with Harry, good-hearted though he was. The look of the war veteran. ‘Why would he call? Could it be they are coming back? And why now? The timing’s all wrong, isn’t it?’

Eden only shrugged, but he knew what I meant.

I was never an astronomer, but since the Martian War we had all picked up a little about the dance of the planets. Mars and the earth chase each other around the sun like racing cars at Brooklands. The earth, on the inside track, moves faster, and periodically overtakes Mars – the Red Planet is lapped once every couple of years or so, in fact. And it is at these moments of overtaking, called oppositions (because at such instances sun and Mars are at opposite poles as seen in the earth’s sky), that Mars and the earth come closest to each other. But Mars’s orbit is elliptical, and so is the earth’s to a lesser degree – that is, they are not perfect circles. And so this closest approach varies in distance from encounter to encounter, from some sixty million miles or more to less than forty million – the closest is called a perihelic opposition. Again there is a cycle, with the minimal perihelic approaches coming by once every fifteen years or so: in 1894, and then in 1909, and again in 1924…

I recited from memory, ‘The next perihelic opposition is still four years away. The 1907 assault came two years before the last perihelic. Surely they won’t come, if they come at all, for another couple of years, then. But if they were to break the pattern and come this year, they may be already on their way. This year the opposition date is April 21—’

‘And as every paper trumpeted,’ Harry put in, ‘including our own, that would work back to a launch date of February 27.’

More grim, memorised logic. In 1907 the opposition’s date of closest approach of the worlds had been on July 6. The landings had begun precisely three weeks and a day before that, and the firings of the great guns on Mars had begun four weeks and four days before that.

But we all knew that if the astronomers had seen anything untoward on Mars, none of us would have heard about it. Since the Martian War the astronomers’ work had been hidden, even internationally, under a blanket of secrecy by the governments. Supposedly this was to stop the panics that had been witnessed during the oppositions of 1909 and 1911 and 1914, witless alarms that had caused damage to business confidence and so forth, even some loss of life, without a single Martian peeping out of his cylinder – but it had led, in Britain at least, to the possession of an unlicensed astronomical telescope being a criminal offence. I could see the logic, but in my eyes such secrecy only induced more fear and uncertainty.

So, even now the cylinders might be suspended in space – on their way! Why else would Walter summon us all so? But Walter was Walter, never a man to get to the point; I knew that I faced hours, days of uncertainty before this sudden tension was resolved, one way or another.

Eden spread his hands. ‘I know no more than I’ve told you.’

‘Well, let’s take the call,’ I said, as bravely as I could. I linked his arm; Harry took my other arm, so we walked, as three, out of the lobby. ‘I think I can stand an hour or two of luxury in the Plaza.’

‘And I,’ Harry said, ‘look forward to meeting this Cook guy. Quite a character, if half of what he says is true!’

Eden, who seemed loyal to fellow veterans to a fault, looked embarrassed. I gave Harry a sly dig in the ribs with my elbow, and we swept out of the doors into the grey March day.

3 AN ARTILLERYMAN IN NEW YORK

We took a cab to the hotel, which is on 58^th and 5^th. The main entrance, if you don’t know it, faces Grand Army Plaza, which used to commemorate feats of the Union Army in the Civil War. Since ’22 this has of course been supplemented by memorials to a different conflict. But it was a grand sight to see, in those times.

Eden’s suite contained the pampered luxury I expected, with overstuffed furniture and a magnificent view of the Plaza outside. A bottle of champagne stood on a low glass table, uncorked. The air was filled with the tinny tones of a ragtime band, emanating from a wireless set – not the compact government-issue People’s Receivers you would have found in every British home in those days, and known universally as Marvin’s Megaphones, but a big chunk of American hardware in a walnut cabinet.

And in this setting Albert Cook, in a housecoat, lounged on a sofa, idly glancing through a colour supplement. In my own first experiences with American hotels I had been all but overwhelmed by such luxuries as a private bathroom, a telephone in the room, and cereals for breakfast. But Cook evidently took to it all like a duck to water.

Cook was a little older than Eden, aged perhaps forty; he had neatly cut black hair peppered with grey, and a livid scar on his lower face (though I later heard gossip that he would touch this up for effect). And while there was no sign in the room of Eden’s work save a single, rather battered reading copy of his book on a side cabinet, the room was dominated by a poster on a stand, a photograph of Cook in ragged uniform and wielding a kind of club, and emblazoned:

Eden briskly introduced us. Cook did not stand. He grunted at Harry, and eyed me up and down, evidently disappointed to see a woman decently covered up in a trouser suit. For myself, I hope the look I gave him was withering. Since the First War my choice had been to reject any clothing in which I could not comfortably cycle – and not the prettied-up fashionable versions either, but the sturdy suits worn by the munitionettes and others – and Cook could like it or not.

He turned back to his magazine. ‘So a ’alf-hour until this blessed telephone call, Eric?’

Eden lifted the champagne bottle from its bucket; it was no more than a third full. He glanced apologetically at me. ‘If you’d like me to order some more—’

Harry and I both demurred.

‘Please, sit down, let me take your coats…’

‘And don’t let me embarrass yer,’ Cook said lazily. ‘I’ll get out of the way when the Prof calls from his foreign nut-’atch. I’ve nothing to say to ’im. I’ve had nothing to say to ’im since Putney, when ’e drank my booze, beat me at chess, and ran out afore the work was barely started.’

Harry laughed. ‘We’ve all read the book, man. What work? You’d barely started whatever grand scheme of tunnelling and sabotage you dreamed of—’

‘That’s as how ’e tells it. Pompous over-educated toff. I shoulda sued ’im.’

‘Just as you’ll be suing Charlie Chaplin, I suppose.’

Cook scowled, for this was a well-known sore point for him. Chaplin had built much of his cinematic fame on the success of one character, the ‘Little Sojer’, a comical, good-hearted gunner in ill-fitting uniform, who forever dreamt of being a general while his guns exploded in clouds of sooty smoke. You would have to be a lot thicker-skinned than Albert Cook not to have seen the source of that.

But it was an irony that Walter’s portrayal of Cook in his Narrative had rather damaged Walter’s own reputation, with Cook’s vision of a utopia of human rats coming across as a bleak, if comic, caricature of the lofty arguments for spiritual unity that Walter himself had tried to make in the wake of the War. Cartoons in the likes of Punch had often paired them, two inadequate dreamers, much to Walter’s chagrin – not that I would have expected Bert to grasp such subtleties.

Seeking to cover over Harry’s lack of tact, I interposed quickly, ‘I’m not sure any of us came out of Walter’s book very well. I’ve never quite lived down the way he introduced me to the world.’ The words Walter had used, as he described how his brother had helped my sister-in-law and myself fight off robbers during our own flight from the Martians, were burned into my very soul. ‘“For the second time that day this girl proved her quality.” Girl! And so on. I could have been drummed out of the suffragettes, before they were banned.’

Bert Cook was not listening, a trait I was to learn was typical of the man. ‘Should ha’ sued ’im, no matter what the lawyers said.’

Eden shook his head. ‘Don’t be a fool. He made you a hero! Inadvertently, granted. I’ve seen you talking in public – you know how folk respond to the detail – how, when the mob fled from the Martians, you alone ran towards them, calculating that was where the food would be…’

I remembered the passage, of course. ‘“Like a sparrow goes for man.”’

‘That’s me.’ Bert looked at me now, as if seeking to impress. ‘Though I ain’t no sparrow. I thought it through, see. As then, so now. And today, out the blue, ’e wants a nice chit-chat with you, does ’e? And what is it ’e wants to discuss? How ’e feels about getting a daily enema from Sigmund Freud, because ’e’s ’ad the wind up ’im since 1907?’ He looked more intent. ‘Or is it about Mars? Another opposition coming up, everybody knows that. What is it – does ’e know something? He’s in a position to find out I suppose.’

I faced Cook. ‘You despise him for his learning and erudition, and his weakness as you see it, yet you want the information he possesses?’

‘If it is the Martians ’aving another go, ’aven’t I, of all people, the right to know? Of all people? Eh? Oh, I’ve ’ad enough of this.’ He got to his feet, a little unsteadily, grasped the champagne bottle by the neck and lumbered to a door. ‘Show time is – what is it, Eden?’

‘Six o’clock. A bookstore on Broadway which—’

Cook belched loudly. ‘Time for a kip, a crap and a wash, not necessarily in that order.’ He winked at me, lasciviously. ‘And then we’ll see what’s what after the show – eh? Plenty of ’ealthy young American women drawn to a proven survivor like me – survival of the fittest, eh? “Like a sparrow goes for man.” Hah!’

I think we were all relieved when he closed the door behind him.

There followed an awkward interval for us all, as we waited for Walter’s call. We allowed Eden to order coffee for us, which came with a heap of sugary cakes on a tray.

‘So, Miss Elphinstone – Julie.’

‘Yes, Major, that’s my name.’

‘Short for Julia? Juliet?’

Harry snorted.

‘Short for nothing. I was christened Julie. I was born in ’88, and in that year Strindberg had his “Miss Julie” in the theatres, and my mother was taken by it.’

He nodded. ‘Then you were nineteen in ’07, when the Martians came.’

I shrugged. ‘I was an adult.’

‘I was but twenty-five myself. Many of my men were older than I. In the Army they follow their sergeants, not their officers. Just as well! But there were much younger recruits in the Schlieffen War, you know, called up by the Russians and indeed the Germans as the fighting dragged on.’

I wondered how he could know that. There had always been rumours of British ‘advisors’ at the side of the Germans in the great killing fields in the east, exploring new weapons – some, it was darkly hinted, based Martian technology.

Eden went on, ‘We did well to stay out of that – a quick knock-out defeat for the French.’ He actually mimed a one-two punch combination. ‘I was a fair boxer at school. Never kept it up, of course…’

Harry burst out laughing, then apologised quickly.

But our conversation rather dried up. Evidently Harrow, Oxford, and officer training in the British Army (for such had been Eden’s career), and indeed a thrilling adventure aboard a Martian space-cylinder, do not necessarily inculcate a talent for small-talk.

At last, to our mutual relief, the telephone rang.

Harry and I let Eden speak to the chain of operators, from the hotel’s own switchboard through to the new transoceanic exchanges, and finally the handlers in Vienna with their ‘strong German accents but beautiful articulation,’ according to Eric. At last he passed the handset to me.

I was surprised to hear, not Walter, but another English voice,strong, cultivated. ‘Mrs Jenkins?’

‘Actually I prefer Miss Elphinstone.’

‘Ah… Yes, I see the detail from the note in your brother-inlaw’s file. My apologies, then. A heroically long connection to make such an error!’

‘To whom am I speaking? Where is Walter?’

‘I apologise again. My name is Charles Samuel Myers. I am one of the specialists who have been treating Mr Jenkins for his neurasthenia for the last several years.’

I frowned. ‘Neurasthenia?’

Eric Eden pulled a face. ‘The privates who faced the Martians – they called it heat stroke. Or the hots, Bert says. Or, the sweats…’

Once again Harry twirled a finger by his temple. ‘Julie, you’re talking to a bump-feeler!’

4 AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

Heat stroke. The hots. The sweats. Ghastly soldiers’ slang for a ghastlier condition.

Later I would learn that my brother-in-law had encountered such terms when he had been referred for his first consultation with Dr Myers at a military hospital at a house called Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh. This was in the autumn of 1916, already nine years after the War.

In a dusty office that might once have been a smoking room, Myers had had a series of books with him, like exhibits, Walter had thought: all of them memoirs of the Martian War, including Walter’s own, and the first of Bert Cook’s self-glorifying pageturners. But the desk was heaped too with records from another conflict, mostly in German: despatches from the eastern front of the still-current Schlieffen War.

‘Heat stroke,’ Myers said. ‘A word coined in those brief days of our Martian War – days long enough to inflict grievous psychic shocks on those who fought in it. But the condition had in fact been tentatively identified before; British Army surgeons reported the after-effects of shellfire on the men during the Second Boer War, and even before that it was noted during the War Between the States. And of course since ’14 the Germans in the east, and their Russian foes, have been coming up with their own labels – Kanonenschrecken. I myself have been phenomenon in a peer-reviewed publication, the Lancet.’

‘Good for you,’ said Walter, uneasy. At that time he was fifty years old, and by his own admission had not felt strong, robust, since the War. Indeed, he still suffered from his burn scars, especially to his hands. Now he was already feeling trapped, he would tell me later. ‘I don’t see what this has to do with me.’

‘But I’ve told you,’ Myers said patiently. ‘I believe that the Germans’ Kanonenschrecken is a similar phenomenon, psychologically, to Cook’s sweats. And what it has to do with you, sir, is the contents of your memoir.’

Walter bridled. ‘I have suffered much criticism for my “unreliability”, as Parrinder has called it. I meant the book as an honest account of my own experience of the War, and my reflections since, for I believed I was in a unique—’

‘Yes, yes,’ Myers said, cutting him off, ‘but what’s actually unique about it, man, is that unlike some accounts of the War that you read – Churchill’s stiff-upper-lip boys’-story heroics, or else the self-aggrandising of the likes of Cook – what you have delivered is a desperately honest account of your own psychological affliction. Can you not see? An affliction from which to some extent you already suffered, even before the experiences of the War. Even after the fighting you have clearly had problems: the fracturing of your relationship with your wife-’

‘I admit that my experience of the War troubled me. No one of intelligence or sensitivity could fail to bear such scars, surely. But – some psychological disjoint before? I cannot accept that, Doctor.’

‘But it’s all here, man. In your own words. Book I, Chapter 7. “Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods.” Yes! Exceptional indeed. You describe a sense of detachment from the world, even from yourself, as if you are an outside observer… You spent your life before the War dreaming of utopias, did you not? The perfectibility of a world looked at as if from outside, and of a mankind to which, even then, you felt only a peripheral attachment.

‘But when the Martians came – look at your own account of your response to the War, from the beginning. You say you fled from that first Martian pit, at Horsell, in panic, only to snap back to equilibrium in a trice.’ He clicked fingers and thumb. ‘In a trice! You showed a peculiar mix of curiosity and dread; you were consumed by fear, and yet could not keep away from the spectacle, the mystery – the newness. At one point you describe yourself actually circling a Martian site, at a constant distance – ha! A circle, a locus imposed by two forces, perfectly matched, warring in you. As for your detachment from humanity, you could be ruthless, could you not? To save your wife you took the dogcart of, of—’

‘A local publican.’

‘Yes! Leaving the man, who knew less than you about the situation at that point, to die. And later you killed directly, did you not? The clergyman you called a curate – did you ever trouble to learn his name, his position? He was called Nathaniel—’

‘There is no value in my knowing it! And I believe that, in the course of a dark night of the soul, even at the height of the War, I came to terms over that – action.’

‘Came to terms with who? God? Yourself? The curate? Even that “dark night” line is a quote from a mediaeval mystic. The truth is you called on God, whose existence you once spent a whole book demolishing!’

‘So I did,’ said Walter, increasingly uneasy. ‘And yet I was brought up within the great carcass of that antique religion. I was even forced to accept confirmation to take up my first post, a teaching position. And when faced with the unimaginable, that which lies beyond familiar categories, perhaps the mind reaches for the trappings of familiar myth—’

‘Was murder unimaginable to you, afore you did it? I suppose you’d say the Martians drove you to it?’

‘Drove me to it, yes, that’s it. For it was not pre-meditated.’

‘Was it not? Are you sure? You are a man of detachment of mind, remember. And a man of detachment of consciousness altogether, at times.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I refer to the later passages of your own book. You describe the great existential shock of the Martians and their weaponry, imposed on the English countryside: “a sense of dethronement”, I think was your term. Very well. But at the end of the War – when, as you admit, you were not the first to discover the Martians’ extinguishing through the plagues – you had a threeday blank, man! Classic fugue. And even later – you wrote this book in ’13, six years after the War was done – you describe visions, memories still intruding even then. You saw living people as ghosts of the past – “phantasms in a dead city”. And so on and so forth.’ He looked at Walter with more sympathy. ‘Your relationship with your wife broke down, Jenkins. Why do you suppose that is?’

This cut Walter to the core. ‘But I spent much of the War seeking her out.’

‘That’s what you say.’ He tapped the memoir. ‘That’s what you say in here. But – look what you did! You went to Weybridge and London, never to Leatherhead where your wife was sheltering: north to the Martians, not south to your family. That’s what you did. And are you aware that you don’t refer to your wife by name in this book, not once?’

‘Nor do I name myself. Nor, for that matter, my brother. Or Cook the artilleryman. It was a literary affectation which—’

‘A literary affectation? You name the Astronomer Royal, man. You name the Lord Chief Justice! And you don’t name your own wife? How do you imagine she would feel about that? And didn’t your hair turn grey? In a matter of days, during the War.’

‘But – but…’

‘There could hardly be more striking a sign of physical as well as mental affliction.’ Myers sat back. ‘I put it to you, sir – and I have already penned a paper for the Lancet on the case – that you are suffering a form of neurasthenia: the sweats, heatstroke, gun-dread. Symptoms of this include tics, mutism, paralysis, nightmares, tremors, sensitivity to noise, fugue, hallucinations. Do these sound familiar? The difference with you, compared to the common soldier of the eastern front, is your articulacy, your intelligence, your self-awareness – even your greater age. Which makes you a fascinating reference point. Sir, our own government, in particular the military authorities—’

‘Ha! What’s the distinction, under our blessed Prime Minister Marvin?’

‘—have encouraged me to refer you for treatment. At this hospital, and others in Germany where gun-dread is being studied. Are you willing to partake in my study? The treatment should be beneficial for you, and may lead to a greater good: the more effective handling of traumatised soldiers of all nationalities.’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘But that,’ Walter told me, his voice a whisper punctuated by pops and crackles from the long, tenuous wires that connected us, ‘was the one question he would not answer. Could not, I suppose, for Myers thought himself an ethical man. Of course I had no choice.’

I rolled my eyes at Harry, who was listening in with Eric Eden, their heads together over the room’s second handset. Despite Myers’s attempt to prepare us, the call, when we were finally put through to Walter, was disorienting. It was hard to know what to say.

I essayed, ‘Walter, I wouldn’t take that guff about Carolyne too seriously. Why, I broke up with Frank, remember, and he didn’t even write a book!’

‘Ah, but I think I my brother has too much of me in him for his own good. A sense of purpose that takes him away from his humanity sometimes, even from his nearest family…’

‘And the treatment? How was that?’

‘I wouldn’t recommend it over a spa cure,’ he said dryly.

In 1916, in the midst of their European war of conquest, the Germans were necessarily the pioneers in the treatment of this ailment, the ‘Kanonenschrecken’ as they called it – but their attitude was shaped by their own culture. To be brought down by fear was dishonourable, shameful. And therefore their treatment programme, called the ‘Kauffmann regime’, was a question of psychological pressure and – unbelievable to me – the inflicting of pain.

‘I was referred to a doctor called Yealland, British, a follower of Kauffmann, who used a technique he called faradisation. The use of electricity to combat symptoms directly. If you were mute, for example, your tongue and larynx would be prodded with a charge, and the room locked to keep you in, and you were strapped down in a chair, until you did speak.’

‘Dear God. And does it work?’

‘Yes! There’s a recovery rate they call “miraculous”. What they don’t report is a rather high rate of relapse.’

‘And in your case—’

‘Yealland tried to “treat” the unwelcome memories. You will recall I was badly burned in the course of the War, especially about the hands. And sometimes, when I have nightmares of imprisonment or flight, or when I see the ghosts of the past in the London streets of today, my old wounds ache, as if in sympathy. By provoking pain deliberately in that injured skin, Yealland sought to break the link between the memories and the phantom physical pain, as he saw it, thereby lessening the impact of the former on me.’

‘And the outcome—’

He said only, ‘After a couple of sessions I chose to terminate the treatment.’

Eden said with feeling, ‘Good for you, old man.’

After that Walter had been taken back by Myers and a colleague called William Rivers, who, sceptical of ‘faradisation’ and similar techniques, had become followers of Freud and his school.

‘Now I am in the rather more pleasant environs of Vienna, and instead of volts it is verbiage, from Freud and his followers. We talk and talk, you see, as the doctors try to discover how a trauma deep in a wounded mind connects to the surface behaviour. I can see there is something in it – but I am sceptical of Freud’s claim, as are the British doctors in fact, that every human impulse is at root sexual in nature. For you have the Martians as your counter-example! The Martians, as we know, are entirely without sex – we have physical proof that to reproduce they bud asexually – and so what use Freudian analysis to a Martian? And yet they are conscious beings, they evidently have motivation…’

I rolled my eyes at my companions. ‘Never mind about the Martians just now, Walter. How is your new treatment regime going?’

‘Well, it doesn’t hurt as much.’

Harry laughed out loud at that.

I said, ‘Walter, I’m sorry to hear of your troubles. I do sympathise. You probably know I left Britain after the ’11 election, when Marvin and his strutting bully-boys came to power – soldiers in khaki marching behind King George’s coronation coach… I would not wish to be in their hands, as you have been… But you have called for a reason.’

‘I have become desperate to get in touch. Not just with you, but with Frank, Carolyne… I could think of no other way but through you, Julie. I could not trace you in New York, so I asked Major Eden to bring a personal message. I hope you will help me, Julie. I hope you will see the sense of it. You have always been—’

‘A girl of “quality”, as you said in your memoir?’

‘Sorry about that. Look – my suggestion is that you go back to England. There is still time. Take a steamer – I have the resources to pay. Gather the family, and I will make another call. Perhaps near Woking – the house I shared with Carolyne is long sold, but—’

‘What is it, Walter? Tell me something.’ So began for me an extraordinary journey, one which took me from the lobby of the world’s tallest building in New York to the foot of a Martian fighting-machine in London – and beyond!

For he would say only: ‘I have grave news from the sky.’

5 MY RETURN TO ENGLAND

When I looked for a steamer, I found the Lusitania happened to be readying for a passage. It didn’t take long to arrange tickets for myself, and for Eric Eden and Albert Cook, both of whom decided to cut short their American tour, with apologies to Professor Schiaparelli, after hearing Walter’s dark hints. Their whole lives had been shaped by the Martian War; of course they would come.

Not that I was keen to make the journey at the time. And my brave hero Harry Kane was even less so. ‘England ain’t a place to be an American these days,’ he told me. ‘Brad Green,’ who was a long-standing and hard-drinking European correspondent at the Post, ‘says that when you open your mouth and let out a Yankee drawl, you’re as likely as not to be hauled over by some cop. And meanwhile they got German troopers on guard outside Buckingham Palace. Now where’s the sense in that?’

‘That’s politics for you.’

He grunted. ‘I blame the Martians. You know, I think for a lot of us on this side of the pond your Martian War was a kind of a big splash at the time, and there were false alarms and panics and such here – but when it was all over, well, it was like some remote natural disaster, a volcano blowing its top in Yorkshire or someplace.’

‘Do you even know where Yorkshire is?’

‘You were crowded off the front page next time there was a jumper off the Brooklyn Bridge. And it didn’t stop the Kaiser marching his tin soldiers all over the map of Europe, did it? But for you Brits – sometimes it feels like you never got over it.’

I had to nod. ‘Surprisingly perceptive. So you’re not going to let my brother-in-law buy you a week on a cruise ship?’

‘Some other time, sweet cheeks.’

We said a perfunctory farewell – but as it turned out it would be a very long time indeed before I saw Harry Kane again.

Two days after Walter’s call it was time to go. It didn’t take long for me to pack. I have travelled light since that dreadful early morn in June of ’07, when I was staying with my brother George and his wife Alice in their house at Stanmore, and he, a surgeon, came home from a call-out to Pinner full of news of the Martian advance. He bundled us onto the chaise, promising to meet us at Edgware station after he had roused the neighbours. It was quite an adventure for us, and recorded at second-hand passably accurately by Walter in his Narrative – for we ran into his brother, my future husband Frank, and as a result we were brought under the scrutiny of the wider world. But it is typical of Walter’s carelessness with detail that he did not trouble to complete that part of his narrative with a report of the loss of George Elphinstone, my brother, who we never saw again.

I joined Cook and Eden at the wharf. The RMS Lusitania was a floating hotel, with electric elevators, and a telephone in every cabin. The ‘Greyhound of the Sea’ would fair whip us across the ocean; we should land in less than six days. Of course at that time there was no faster way to do it; the great Zeppelins no longer flew the transatlantic routes, and it was only a year since Alcock and Brown had fluttered across the Atlantic, the first to do so in a fuel-laden variant of the war aeroplanes that had evolved so quickly on the eastern front of the Schlieffen War.

I was irked at the beginning of the show for we had to stay an extra day in dock while the harbour managers arranged the formation of a convoy, twenty or so ships with ourselves as the largest passenger boat, a number of merchantmen, and a brace of US Navy destroyers equipped with sounding gear and depth charges to see off any threat from the ‘U-Boats’. Since the early weeks of the Schlieffen War in 1914, no American ship had been so much as scratched by a German torpedo, but it says a lot for the tensions between the precautions were deemed convenience for us; the convoy would make for Southampton rather than the Lusitania’s usual port of Liverpool, and would deliver us closer to London.

During the crossing I spent much of my time in the onboard library, while Eric Eden habituated the gymnasium and Cook the First Class Lounge, with its stained glass windows and marble pillars and delicate, fluttering women. There was much black humour among the passengers. We were lucky, it was said, that our convoy didn’t include the White Star’s Titanic, thought by many to be a cursed ship since she was almost wrecked by an iceberg on her maiden voyage – saved only by hull armour of high-quality Martian-grade aluminium.

As soon as we landed at Southampton, squads of the Border Control Police in their black uniforms came on board, accompanied by a handful of regular soldiers in khaki. We three British citizens, with our papers in order and checked while still on board the Lusitania, were allowed off briskly, while – just as Harry would have expected – Americans and other foreigners were kept back for closer scrutiny. Once off the ship, the bulky luggage of my two gentleman fellow-travellers was sent on ahead to our hotel in London.

Then, outside the passenger terminal, we three were met by Philip Parris. Philip was Walter Jenkins’s cousin. Then in his fifties, he was a bulky, jowly individual, his grey-black hair plastered to his scalp by pomade, habitually dressed in a heavy suit that generally featured sombre black tie and waistcoat adorned with thick watch-chain. He looked every inch the man of business, the man of substance – and the competent kind to whom a man like Walter Jenkins would entrust the welfare of three transatlantic waifs such as ourselves, just as he had once entrusted his wife’s safety during the chaos of the Martian War, while he followed the Martians around the English countryside as a fly follows a horse. I remember in his memoir Walter dismissing Philip as a brave enough man but not one to respond quickly to danger. Ha! Sooner at my side a man like Parris than one like Jenkins.

Philip led us briskly to the car park, and told us his plan. He would take us to London for the convenience of the hotels, then drive us back out to Woking later, for Walter’s family meeting in a couple of days’ time. ‘I trust you had no troubles with the busy-bodies of the Border Control.’

Eric Eden shook his head. ‘Just doing their jobs, I suppose. But when they came crowding aboard – I haven’t seen so many uniforms in one place since I left Inkerman Barracks.’

Philip snorted. ‘Wait until you see London. I blame Marvin – much too pally with the Kaiser, if you ask me.’

We came to his car, which was one of the new Bentleys; its chassis, mostly of aluminium, gleamed in the watery March sunlight.

Cook, whistling, ran a finger along the smooth lines of the bonnet. ‘What a beauty.’

Philip grinned back. ‘She is, isn’t she? English aluminium, or rather Martian, and Ottoman petroleum in the tank, and the best leather from the cut-price French markets. And not entirely an indulgence. Aluminium’s my game these days, and I need to advertise the wares. I’m going to swing east and pick up the Portsmouth Road to London. Keep your papers handy. We’ll pass through the Surrey Corridor, I thought you’d like to see that, but they can be a bit twitchy at the security gates…’

The Surrey Corridor? Security gates? I had been away a long time, but I remembered a time when you hadn’t needed papers or passports even to cross international borders, let alone to move around England.

He bundled us into the car, whose interior smelled of polished leather.

Near Portsmouth, at Cook’s request, Philip turned off the main road and halted at an elevation from which we had a view of the city and the harbour beyond. Portsmouth has always been the main port of the Royal Navy, and that day we could see the English Channel crowded with ships, like grey ghosts in the March mist. Black smoke streaked from their funnels in the breeze.

Cook and Eden, military men both, were fascinated by the sight. ‘Something is afoot,’ murmured Cook. ‘Lot of traffic down there.’

Philip said, ‘Wish I’d brought my bird-watching glasses… Are either of you Army men ship-spotters? Not all those vessels out there are ours. Some are German – and some indeed are French, impounded after the Schlieffen War.’ He glanced back, almost conspiratorially. ‘There are tensions with the Americans. The rumour going round my club – well, it’s this. That the Kaiser, straddling the whole of Europe, is feeling restless again. Just as they launched the European war in the west to knock out France and have a free hand to hit Russia before she mobilised – that was the whole point of the Schlieffen Plan – now the German planners are thinking of taking on America before she becomes too big to handle. America, you know, has a decent navy but a very small standing army, and problems with her neighbour, Mexico. If the Germans can get their fleet across the Atlantic, and if the Mexicans can be encouraged to cross the border…’

‘Madness,’ murmured Eden. ‘Too many damn war rumours. Keeps everyone on edge.’

But Cook said, ‘But you’ve got to ’and it to the Kaiser. He’s winning ’is war on one continent, through being bold. Maybe ’he can do it again. Why not?’

I had watched all this martial drama from afar. In a sense it had all followed on from the Martian War. The British Navy, the best in the world, had turned out to be all but useless against forces that fell on us from the sky. Frank and I ourselves, in our flight to the sea, had seen the Channel Fleet standing useless across the Thames estuary while the Martians rampaged. So, after the War, there had been a drastic rebalancing, with funding for the home Army boosted, and the Navy drastically cut, amid much hand-wringing about the loss of tradition, and bitter inter-service rivalry. Part of the strategy had been, by 1912, our agreeing a rather shabby non-aggression pact with the Kaiser to avoid any naval arms race – and, indeed, to reduce the risk of war with Germany, whose generals were alarmed at the potential of our new, heavily expanded land army for waging a war in Europe. After that we cooperated with the Germans when it came to the oil-rich Ottomans, and we had no fear of German aggression against India – so long as we turned a blind eye to their wider plans.

At home, Marvin was cunning in how he reinforced his new position. Neutrality was popular with the financial markets, and after the shock of the Martian invasion, the general militaristic timbre of Marvin’s regime struck a chord with the populace. It was even good for business, if you were quick-footed enough: clothiers produced uniforms and other military apparel, leathermakers turned out Sam Browne belts and holsters, boots and harnesses, and our munitions factories produced arms and ammunitions to be poured down the great gullet of wars to come…

All this had led, in the end, to the betrayal of our old allies in 1914.

Phillip rubbed his jaw. ‘Whatever you think of the national interest and so forth, I think a lot of us were rather ashamed to allow the Germans to inflict a mechanised war on Belgium and France, rather as we had been subject to just such an attack from Mars. No wonder the Americans were disgusted.’

Cook grinned cynically. ‘We was too blessed busy dishing the Irish, and marching into Mesopotamia to get our ’ands on the Ottomans’ oil, to ’ave time for conscience. But as for the Germans versus the Yanks, maybe the Martians will come again and put a stop to the whole thing before it starts.’

And there you had the paradox of Albert Cook. He was not a conventionally intelligent man, and was certainly poorly educated, but he did have a kind of cunning grasp of strategy, of the big picture. For, of course, in that last playful prediction he turned out to be right.

Philip started the car. ‘Let’s press on. There’s a decent pub at Petersfield where we can stop for lunch…’

6 THE SURREY CORRIDOR

It was early in the afternoon when I discovered what Philip had meant by the Surrey Corridor.

We were passing through Guildford. Just beyond the High Street and before the junction for the London Road, we came to a barrier, like a level-crossing gate. Philip slowed as we joined the small queue of traffic before the gate, which was raised and lowered to allow each vehicle through.

When it was our turn, a police officer came to Philip’s window. He wore a regulation uniform as far as I could see, but he had a revolver in a holster at his waist, and no collar number. George had warned us to have our papers prepared. Our documents were taken into a small cabin at the side of the road, and inspected at length. I quickly grew impatient with the wait, though Eden and Cook, with more experience of the modern England than I, sat it out stoically.

Then came a new adventure. One by one, we three were led from the car and into the cabin. Eden and Cook were released quickly, with Cook returning to the car smiling. ‘Bobby in there ’as a copy of my book. ’Ad me sign it. Ha! Fame can be ’elpful sometimes.’

Which was fine for them. But when my go came, I was detained. The officer in charge was a short, bristling man with a long, mournful moustache of a style I thought of as Germanic – I was to see plenty more examples in London. ‘I’m very sorry, Miss, but I have to hold you here for now.’

I believe I managed to smile sweetly. ‘Who says so, Officer?’

‘Exchange.’

‘Which is?’

‘Big records office, in the British Library.’

‘The Library? I’m surprised there’s room with all the books.’

He shrugged. ‘All the books gone down to a bunker now, Miss.

‘I simply yelled, ‘Philip!’

Philip Parris was a man of substance even in General Marvin’s Britain. Once he was at my side, I asked again why I was being detained.

The moustached officer glanced at his notes. ‘Miss, in 1908 you became a member of a proscribed organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union—’

Philip barked laughter. ‘So that’s it! You’re a suffragette!’

‘I was,’ I said. Then amended to: ‘I am. What, is that a crime now?’

‘Actually it is, Julie. We’ll sort this out.’

With his knowledge of the bureaucracy of the modern British state, and sheer force of character, Philip was able quickly to establish that there was no record of me having participated in such acts as bombings or assaults – neither the assassination of Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman at the unveiling of the Tomb of the Vanished Warrior, that great memorial to Heat-Ray victims, in ’08, or even the sporadic protests that had intensified after Marvin’s quasi-legal election triumph in ’11, after which the movement had been banned. In the end, after much telephone negotiation, Philip got me out of choky in return for guarantees that I would present myself at a police station in London, and that Philip himself would be a guarantor of my good behaviour.

Though grateful to Philip I was humiliated to have to rely on the help of a man, given the circumstances.

Thus my introduction to the new Britain. We drove on.

Beyond Guildford, the Bentley passed smoothly along an almost empty road, and we came into the landscape where Martians had once walked.

The maps that have been drawn up of the battle zone since the end of the First Martian War are familiar enough. It begins south-west of Woking, at Horsell Common, where the first cylinder landed at midnight on Friday June 14, in the year 1907. Then you have that sequence of pits, forming loose triangles, laid down by cylinder impacts over nine more summer nights, reaching up through Surrey to central London and beyond. That loose band of destruction and poison had since become known as the Corridor. Now the countryside had recovered from the scorching of the Heat-Ray, at least as far as the naked eye could see, with the green of the grass sprouting in abandoned fields evident even in the grey light of March.

But we saw the ruins of central Woking itself, still unreconstructed, left as a kind of monument to the fallen of the War of which this brave, unremarkable town had been the epicentre. I did glimpse the shining dome of the bravely rebuilt Shah Jahan Mosque. It had become a sad joke that Woking, which had once been notorious as the site of the first crematorium in Britain, had now become nothing but a necropolis itself. We drove on.

Phillip said, ‘Even after the clean-up all this was left undeveloped. Aside from all the physical destruction, the Martians’ use of the Black Smoke, and their vegetable infestations, the red weed, left traces thought to be toxic in the long term. So the land’s unfit for use.’

‘That’s the cover, right enough,’ said Albert Cook slyly.

The closest the road came to one of the Martians’ landing sites was at Pyrford, where we saw a substantial building of corrugated iron and concrete, with barbed wire and watchtowers all around, and armed troops patrolling, and a Union Jack flying jauntily. To reach the site we would have had to pass through another gate, still more massive than the one at Guildford.

I complained, ‘I can see nothing of the Martian pit from here.’

‘That’s not surprising,’ Philip said. ‘It’s the same all over. The pits have become too valuable an asset to be open to Sunday trippers and lemonade-sellers.’

‘More than that,’ Cook said. ‘There’s science stuff goes on in there. Like a labor’try. Scientists and inventors and military men, fiddling with Martian gear– trying to make it work for man, see.’

Philip snorted. ‘And what would you know of all that?’

The former artilleryman tapped his nose. ‘I ’ave my sources. And my readers, even in the ranks of the military, who agree with me on some points of strategy, they tell me stuff. We ’aven’t ’ad much trouble figuring some of how it works. The Heat-Ray, f’r example, generates a beam of a special light they call infra-red, that rattles back and forth between two little mirrors, getting stronger and stronger, until, bang, out it shoots. Coherent – that’s the word. The big parabolic mirror on the outside of the generator is for sighting, so I understand it, to gen’rate the guide-light that’s barely visible to us. And the Ray itself – fifteen hundred degrees it is, nearly ’ot enough to melt iron. Bet you never knew that.

‘And the flying-machine, they got that working even before the Martians’ corpses were cool. But what they can’t figure is what powers all these gadgets. They all have these little boxes inside of ’em, energy packs… They don’t burn coal or oil, they’re not electric batteries.’

‘He’s right about that,’ Philip said. ‘There are a couple of German physicists called Einstein and, um—’

‘Schwarzschild,’ Eden murmured.

‘That’s it. They have a theory that the power packs are something to do with the energy that’s evidently trapped, so they say, inside every atom. And if only you could liberate it – well, perhaps that’s what the Martians have managed. If so it’s beyond our understanding, for now.’

‘I’ll say,’ said Cook with some glee. ‘But they’d make mighty fine bombs. Maybe you ’eard of the explosions they ’ad at Ealing and Kensington and Manchester, tinkering with those fellows. Boom! Bash! And ’alf a square mile – flattened.’

Walter himself had witnessed this power. In his Narrative you will read how he saw the Heat-Ray camera of a fallen Martian at Shepperton flash river water to steam, and cause a great scalding wave to advance down the river – he still bears the scars of the scalding he received that day. ‘Think how long a kettle takes to boil!’ he once said to me. ‘And imagine, then, the torrent of energy which that generator must have poured into the tremendous mass of the river water…’

Philip said now, ‘But even so we’re working some miracles.’ He slowed the car. ‘Take a look.’

Glancing around, I saw that we were in the vicinity of Esher. To either side of the road stood lines of wire fencing, tall, topped with barbed wire, with here and there a manned watchtower. Buildings were dimly visible within these barriers, and people were coming and going, like spectres in the grey afternoon light, watched over by the soldiers or police on the towers. I did not know who these people were, but I saw one small girl pressed up against the fence itself, peering out, fingers meshed in the wire.

We slowed beside a factory complex. Troops were patrolling the wire here, and Philip made sure a kind of badge was visible behind his windscreen as we paused. We all gazed out.

And, at the centre of a small compound of huts and pits and heaps of clay, I saw a Martian machine.

I recognised it at once, from the reconstructions in the museums of New York. It was a handling-machine, a crab-like vehicle that sat on five stiff, stationary legs, and with articulated tentacles working before it. It had no rider. Compared to the dioramas in the museums, which included model Martians riding the things like pilots, it looked as if it had had its brain scooped out.

Beside the handling-machine was a crude-looking apparatus, an upright cylinder above which a kind of receptacle tipped back and forth. With graceful if unearthly swipes of its tentacular limbs, the machine fed dirt into the cylinder through the tipping device at the top. A white powder filtered out of the base of the cylinder, to flow down a channel to a boxy receiver, from which puffs of green smoke rose into the air – Martian green, an eerie shade that brought back vivid memories to me, if not the others.

Even as we watched, another tentacle snaked out of the handling-machine to withdraw a silvery ingot from the receiving device.

But this eerie industry was only the centrepiece. Around the central drama of the clay and the ingots and the green smoke, lines of people supported the operation. Shuffling they were, in bland prison-like uniforms and soft shoes, men, women and children. They brought dirt to the handling-machine, and took ingots away, and performed other such menial tasks, all under the supervision of armed guards.

Philip, Cook and Eden did not mention the people. They enthused about the gadgetry, what they saw of it as the car crawled past. ‘It is manufacturing aluminium, of course,’ Philip said expansively. ‘That superb material, strong and lightweight as no other metal… We only began manufacturing on an industrial scale, with the Hall process, a dozen years before the Martians came. And we needed a plant with the power of a Niagara Falls, and an input of aluminium-rich bauxite, to achieve such results. But the metal is abundant in the earth’s crust. The Martians could produce aluminium from ordinary English clay!

‘I was keen that you should see this, Julie. You are family, after all. And this is how I have made my, our fortune… And I’ve Walter to thank for it; he showed me an early draft of that book of his about the War, and while everybody else oohed and aahed about the fighting and so on, I picked up a few clues about what was likely to be the real legacy of the Martians for us– I mean their manufacturing capabilities – and got my counters on the game board ahead of the crowd… Some, of course, dream of the military application of the Martian technologies—’

Cook snickered. ‘As the Russians are finding out right now.’

‘And others, like cousin Walter, dream of commerce between the worlds. But I tell you now that this humble gadget, the Martian aluminium-smelter, will do more to transform the fortunes of this country than any of that.’

I considered what I had seen. ‘But these fences – the guns – the people working here. Who are they? Criminals?’

‘You know there are a lot of French refugees in England now. Belgians too. Some of them cause trouble: attacks on German business interests, and so forth. And we do have our own home-grown saboteurs—’

‘Saboteurs? What, even the children? Is this a concentration camp, Philip?’

He had the grace to look embarrassed. He said only, ‘This isn’t South Africa.’ He drove us smoothly away.

And Bert Cook laughed. ‘I bet Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald are in that camp somewhere, fighting for the top bunk like true socialists!’

A little further north we passed the burned-out ruins of Wimbledon, to our right. Here the road had been raised onto a kind of viaduct, for the land was flooded extensively – as I was to learn, a result of the choking of the Thames by the Martians’ red weed. Thirteen years after the vanquishing of the Martians, this damage had yet to be corrected.

A hangar-like building stood bold not far from Wimbledon itself, surrounded by levees and embankments. This was the site of another of the ’07 cylinders, the sixth to fall. And here I saw work parties, toiling knee-high in the shallower water at drainage ditches – or, in one place, working in what might have been a paddy field. All of these were watched over by armed police. The low sun glittered on the water. It was almost a beautiful sight, save for the black blemishes of the toiling human figures.

Albert Cook said quietly, ‘I was ’ereabouts, on Putney Hill. Defying the Martians. Apparently the ’ouse I was in has got a plaque on the side now, saying so.’

After that we spoke little until we approached London itself.

7 IN LONDON

Philip brought the Bentley to an extensive car park outside Waterloo Station. The station itself had been rebuilt as a sprawling pile fronted by an edifice of concrete and marble – it reminded me of nothing so much as the Brandenburg Gate writ large.

We were to stay two nights in London; we made arrangements to meet the day after next, for our excursion back to Surrey to meet Frank and Carolyne. Philip, he reminded me, had to bring me to the London police headquarters, relocated to the Barbican, to prove I was no anarchist. Eden and Cook left for the hotel Philip had arranged for us at the Elephant and Castle – and to which our luggage, save for my rucksack, had been directed.

And, with some time before my appointment, Philip and I decided to walk.

As we left the car park I found myself staring up at a tremendous poster of Brigadier-General Brian Marvin himself, arms folded, his gaze fixed sternly on mine:

Philip joined me. ‘Doesn’t get any better-looking with age, does he?’

‘I’m surprised nobody’s improved it. Given him a better moustache, for example.’

Philip laughed. ‘Oh, nobody would dare…’

I mused on the oddities of humanity – of Philip Parris in particular. He was self-evidently a good man, competent, and a support to his friends. He had enough intelligence and detachment to see the corruption of the regime under which he now lived – even its absurdity. And yet he had not turned a hair when faced with the aluminium-factory camp in the Corridor. We are all complex, I suppose, and none of us consistent.

We walked through the train station itself, an echoing hall, half of which was fenced off by wooden panels. Within was the usual chaos of porters and passengers and portmanteaus, with wreaths of steam everywhere, and the shriek of whistles. But I was puzzled by the half-complete aspect. ‘Why all the rebuilding? I don’t remember any Martian War damage here.’

‘Ah, this is another of Marvin’s grandiose dreams. Better communications, that was the promise: more road and rail links, the better to move the guns and men around if the Martians had another go – and he’s done that, to some extent. But he does have a weakness for the grandiose design. Vast naval canals joining Clyde to Forth to Grangemouth: warships sailing down Loch Lomond! That’s the plan; so far, there’s barely a scratch in the Scottish turf. And then there’s the tunnel under the Channel. They actually started one in Gladstone’s day, you know. Again, barely a scratch – and nor has work begun on the big rail links to the London termini that will be necessary. But we’ve got the station! The frontage, anyhow.’

I smiled. ‘It’s just as Walter said of Bert Cook. All dreams and no action.’

Philip winked. ‘He’d be a good fit in Marvin’s cabinet then, along with old warhorses like Churchill, and all those tycoons from the railways and the coal mines…’

There was a W.H. Smith’s near the exit from the station, and I glanced over its stock with professional curiosity. In contrast to the vibrant American press, here on offer there were only what looked like dreary official government rags, and a couple of pro-Marvin tub-thumpers like the Daily Mail. The Mail itself had been the first to resume publication after the Martian War, and had never let its readers forget it: ‘Even The Martians Could Not Silence Us!’ I wondered if there was an underground press.

We crossed Waterloo Bridge, itself heavily repaired after the damage of the War. At this time of day the smoke pall hung as heavy over London as it ever did, and from here, suspended over the eternal river, I could see Westminster, where the palace, wrecked by the Heat-Ray, was gone – even the Clock Tower demolished – to be replaced by a looming fortress of concrete and glass.

Philip grunted. ‘Behold our rulers. The Mother of Parliaments replaced by a bunker – ugh! And over in the City, around Bank, the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England, Mansion House – the seat of global finance, similarly secured. You still get the swarms of commuters coming in from the suburbs in the morning, and trickling out in the evening, day by day. But they all carry papers and passes, and Black Smoke masks or revolvers depending on which drill is on that day…’

A deep thrumming seemed to make the fabric of the bridge itself vibrate, and a diffuse shadow crossed the river. Looking up I saw a vast Zeppelin, a whale in the sky. The eagle of Imperial Germany was easily visible on its flank.

Once across the river we walked along the Strand a distance, and cut up through Covent Garden. Bunting hung everywhere, and Union flags fluttered, and there were posters of the King and of the heroes of the new military government – Marvin himself, Churchill, Lloyd George. But the streets were grubby, the paint peeling on many buildings, and there were very many beggars. Their hands, open for change, were like grimy flowers.

And I was struck by how many people I saw in uniform, not just bobbies or soldiers. Every public building seemed to have a soldier or two on guard, and even the staff at the hotels and restaurants sported epaulettes and brass buttons. It was the Berlin-ification of London, I thought. And considering that, I seemed to hear an unconscionable number of German accents.

Trafalgar Square looked much as it always had, and I was obscurely pleased to see that Nelson, hero of Trafalgar, who even the Martians had not toppled, had not yet been replaced on his column by a beaming Brian Marvin, hero of Weybridge. We walked up Charing Cross Road which, of all the locations in London I had seen so far, seemed the least changed, still a warren of bookshops and barrows laden with tattered volumes. As a girl I had always loved coming to London, not for the clothes or the cafes or the shows, but for the books, always the books. This feeling, of stumbling upon a fragment of the past, was so strong that I briefly found myself overcome. Philip, always more sensitive than he looked, gave me his arm, and we walked on in silence.

I saw a new book on sale, prominently displayed: General Marvin and Why We Must Fight An Unending War, by Arthur Conan Doyle.

We cut through Oxford Street and Portland Place. On the Marylebone Road we ignored placard-bearers urging us to visit Madame Tussaud’s, where a new diorama showed the ‘true horrors’ of the Martians’ feeding habits. Philip said the exhibit was popular.

It was with relief, for me at least, that we reached the green spaces of Regent’s Park, although the light was fading fast. But even here much was changed; the expanses of grass had been largely given over to vegetable plots, meant as demonstrations for householders urged to grow food in their own lawns. And where once children flew kites and rode their bicycles, now the only youngsters marched in crocodiles or dug at the ground, and even put on what looked like a mock battle.

Later I would learn of the transformation Marvin had inflicted on the education system. The motto of the new movement was an old quotation of Wellington’s, on seeing a cricket match at Eton: ‘There grows the stuff that won Waterloo.’ Well, now Eton and the other schools turned out nothing but officers, while the younger siblings of the scholars were enticed into joining a new movement called the Junior Sappers, organised by Baden-Powell: boys and girls as young as five or six, digging trenches or binding mock wounds. All this was part of a general cleansing of the national moral character, as Marvin’s supporters called it. I was dismayed at what I saw, coming at with unprejudiced eyes from across the Atlantic. Was this the future of Britain – the child soldier?

We passed the Zoological Gardens – now closed up and empty of animals – and crossed the Albert Road to climb Primrose Hill. The view opened up around us as it always had, the hill itself seeming to rise out of the greenery of Regent’s Park, beyond which the great reef of the city was visible, the wounded dome of St Paul’s, the new concrete excrescences of Westminster and Whitehall, the ethereal glitter of the Crystal Palace, and the Surrey hills in the distance.

Here we stood before what had been the landing site of the seventh Martian cylinder, and the nucleus of what had become the largest single Martian construction during the War. This was fenced off as had been the pits in Surrey. But of the three inert fighting-machines Walter had glimpsed here on that hot summer’s day at the end of the War in 1907, one had been left standing, a tripod stark and disconcerting in profile.

A fairground had been set up, a roundabout with cars and horses, a steam organ, coconut shies, balloon races. Thus, around the feet of the ghastly monument, small children played. I looked up at the brazen cowl of the thing, that mechanical component so like a head.

And it was at that moment that I had what Philip described as my ‘turn’.

After I recovered – I sat on a bench for a while, with Philip hovering solicitously – we took a taxi to the police centre at the Barbican, where I was processed with cold efficiency, though it was nine at night before I was released.

I allowed Philip to escort me back to the hotel at the Elephant and Castle, where I retired immediately, taking a cold supper in my room. I slept little, trying not to think of that which had disturbed me, on the Hill.

The next day was free. I felt I needed to see something of the real London, away from Philip’s kind but suffocating embrace, away from the military cynicism of the others. I still had old friends in the city, and I hastily called a couple from the hotel and made arrangements. I left the hotel early, avoiding Philip and the others.

Lunch was at an oyster house in Lambeth. Here I met a school friend who ran a soup kitchen.

For all his grand visions, and whatever he might have done for national security, Marvin had delivered an economy that was faltering at best. I was told that though trade unions and the like had long been banned, there was plenty of agitation, in the mines, the railways – even in Woolwich Arsenal, which manufactured a large percentage of the country’s munitions supply. All of this was brutally suppressed. And at the very bottom, they were opening up the workhouses once again. My friend had plenty of clients. I was lucky to be here in March, in a place like Lambeth, said my friend, for in the summer the bugs came out.

That evening, by way of contrast, I called another old friend, the wife of a banker. We met in a tea shop – I relished the smell of coffee and tea and cigarette smoke, and the rattle of the dominoes – and Hilda loaned me a dress for the evening.

We went to the Savoy on the Strand, which I playfully told Hilda was nearly as grand as the Lusitania. We had caviar and crab and mushroom salad, and a bottle of Hock. The place was full of the usual menagerie, the bounders and the flappers and the roués and the Varsity youth, their cheeks flushed pink with the drink. We danced to the Havana Band, and we let ourselves be charmed by handsome German officers.

There wasn’t much to enjoy in Marvin’s morally uplifted Britain. They hadn’t quite had the nerve to prohibit alcohol, but prices had been sharply increased by tax levies. The government had shut down most sports (none of which I followed anyhow), save for cricket which Marvin regarded as ‘manly’, and football, but only as played by military personnel on leave. But if you had money there were still places in London to spend it well.

The Savoy was relatively uncrowded, I thought, but Hilda reminded me it was not yet the season. For now the upper classes were still mostly ensconced in their draughty country houses, but they would swarm in London during the summer – like the bugs in Lambeth, I thought to myself. The well-to-do had no problems with the new way of things, Hilda told me, unless it was to complain about the reintroduction of wild boar to the English countryside, so the Germans could hunt schwein…

Between dance numbers a kind of dumb waiter was circulated around the room. It had to be pushed around, but fine metallic tentacles curled from it, grasping bottles to pour, even mixing cocktails: Martian technology, of course, and a pretty advanced experiment. A glimpse of the industries of the future, perhaps. It seemed grotesque to me. The beautiful people clapped and laughed in delight…

We went on, deeper into the wilds of London – to a dance hall in Soho, where a band from America played ‘Tiger Rag’, and the dancing was as fierce as the music…

And throughout these foolish adventures I said nothing of what had given me my ‘turn’ on Primrose Hill. In the gloom of that March evening, even as the children of London had played around its tremendous feet, I thought I saw the Martian turn its head.

8 A MEETING AT OTTERSHAW

The next morning, even if I was a little tender, I was ready for Philip and Eden and Cook, and our drive to Surrey. It was March 25, a Thursday.

It was a little after lunch when we gathered at last in Ottershaw, some three miles to the north of Woking where Walter and Carolyne Jenkins had once shared a home – and, though this site was only a couple of hours’ walk from the location of the first Martian landing, it was just outside the Surrey Corridor perimeter.

Marina Ogilvy, our hostess for the evening, had long been a friend of Carolyne’s, though the closest relationship had been their husbands’. Benjamin Ogilvy had been a noted amateur astronomer, with his own small observatory in Ottershaw. In that eerie summer of ’07, he and Walter had watched through Benjamin’s telescope those reddish sparkings on the disc of planet Mars, those gushes of gas, that turned out to have been signs of the firing of a mighty cannon. What a disturbing thrill it must have been for Walter and Benjamin to see it with their own eyes! And the first landing at Horsell, so close to his home, must have been a kind of vindication for Benjamin the amateur – that and the response of the Astronomer Royal himself, who had come out to Horsell: the crowning moment of Benjamin’s life, perhaps. To be followed pretty rapidly by his death, in the first few hours of humanity’s encounter with the Martians.

Despite this grisly outcome, or even because of it perhaps, Marina had kept on the house, and she had maintained her husband’s observatory, neither of which had been damaged during the War. She had even let out the observatory to a local amateur-astronomical group, of which, of course, a profusion had sprung up after the night sky became an arena of threat for all of us. Later, of course, the telescopic observation of Mars by amateurs had been banned by the Marvin government under their Defence of the Realm Act of 1916; now Benjamin’s grand old telescope was without mirrors and eyepieces.

Anyhow, Marina had generously offered to host our telephonic meeting with Walter. Hers at least was one telephone number Walter had retained, even if he had lost contact with Carolyne, his own ex-wife. Carolyne had quickly sold her own house on the Maybury Road in Woking after her divorce. I suppose the reason for the breakdown of her marriage is obvious, if you read the Narrative. But it seemed somehow fitting to be in a location so close to the start of it all.

So here I was, with Philip. Here were Eric Eden and Bert Cook, who had followed us home in my wake, so to speak, both of them alarmed or intrigued by the tantalising promise of Walter’s news.

And of course my own ex-husband had to be summoned to the gathering too: Walter’s brother, Frank Jenkins. Thus the Martians, those interplanetary matchmakers, brought us together once again, for we had first met during the great flight from London. Frank was a medical student then, and I at nineteen a few years younger with ambitions to become a journalist. And for a while it worked. Frank completed his studies, and settled down to what had evidently always been his ambition, to become a general practitioner, and we bought a house in Highgate.

Bur Frank had always had something of his brother’s sense of destiny about him. Though heavily committed to his practise, he would often let himself be called away on what I described as his ‘missionary’ work among the destitute in the East End. And in ’16, when the DORA was passed, Frank surprised me by being drawn to Marvin’s new programmes of military service. He had quickly enlisted in the Territorial Force, a volunteer reserve, which Marvin, with typical cunning showmanship, renamed the ‘Fyrd’, a nod to deep English roots.

‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’ I had protested. ‘I can understand a schoolboy enjoying all the marching about. But you – you’re a man of healing.’

‘I heal humans,’ he said. ‘I would kill Martians. At High Barnet, remember, it was your brother’s revolver that saved us from the ruffians who wanted your cart, Julie, and a bit of my boxing from school, not my nascent medicals skills, or even your high spirits. There are times when one must fight…’

Well, to be a witness to self-assumed greatness was never enough for me. And besides – it is hard to record this so bluntly, but it was a difference between us – I had never wanted children. Not after the horrors of the Martian War; whatever you may read of Walter, that was its lingering effect on my psyche. Other survivors reacted similarly; Eric Eden, for example, never married. It is just as well the rest of the human race doesn’t share that flaw; indeed after the war there was a sharp rise in the number of births in Britain.

Frank understood, I think, but did not share my reluctance. Since we had divorced, Frank had married again, he had a child, and I was happy enough for him. But I wasn’t terribly comfortable to be in his presence again, here in this relic of our calamitous past, and I dare say nor was he.

So the six of us gathered early that afternoon, replete on Marina’s tea and finger sandwiches: myself, Carolyne, Philip Parris, Frank, Eric Eden and Bert Cook. It was a vivid scene, with our six faces glowing like moons in the light of a single, shadowed electric bulb – there are only dim lights in an observatory, of course. The building itself was a cylinder, topped by its hemispherical dome. The telescope sat on a stone pillar, beside the clockwork that enabled it to track the motion of the sky. That sky itself was visible through the open roof, a slice of blue. I remember the smell of oil and furniture polish and clockwork, with the dome over us adding a peculiar echo to the soft sounds of our voices. The main telescope itself, angular in the shadows, had an eerie Martian-like quality that made me unwilling to turn my back on it. It was rather cold, too. I could feel my own tension rising – a tension that had never gone away since Walter had approached me in New York. Of course it was news of the Martians I feared hearing, yet oddly longed to hear, if only to remove the suspense.

It was something of a shock when the telephone finally rang, right on cue.

9 A CALL FROM GERMANY

Bert Cook had some practical skills, and, with odds and ends from the observatory tool box and the remains of a broken Marvin’s Megaphone, he had managed to rig up a small loudspeaker so that we could all hear Walter’s thin voice, relayed from Germany. Though Walter asked to speak to Philip, that good man firmly passed the handset to the man’s former wife.

Her own voice firm, she said, ‘Walter? It’s me. Carolyne. I’m here safe and sound – we all are.’

‘Carolyne? I…’

‘What’s this all about, Walter? And where are you, for heaven’s sake?’

‘I am in Berlin – not in Vienna any more, as when I called Julie in New York. For with the coming emergency they let me out of the nut-hatch and ferried me here.’

I asked, speaking loudly for the pick-up, ‘What “emergency”? And who are “they”?’

‘Julie! I’m grateful you came. “They” are a stellar assemblage here at the Academy of Sciences, drawn from across Germany – indeed across Europe. Drawn to this rather well-equipped bunker under the tennis court, and I can tell you with some authority that many of our crowned heads are in similar bunkers, dotted around the planet: the Kaiser, the Emperors of China and Japan – no doubt the American President – and our own King George with his family is I believe deep in the turf beneath Balmoral.

‘As to who has been gathered here, you might call it a brains trust – with myself roped in on the basis of my Narrative, and I feel as if I am the comic relief. The Buster Keaton of Martian studies. You have Einstein and Schwarzschild and Rutherford, experts on one aspect or another of the atom and its nuclear energy which we suspect the Martians tap for their power. You have Rayleigh and others speculating on novel implementations of Martian technology, and Hohmann and Tsiolkovsky analysing and predicting interplanetary trajectories. They’ve even got the chap – what’s his name? – who once wrote a facetious but provocative essay on the future of humanity, and almost by accident came up with a sort of vision of the Martian form. “The Year Million Man” – it was called something of that sort. You may have heard me speak of him before. No longer young – about my age in fact – an odd, bouncing sort of fellow, but full of ideas.

‘And you have the astronomical exchange wires buzzing with sightings from Hale in Wisconsin and Lick in California and Nice in France – though that’s now under German control all of it organised and marshalled by Lowell’s team at Flagstaff; shame the old man himself isn’t alive to see this. Even the Vatican observatory at Castel Gandolfo has pitched in…’ Philip took the handset and spoke more sharply. ‘Get to the point, Walter. Sightings of what? What are you on about? What is it they are all observing, man?’

Again my own inner tension tightened a notch, and I could see it in the faces of the others.

But Walter named a planet we were none of us expecting: Jupiter. We all stared at each other, confused. But then, Walter Jenkins was nothing if not a wounded oracle.

Jupiter!

Philip snapped, ‘Walter, damn you! What about Jupiter?’

‘Why, a sigil has been observed on its cloudy face.’

‘A sigil?’

‘A mark, luminous and sinuous – entirely contained within the feature we call the Great Red Spot, as it happens, but easily visible from the earth. Indeed Dyson in England claims to have seen similar sigils on Jupiter’s larger moons, but that is disputed.’

Eric Eden said, ‘A sigil? You mean like the marks observed some years after the War, on Mars and Venus?’

‘That’s it, yes,’ Walter said when this was relayed. ‘The Mars and Venus sigils were identical, aside from scale ’

‘Of course they were. They were made by the same agency.’

‘The Martians?’

‘Of course the Martians! Who did not have the time to complete the construction of a similar symbol of possession of the earth back in ’07, though the work was begun.’

‘It was? A sigil on Earth? I never heard of that,’ said Eric, evidently confused ‘And the Jovian sigil—’

‘Quite different in character, obviously – the Jovians’ was a near-perfect circle—’

Frank broke in, ‘For God’s sake, Walter, can you never get to the point? What has all this to do with us, and your brains in Berlin?’

‘Everything,’ said Bert Cook. ‘For ’e’s giving us the bigger picture. Aren’t you, Walter?’

‘Bert?’ said Walter. ‘How odd to hear your voice again.’

‘How’s your poker play?’

‘And how’s your chess? You’re right, though. This is indeed the bigger picture. The context of our petty lives. For, you see, if the nebular hypothesis is to be believed, a kind of migration between the worlds is a necessity if life is to survive…’ As most people knew then, and understand better today, it was Kant who first suggested that the sun had once coalesced from a vast gas cloud – that was in the 1750s – and then Laplace, a great Newtonian, described how the spinning sun would cast off successive belts of dust and gas, expanding like smoke rings, toroids that would ultimately collapse into worlds. It took another century before the followers of the Scot physicist James Clerk Maxwell managed to resolve certain problems concerning the transfer of angular momentum…

The relevant point of the hypothesis, now universally accepted, is that the further a world is from the sun the older it must be, and the older, too, its freight of life and mind. But since life first emerged it has faced challenges. Our best physics has it that as the sun itself ages it is cooling, year on year. That is why the Martians were driven to the earth, as an Ice Age without end crept upon their planet. Some day our own world will suffer the same fate: the oceans will freeze from the coasts, the rains will diminish, the higher forms of life will die out and the lesser shrivel to sleeping spores. Whither mankind?

A mature but doomed civilisation must reach out to the younger worlds for room to live. It is the logic of Kant and Laplace; it must be so.

‘Which,’ Walter said, ‘is why the Martians must come again to our younger earth. Oh, they have made a stab at Venus – and that is the ultimate prize in the far future, for ourselves too.

Within Venus is only Mercury, younger still but a lifeless cinder.

Yes, Venus is the prize.

‘But –

‘But out on the rim sits Jupiter, largest planet of all – fully seven times as old as Mars, even. And this ancient and enormous planet may be the seat of—’

Frank grabbed the handset from Philip. ‘Into the inferno with Jupiter, Hubble and all! You wouldn’t have dragged us all together, from across the damn ocean, just to talk about Jupiter.

What is it you really have to tell us, man?’

But – typical of the man! – still Walter hesitated, as if gathering his thoughts.

And Eric Eden said, ‘We’re here to speak of the Martians, of course.’

An awkward silence! None of us knew how to respond, and Walter fell silent.

So it was Eric, again, who spoke next. ‘Actually I would say that serious military thinking argues against another invasion. After all, their first shot was a hopeless attempt. The Martians couldn’t stand the different atmospheric pressure, they couldn’t stand the difference in gravitation, our bacteria finished them up – them andtheir red weed. Hopeless from the start.’

‘But that was only a scouting mission,’ Walter whispered. ‘You have to start somewhere. Columbus in the Americas. And he thought he was in Asia! Consider how difficult it is to observe the earth from Mars… As seen from Mars, the earth is an inner planet – as Venus is to the earth – that is, closer to the sun. They must have known little of our world, before launching that first cylinder. And yet they knew something.’

Eric Eden frowned. ‘Prove it.’

‘I can, easily. Remember the timings of the firings of their great cannon? Ten shots in all, each fired at our midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, and each landed at local midnight. Now the Martian day is longer than ours – nearer twenty-four and a half hours – and “midnight” at the cylinders’ launch site did not coincide with that in Britain. So their timetable, for symbolic or other reasons, was keyed precisely, not to the time at the launch site—’

‘But to the time at the target,’ Eden said softly. ‘Even the launch timing! I never thought of that.’

‘Exactly. Nobody has, before me. As to the rest, consider how different our earth is to their own world, how much they must have learned, and how quickly! Their seas are shallow and cover only a third of their world; our deep oceans cover twice as much of earth. And so the oceans have become our highway of choice – on Mars, it must be the land.’

‘No wonder they were baffled by our ships, then,’ Frank said. ‘Off Tillingham, I saw them amazed by the torpedo ram that got amongst ’em.’

‘That’s it. Meanwhile, Mars is famously arid – it snows in winter, a fall that blankets the planet, but they need the canals seen by Schiaparelli and Lowell to water the land otherwise. Perhaps they have no rain! If you had never seen it, you might not even guess at the existence of such a phenomenon. And so, in poor weather, their Black Smoke would simply have washed out of the air, even before they laid it.’

Frank the doctor asked, ‘And what of our bacteria and viruses? That was new to them too, evidently.’

‘A lacuna in their knowledge when they came, yes. I speculate they must have eliminated whole microscopic continents of such creatures deep in their past, perhaps while they were in the process of remaking their own bodies. So long ago they simply forgot such perils – as a Roman, say, would have been surprised to be savaged by a wolf at the heart of a city in Italy. But they learned, the hard way, and next time will come prepared.’

Cook leaned forward. ‘But there’s a question of intelligence, you see. Of signalling and communications. Every soldier knows that. All those Martians who came ’ere are dead. How could they have got the message back, then, about gun boats and germs, back across space to Mars?’

Walter said tensely, ‘I explored this issue in my memoir. I observed the Martians in life as closely as anyone – yes, I still maintain it is so, Major Eden! And I still argue that what I saw with my own eyes, of their ability to carry through complex communal tasks all without a word being spoken, is evidence of some kind of telepathy. A direct link, mind to mind. Why, isn’t it logical? The Martians have stripped away their bodies until they are nothing but mind. And if a Martian mind may speak to another across a pit in England—’

Cook rubbed his chin. ‘Then why not between worlds?’

Philip, the voice of common sense, guffawed. ‘Oh, this is all fanciful.’

‘So would the idea of warriors from Mars have been once, cousin,’ Walter said regretfully.

Eden objected now, ‘But if that’s so why the sigils, the markings on the faces of the worlds?’

Cook said, ‘Nothing wrong with that. Just as a Navy tub will fly the White Ensign, even though those boys talk to each other with the wireless telegraph these days, instead of with flags like ol’ Nelson in ’is day.’

‘Or perhaps,’ Eden said with an uncertain grin, ‘it’s a marker. Telling the men from Jupiter to keep off.’

‘Or vice versa,’ Walter whispered. ‘Which is the point I’ve been trying to make…’

As this conversation unfolded, of the mind-reading of the Martians and other exotica, I glanced at Carolyne, Walter’s former wife, who had not been addressed since the beginning of the conversation. She sat rather slumped, her face an expressionless mask – not bitter, somehow accepting.

At last Philip, sensible as ever, cut across the talk. ‘Very well, Frank, you’ve done scaring us. Tell us your news, man!’

‘We’ve seen the shots,’ Walter said, almost gently. ‘The shots on Mars.’

‘Ah,’ said Eric Eden softly, sounding oddly disappointed.

And there it was – at last!

The tension broke within me, as if I had received a grim but not unexpected diagnosis of illness. I remembered again how I thought I had seen that solitary fighting-machine on Primrose Hill move its head-like cowl – as if in anticipation. It had distressed me – I thought I had been seeing things… Perhaps it knew, through some machine telepathy of its own…

This was the way of it with Walter, of course. If you’ve read his Narrative you’ll know he wasn’t a man to walk in a straight line. He set off from the ruins of Woking in search of his wife, at Leatherhead, and ended up on Primrose Hill, at the greatest concentration of Martians in England. Of course! If you want to find Walter Jenkins, go where the Martians are. And as then, so it was now, with this rambling affair of second-party messages and transatlantic crossings: in the end here we all were facing the Martians once again.

Philip was angry, reasonably enough. ‘You have such news, Walter, and you yattered on about Jupiter—’

‘But it’s as Bert said,’ Walter replied, his voice faint. ‘You have to see the bigger picture.’

‘Oh, to Hades with your bigger picture, you pompous ass,’ Frank protested. ‘When? When did the firing start? On February 27? Because if they kept to the same timetable as last time that’s when they’d had to have fired, with an opposition on April 21—’

Cook snarled. ‘And if it’s so, the governments have kept it quiet after all—’

‘No,’ Walter said softly. ‘Earlier than that. The strategy’s evidently different this time, although it’s not yet obvious how. The guns started firing earlier – nine days – on February 18.’

Frank was as furious as his cousin by now. ‘You’re saying now that they started to fire in February! Why, that means the landings must be close – what, days away, no more? And it is only now you warn us, with this farce of messages across the Atlantic?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Walter said, still more quietly. ‘You must understand that the information I have is partial, gathered in shards and scraps – the security is heavy here, and it was difficult for me to get in touch with you at all – then it took time for you to come together. I suppose I might have planned it better. I did my best, Frank, to give you this warning. I did my best.’

Oddly enough, I believed him.

And Cook, the military man, picked up on the key detail. ‘You said guns, Jenkins. The guns started firing. Not gun.’

‘That’s it. More than one this time, Bert. More than one gun, on Mars.’

We looked at each other in horror, we veterans of the First War.

Walter continued to speak, his voice frail and faint, dogged. ‘We think we saw the casting of the new weapons – just as, in retrospect, we glimpsed the casting of the first at the opposition of 1894, when the workers at Nice and Lick saw an anomalous glaring on the surface. They had one cannon last time. Now it’s ten. Ten we’ve seen to fire, anyhow. A belt of them in low latitudes, spread around the planet.

‘We’ve been able to map it against Schiaparelli’s scheme of the canals. Perhaps you know that the canals are tremendous affairs, some thousands of miles long – and they meet, in groups of three or four or five, with geometric precision, in junction places, “nodes” as Lowell called them, or “oases”. The greatest of them all is a node called Solis Lacus, the Lake of the Sun – a sort of nerve centre for the whole planet, I suspect, from which any point can be reached. But there are others, at Trivium Charontis, Ceraunius, the Cyane Fons. These junctions of transport network may be like our cities.’

Philip the industrialist said, ‘And so centres of population, of manufacture. And if you’re seeking to build an interplanetary cannon—’

Cook nodded. ‘All right. Ten cannon instead of one. Last time it was ten shots—’

‘This time there were a hundred, Bert. Ten from each gun. Last time a flotilla; this time a veritable fleet.’

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘But what about the oppositions? Why come now, four years before the next minimum approach?’ I could hear a complaining whine in my voice, I admit. Like everybody else in those days, I would watch the skies at every opposition with Mars, even the most unfavourable. But I knew that the next most likely date for an attack was two years hence. Not now! It’s not fair! That was how I, quite unreasonably, reacted.

But Walter was reason itself, in his fashion. ‘But last time they came in ’07, two years before that minimum. Perhaps they planned, and abandoned, a follow-up shot for the perihelic optimum at ’09. We’ll never know, of course. There’s no reason to suppose they haven’t expanded their capabilities to exploit less and less favourable oppositions – why not?’

Cook nodded grimly. ‘Well, at least we’ll be prepared this time, if we can get the guns up before they open their shells – and if we can predict where they’ll fall.’

‘But they may not land in any kind of neat sequence,’ Walter said. ‘Oh, there will be constraints of graphic geometry.’

It was a remark that baffled me at the time – but it turned out to be key to the whole issue, as I will relate in its proper place.

‘But we know,’ Walter went on, ‘that even last time the cylinders did not simply drop from the sky. We know they must have slowed at least, to avoid being smashed against the ground like so many falling meteorites. Most observers saw green flashes as they fell – I did myself. Tsiolkovsky and others speculate this is some kind of motor, a rocket perhaps, which slowed and directed a cylinder’s trajectory.’

‘That’s a nasty thought,’ Cook said softly. ‘So we can’t predict anything from the dates of the launch. They could land anywhere, any time they liked.’

‘That’s it,’ Walter said. ‘And though they fired off ten cylinders per night, there’s nothing to stop them joining up in space. We can only wait and watch. There’s a global network of spotter ’scopes watching the skies, international and highly secret. We might have a few hours’ notice, at best.’ He sighed. ‘But to me their destination is obvious, and I’ve made my case as forcefully I can to the authorities. They must return to England.’

The six of us absorbed that dread but oddly authoritative warning in a brief silence. I think I had expected it – the Martian on the Hill! Even so it was a shock.

Eden said, ‘Walter, I still don’t see it all. As I understand the way you’ve explained it, they came to Britain last time because we had been first into the Industrial Revolution – yes? London the largest city. All of which you could see from Mars. And if you believe, as the Martians seem to, that we must be a unified civilisation, as they may be, then you come to the World Capital for a quick decapitation. Fine. But, look, they could land anywhere on the earth. Why England again?’

‘Because of what I saw at Shepperton. Bert, I thought you saw it too. When Marvin’s guns downed a fighting-machine, and the battle was done, the others came back for it, and carried it back to the pit at Horsell. You know, it’s easy to speak of the Martians as evil and unethical and so forth. We should not judge their ethics on the way they behave towards us, for we are vermin – farm animals at best – to them. No, we must judge them on how they behave to each other. They talk, they cooperate – they come back for their fallen. And that’s why they’ll come back to England.’

I thought with a shudder of the pickled specimen of a Martian, on display in the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum in Kensington. I myself had viewed it many times.

At last Philip said, ‘So this is why you called us.’

‘I am aware have called some of you, Julie, back from places of relative safety.’

But I was already thinking ahead, planning. I would call on my sister-in-law, she with whom I had fled the Martians last time. ‘Never mind that. You did the right thing, Walter,’ I said as firmly as I could.

Eden glanced at Cook. ‘I think I’ll go back to my old regiment, at the Inkerman barracks. What about you, Bert?’

Cook’s eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, if the Martians come again I know just where I want to be.’

Frank stiffened. ‘And I’ll get my wife and son to safety, and I thank you for that, Walter. But as to myself – if the Martians do come, I will have my duty as a doctor and a soldier, of the Fyrd at least.’

‘Of course you will,’ I said coldly.

Walter whispered, ‘And – Carolyne?’

She looked up. ‘Now you think of me?’

‘Always. You know that I – before – that I had counted you among the dead…’

‘Oh, Walter—’

‘Philip?’

Walter’s cousin looked up. ‘I’m here.’

‘I must ask you to care for her, as you did before—’

‘Oh, you fool, Walter.’ Carolyne snatched the telephone handset, and yelled into it, ’You bloody fool!’ And she slammed it down into its cradle.

Marina Ogilvy took her hands.

Philip shook his head. ‘You’re right, he is a fool. And so indirect. Always was. But I wonder if all of this – never mind the babble about Jupiter – was all, really, about saving you, Carolyne.’

I said cautiously, ‘He does love you. He always did.’

‘I know,’ said Carolyne bleakly. ‘I read about it in his book.’

10 TO STANMORE AND LONDON

We all stayed over in Ottershaw that night.

Marina took one more call from Walter, in the small hours, and then she woke the rest of us. He was able to confirm the likely date of the landings. It would be at midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, the morning of Monday March 29. The logic made some sense; the landing would be four weeks, four days after the final gun firing, just as with the sequence of 1907. Still there had been no public announcement.

Monday, then. Our meeting at Ottershaw had been on the Thursday. We had little time. On the Friday morning, after a breakfast and hurried farewells, we scattered to our various destinations.

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, filled 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:

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.

At Baker Street station they joined in an elaborate game of queuing up and filtering through entrances and turnstiles meant for a comparative trickle commuting clerks. The station itself was a box of noise, the ringing and clanging of shunting engines, the shriek of whistles, thousands of excited voices echoing like a gull colony – but above it all there was a sense of organisation. In some ways, Frank would say to me, he thought the efficiency and order of the railways, including the underground, was one of the finest expressions of our civilisation. During the first Martian attack the railways had kept functioning even after the government itself had effectively collapsed, and here they were now, an essential part of the defence of the nation.

As they waited, he got to know Verity Bliss and her friends a little better. They all knew each other; they had been ‘munitionettes’ working at the Woolwich Arsenal, where they had picked up their first aid training, before signing up as VADs together under the prompting of the government’s public exhortations.

A military bakery van worked its way through the crowd, handing out free sandwiches, cakes, hot sausages, bottles of lemonade and water. Frank even managed to nab a paper cup of coffee. ‘Make the most of it,’ a regular told them, when some of the VADs were reluctant to take the food. ‘You sleep when you can, eat all you can get, for you never know when the Army will trouble to feed you again. And if you don’t want that sausage sandwich, love, I’ve got a good home for it…’

It was mid-afternoon, and Frank was already tired from all the standing around, when at last they were bundled onto a train. It was a Metropolitan Line commuter special that was standing room only before it finally pulled away. Frank and his VADs, among the last aboard, found themselves close to a door through which they could see something of the stations they passed through. The mood remained cheerful enough, though the MPs assigned to each compartment kept a watchful eye. In Frank’s compartment a tommy accompanied bawdy songs with a mouth organ, and at times he heard the skirl of bagpipes coming from a carriage further up the train.

Soon they were beyond Hampstead and out in the country, passing through Wembley and Harrow. They did not stop at intermediate stations, but the train did slow, and local people came out to clap and wave flags, passing up food and apples and even postcards. Frank saw troopers leaning out of the windows, trying to grab bottles of beer. And, once out of the city, Frank saw columns of troops marching, and howitzers and field guns drawn by motor and by horses. He wondered if the farmers and publicans were having their horses requisitioned, as he had lost his car: war always demanded a great number of horses.

The general flow was away from London, towards the northwest, towards Middlesex and Buckinghamshire, a pattern that did not go unnoticed by the more experienced soldiers on the train, who spoke in a variety of accents, mostly from the rich linguistic pot of London:

‘I reck’n someone knows where they’re coming down this time.’

‘Yeah, some ast – ast – rologer.’

‘Last time they came dahn in Surrey, din’t they? Trying sumfin diff’rent this time, looks like,’ said an older, scarred man.

‘So what? Big guns would’ve knocked ’em flat las’ time, and it will this time if’n we get the chance.’

‘Won’t be like las’ time. Coming down somewhere else, in’t they? If that’s diff’rent, the rest will be. Stands to reason they’ll try something new. They lost, din’t they? They’ll learn.’

‘Huh. We don’t always learn.’

Laughter at that, and ribald comments about the failings of various commanding officers.

But the scarred man did not laugh. ‘If’n they’re smart, they’ll learn. Look at the Germans. They flattened the French in 1870, and they hit ’em even harder in ’14, and they won again.’

Nobody had a reply to that.

13 APPROACHING UXBRIDGE

The train stopped at Ickenham, and they were disembarked. This, Frank knew, was short of the terminus of the line, at Uxbridge. Here personnel were formed up and marched away, and equipment was hauled off along the roads by horses or trucks – all generally heading further to the north-west, towards the town.

Frank and Verity, herding their little flock of MOs, nurses and VADs, saw little of the village of Ickenham before they were marched out into the country. They heard mention of units of troops from all over the country: the 4^th Battalion, 5^th Fusiliers; the 2^nd Battalion, King’s Liverpool Regiment; the 1^st King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry. There were divisional troops too, specialists with their equipment, the artillery batteries there were Royal Engineers, the sappers. There was wireless gear and cables for the field telegraphs, such mundane gear as a field bakery, and more exotic items such as sections of pontoon bridges and the envelopes of spotting balloons.

Verity touched Frank’s arm and pointed at troops on motorcycles heading up the roads and across country, off to the north-west. ‘Scouts,’ she said.

‘Heading where they expect the battle to be joined.’

‘I imagine so.’ She shivered, and Frank imagined she was thinking that those forward units might be among the first casualties of any action – though somehow that prospect still seemed unreal.

Before very long the marching column broke up, and Frank’s group was led to a series of field hospitals, tents erected in the fields. The MP who brought them there briskly summarised orders he read from a sheet. ‘Get yourselves set up. You’ve got a water supply and oil heaters, or should do, check it all over. Tents over here, beds over there, supplies and whatnot over there. Bandages and a blood store, and knock-out drops and surgeons’ saws…’

Not all the medical staff were terribly experienced, Frank saw, and some of them paled as these words were delivered with gruesome relish. ‘That’s enough, Corporal, we get the idea.’

‘Then get to it.’ At the last minute the MP remembered to salute his senior officer, and made to turn away.

‘Hold on,’ Frank said. ‘What about the rest of it?’

‘What rest of it?’

‘We’ve been on our feet all day.’

‘And I’ve been walking around shouting at people, sir, and you don’t hear me complaining.’

‘We’ve only eaten once—’

‘Field kitchens over there.’ He pointed. ‘You can work out your own rota for that. Lavatories thataway.’

Frank looked around again; he had the sinking feeling he was missing something obvious, and was on the point of making a fool of himself. ‘Yes, but – where do we sleep, Corporal?’

The MP stared at him, and grinned. ‘No sleep for any of us tonight, Captain. Balloon goes up at midnight. Or rather, something big and fat and heavy from Mars comes down at midnight. Then we’ve got the nineteen-hour window, and when that’s done – why, then I reckon we’ll all be due a good kip.’

Midnight, Frank thought. So they were coming at midnight, just like before – just as Walter had noted. Looking around at the young, apprehensive faces around him – many of them could only have been children last time – he kept his sudden nervousness to himself. Nineteen-hour window, though: what could that mean?

It was late afternoon and the light was already fading. Seeing that he would get no more from the MP, he briskly set Verity, the junior MOs and the rest to organising the field hospitals and their equipment – hoping very much that he gave the impression that he knew what he was talking about – and then went stomping off to find ‘somebody in charge’, as he would later note in his journal.

He came upon a kind of command post: a lot of senior officers, and map tables and field telephones and wireless units and telegraphs, and a coffee urn. It took some moments before a young officer called Fairfield, a lieutenant-colonel, took pity on him. ‘Sorry about this, Doctor – Captain. The trouble is we are running around a bit to get organised, and you MO types don’t fit easily into the command structure.’ He was perhaps a decade younger than Frank, with a clipped public school accent and an air of wry amusement. ‘Coffee?’

‘No, thank you, sir.’

‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘You do?’

‘Good job it’s not raining, what? Although it will be raining Martians soon enough.’

‘Where, sir? Where is the cylinder coming down? I know the telescopic spotters have been tracking them.’

Fairfield raised an eyebrow. ‘Not so much “cylinder” as “cylinders”, Doctor. But the one that interests us seems to be heading slap bang for the middle of Uxbridge, which is bad luck for that unlovely town. Population’s already been evacuated, by the way, off to the north, so you don’t need to worry about them.’ He glanced up. ‘Closer to the hour we’ll have planes up there, even a Zeppelin I’m told, courtesy of the Kaiser. They might give us a better fix.’ He eyed Frank. ‘To be honest I’m not sure how well you’ve been briefed.’

‘Hardly at all.’

‘Well, that’s typical. What you do need to know is that a regular arrangement for treating the wounded has already been established. You have aid posts at the front itself – that is, the site where we have our best guess about where the cylinder will come down – and behind that, within stretcher-bearer distance, you have casualty clearing stations, and behind that it’s ambulances back to the field hospitals, which is where you come in. You haven’t drawn the short straw, you see, Doctor – the forward staff, the MOs and the rest, are already at the front-line clearing stations.’

Frank nodded. ‘Thank you. That’s clear enough. The MP said a couple of other things. Nineteen hours ’

‘He has been talkative, hasn’t he? I’m told that after the first cylinder fell last time, near Woking—’

‘At Horsell Common.’

‘It took that long, you see, for the Martians to unscrew the bally thing, and for the Heat-Ray gun and other nasties to start poking out, and for those fighting-machines to climb out and stretch their legs and get to work. So this time we should have that window of opportunity, to shell the thing while they’re helpless.’

Frank felt suspicious of his confident tone. ‘If all goes as it did last time—’

‘Of course I would hope we will finish the thing off in two hours, not nearly twenty.’ He asked blandly, ‘Is there anything else, Doctor?’

‘You said “cylinders”. There was only one at a time before.’

‘Ah. Well, that is something new. The astronomers have been definite about this, if a little late in the day. Can’t blame them for that, I suppose.’ He faced Frank. ‘There are more than fifty of ’em coming in, all across this part of the country.’

Fifty. Frank remembered his brother’s talk of the array of cannons spread across Mars, firing night after night, and the fleets of cylinders perhaps forming up in space. And now that deadly barrage had crossed interplanetary space and was about to fall here. Fifty together! And from what Walter had said there would be another fifty following after…

The Lieutenant-Colonel clapped his shoulder. ‘Anyhow, we only have one to worry about.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Now look, if there’s nothing else urgent…’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Carry on, Captain Jenkins.’

Once the sun had gone down, it felt like a long wait until midnight.

Frank’s staff had got the field hospital organised as well as it could be, and he was relieved there had been no significant balls-up with the supplies. But there was only so often he could check and recheck it all. At about seven, he gratefully accepted Verity’s idea of mounting a few exercises, with volunteers playing the roles of incoming wounded. The VADs especially went at this with a will, if inexpertly. Frank knew that there could be gruesome accidents at munitions plants, but he had the impression that most of the VADs had little experience much beyond their training.

At nine he encouraged those who felt like it to use the hospital beds to nap. Few could sleep, though several lay down.

At ten he ordered his people to eat, have coffee or water. He caught one of the junior doctors with a hip flask, which he confiscated and locked away in a chest, promising to hand it back after the ‘battle’, as they were calling it – unless some wounded had a greater need of the rather good brandy it contained.

At eleven he ordered his staff to use the latrines, in a rota. He murmured to Verity, ‘But of course I’m expecting rather a few loose bladders before the night is out, come what may.’

As midnight approached, the two of them tucked in behind a barricade of sand bags, looking north-west. They both had medical bags at their sides, and they wore regulation steel helmets. The sky was clear that Sunday night, with only a light mist obscuring the stars.

They spoke little. Verity seemed too nervous to say much of herself. He did gather she was single, and had only just moved out of her parents’ home into an apartment near Woolwich with some of the other workers when the call-up came. He tried to distract her with talk of himself – or rather of his brother, whose book, he glumly suspected, had enjoyed a spike in sales that day.

Of course she had heard of Walter. ‘I was only twelve,’ she said. ‘We had been visiting family in the Midlands when the news started coming out of London. My father got us on a boat to Ireland, out of Liverpool. I missed the whole show.’

‘You were lucky. And now here you are in the opening overs of the rematch.’

‘But your brother’s book – it made it so real. I met him once. There was an illustrated edition. He came to Foyles on the Charing Cross Road to give a talk. I remember he complained about the drawings, though. I got him to sign a copy for me.’

‘Of course you did,’ Frank said, gritting his teeth.

‘Captain, you saw one fall, didn’t you? A cylinder. Last time.’

‘Yes. The sixth, that came down at Wimbledon. That was at midnight too. We were sleeping out in the open, myself and my future wife and her sister-in-law. Long story.’ He glanced at his watch; it wanted five minutes of midnight.

‘What did it look like?’

‘The cylinder? Like a falling star, sliding across the sky. Green flashes.’

‘Green? Then that’s what we must look out for, I suppose.’ She raised small binoculars and scanned the sky.

For a time neither of them spoke. Frank imagined a great circle drawn around Uxbridge, the quiet, deserted town at the centre, with its electric street lights pointlessly glowing, and a ring of troops like themselves with their guns and field hospitals and binoculars, all waiting, waiting.

‘Captain, it’s gone midnight. My watch has a luminous dial… Midnight plus ten seconds. Fifteen now.’

From somewhere a Cockney voice floated, singing to a carol tune: ‘Why are we waiting? Why-y are we waiting?’ Chuckles of laughter, a soft command to be still.

‘I don’t see any green flashes—’

There was a crack, a detonation high in the air above them. Then a searing light that smashed down from the sky, coming from directly above them. White light – not green at all.

Plunging at the dark earth.

‘Down!’ Frank lay flat,and pressed the back of Verity’s neck to force down her head.

Then the shock hit them.

14 THE LANDING OF THE FIRST WAVE

I learned later that the astronomical spotters had got some of it right – at least the number of projectiles, and the rough location of their fall. None had anticipated the manner of that fall.

A total of fifty-two cylinders landed on central England that night. Tsiolkovsky and co-workers later calculated, given comparisons with the 1907 assault, that they must have come in five flotillas, each of ten or so shots: launched on the 18^th February, and then on the 20^th, 22^nd, 24^th and 26^th.

(The cylinders to fall the next night, at that moment still en route to the earth, had been fired off on the interleaving nights, from the 19^th through to the 27^th February…)

As Tsiolkovsky had suggested, the Martians used engines during their interplanetary flight to tweak their trajectories, the lead volleys slowing to allow latecomers to catch up, so that in the end all the cylinders of the first wave fell simultaneously – at least within the limits of accuracy of the timepieces of the military observers who saw them fall – at midnight of Monday, March 29. And the last cylinder to be fired, accompanied by its tardier brothers, landed on the earth four weeks and four days after its launch – the precise same timing as the cylinders launched in ’07.

(And meanwhile the second wave cylinders were still coordinating their own fall, out in space…)

That first fifty-two fell together in a great ring of sixteen miles diameter, roughly centred on the town of Amersham in Buckinghamshire. The circle of impacts reached out as far as High Wycombe to the south-west, Uxbridge to the south-east where Frank was stationed, and Berkhamstead to the northeast. The cylinders came down in a chain, each roughly a mile from its neighbours on either side. There were no green flashes this time, no attempts to slow the craft – if true craft they were, rather than inert missiles fitted with steering engines. Their purpose with that first wave was evidently not to deliver Martians and their equipment intact to the earth, as had been the case with the Horsell cylinder and its siblings of the First War.

The sole objective was destruction.

In their analysis of the 1907 event, Denning and others with expertise in the kinematics of meteorites had pointed out that by landing their cylinders relatively softly, the Martians had actually thrown away a kind of advantage of position – the advantage of the sky over the earth. Barringer, meanwhile, has studied the Canyon Diablo crater in Arizona, and has suggested that it may have been formed, not by volcanic action or by such events as a steam explosion, but by the uncontrolled fall from space of an iron-rich meteorite a few tens of yards across – that is, of a similar size to a Martian cylinder. A hole in the earth some half-mile across and two hundred yards deep: there you have a measure of the harm such a fall can inflict. Indeed, Walter’s account of his experience of close proximity to a cylinder-fall on the houses in Sheen gives a vivid impression of the damage done even by these relatively gentle landings.

(Incidentally one speculative writer – the man-of-the-year-million essayist whom Walter met in Berlin – has irresponsibly suggested that the Barringer crater was created by such a cylinder, an early Martian visitor of the remote past.)

This was the simple but cruder tactic adopted by the Martians to begin their second assault on the earth: to use the brute kinetic energy of these dummy projectiles to smash any resistance before it had a chance to escape, let alone respond.

Thus the event that befell England that March night. Consider the impact of a single cylinder. In its last seconds of its existence the Uxbridge cylinder angled in from the west, across the Atlantic Ocean. It punched its way through the earth’s atmosphere in fractions of a second, blasting away the air around it, blowing it into space, leaving a tunnel of vacuum where it had passed. And when it hit the ground, it delivered all its energy of motion as heat in a fraction of a second. The cylinder itself must have been utterly destroyed, says Denning, and a great wave pulsed outward through the bedrock. A narrow cone of incandescent rock mist fired back along the cylinder’s incoming trajectory, back through the tunnel in the air dug out in those last moments – some more distant observers thought they had seen a vast searchlight beam. Around this central glowing shaft, a much broader spray of pulverised and shattered rock, amounting to hundreds of times the cylinder’s own mass, was blown out of the widening crater. Then the shock waves came, a battering wind, a searing heat. Even the ground flexed and groaned, as a crater a mile wide was dug into the flesh of the earth.

And in that same moment the event was repeated in that grand ring, all around the target circle: seen from the air (as photographs taken the next day proved) it was a circle of glowing pits, every one still more impressive than the Arizona crater, neatly punched into the English ground. And any military units which had been within a mile of the infall were lost.

Many had believed that England would not be subject to a second Martian attack, but enough had believed it possible, and more had feared it, that the authorities had been compelled to prepare. The result had been a reconfiguring of our military and economy, a recasting, perhaps for the worse, of our international relationships, and a coarsening of the fabric of our society. All this had however delivered a much more effective home army, and when the attack had finally come the mobilisation, after years of planning and preparation, had been fast and effective.

But as a result of that promptness a little less than half the new British Army, as measured in numbers of regular troops and front-line materiel, was destroyed in the first minutes of the assault – most of the lost troops leaving no trace. And even those on the periphery of the landfalls, like Frank, endured great trials.

The violence was astonishing, overwhelming. To Frank, lying in the dirt, it felt as if the world itself were coming apart, the very bedrock shuddering, dirt thrown high into the air, his own body hurled and wrenched. Waves of heat washed over the trench above him, and then a kind of hail – fragments of hot rock, he thought, that stung where they hit him. The contrast with a moment before was astounding – the orderly processes that had led him to this point smashed and shattered in a moment – as if he had suddenly been born into some new, primordial realm, a helpless mote.

He lay flat on his belly, face pressed into the dirt, hands over his head. He stayed down behind the sandbags until the ground had stopped shaking, the waves of heat and noise had roared past them, and the thin hail of hot rock fragments had ceased to fall.

Then he dared to look up, over the parapet. There was only billowing dust, as if the world had been erased.

Verity’s face was a coin in the gloom, as blank and bewildered as he felt. When she spoke it sounded as if she had had the breath knocked out of her. ‘What was that? The Heat-Ray?’

‘Not that… I don’t know.’ Frank stood up. ‘A terrible disaster.’ He glanced around. He saw the camp in disarray, tents blown over, even a great field gun toppled on its side. Officers stood over communications specialists with their telegraphs and field telephones, striving to no avail to contact lost units. And Frank saw now that his field hospitals were blown down, the beds and other supplies scattered. ‘This will take some clearing up.’ His very words seemed foolish as he spoke. How could any human agency cope with this?

There was the sound of a motorcycle revving. Verity pointed. ‘Look.’

A scout, goggles and gas-mask fixed, headlight bright, rode a motorcycle into the billowing smoke: immediately heading into the zone of destruction. Soon more prepared to follow.

‘That’s where we need to be,’ Frank said. ‘Where the wounded are – if any survive at all. Come on. Pick up your bag.’

‘But the hospitals—’

‘Plenty of muscle here to put all that back together. What we must do first is to find our patients.’

He led the way beyond the parapet, digging a torch from his pocket to light the way. They both donned their gas-masks, meant for protection against the Black Smoke, but now the goggles and filters served to protect eyes and lungs from the dust of the shattered landscape. Glancing around, Frank saw that more of the VADs were following their lead, carrying torches and lanterns.

‘We must go in,’ he said.

The staff around him, MOs and VADs, all terribly young, terribly scared, only looked at him. He had to take the lead, he saw. He turned into the dark, took one step, two. They followed.

The ground was broken, as if a great wave had passed through it, pocked as if a hail of meteorites had struck. And it was littered, he saw, littered with wrecked guns and vehicles, and with human remains. A limb here, an open hand there, a detached skull: some of the more complete bodies lay draped over the parapets of trenches. Disarticulated: a clinical word that floated to the top of Frank’s stunned mind. Not even burned, most of them, just torn apart. Yet he saw movement, obscured by dust, a little deeper into the zone.

Verity stood at his side, her gloved hand over her mouth. ‘Perhaps this all seems very small, if you’re looking at it from Mars.’

They came upon a couple of soldiers, one dragging the other, who appeared to have a broken leg and was badly burned on the face. Frank and Verity ran to the men, and helped lower the wounded fellow gently to the ground.

‘It’s nothing,’ the man said, his speech distorted by the damageto his face. ‘A cushy. Nothing…’

‘Don’t talk,’ Frank said.

The soldier who had been doing the carrying didn’t seem badly injured. He just stared, apparently unable to speak.

‘Shock,’ said Verity briskly. ‘Nothing to be done for him now. Just take him back.’ A couple of VADs took the shocked man in hand and led him away.

Verity briskly examined the wounded man. ‘He’s bleeding out. He needs a tourniquet on this leg. Cold water for the burns on his face. Get the leg set and splinted…’ She looked at Frank, her uncertainty evident despite the masked face. ‘If you agree, Doctor.’

‘Of course. Go ahead.’

As she worked, Frank stood and looked around once more. The dust was clearing a little now. Still a tremendous heat came from the direction of the cylinder’s fall – whatever was left of Uxbridge must be burning vigorously, he thought, and the fields and the forests around the town. From the camp, others were coming out, medical staff but also common soldiers, NCOs, even the officers, meeting the handful of men and women who came limping out of the disaster. Frank already had an intuition that the percentage of survivors would be small, that the wounded they encountered from the periphery of the infall.

One older man, an experienced MO, bent over and vomited helplessly. When he straightened up, wiping his mouth, he said, ‘What can we do here? It’s a butcher’s yard.’

‘Yet there is life.’ Frank pointed. ‘I saw movement, there.’

Verity walked that way. ‘It is a horse. I think its back is broken.’ She took her revolver, and, hesitantly, but murmuring words of comfort, she pressed it to the animal’s temple and pulled the trigger. The report seemed shockingly loud. ‘Never had to do that before; I’m no country girl.’

‘What can we do?’ the older man asked again. ‘What can we do?’

‘Medicine,’ Frank said, as determinedly as we could. ‘Whatever we can. Come, Follow me. Fan out…’

So they found their patients, among the dead. Most of the beds of the field hospital remained empty. But throughout the night Frank and his team went back into the broken landscape to seek survivors, or at least to tend the dying, over and over. All this was lit sporadically by torchlight and lanterns: human forms coming together, dimly glimpsed in air laden with soot and smoke.

15 MONDAY IN LONDON

Monday morning has never been my favourite time of the week. Especially if one is tied to the routine of an office and the commute, it is a grey dawn on the brightest of days, when a lazy Sunday evening at the end of which one somehow feels as if one is oneself again is revealed to have been a deception, and with a hurried breakfast heavy in the stomach, there’s nothing for it but to swarm ant-like to the great hives of the office districts. And bit by bit one’s own identity is shed for the duration. But there can scarcely have been a more dreadful Monday morning to wake to than that of the 29^th March – in London not since the days of the First Martian War itself, perhaps, or in Paris since 1914 when the Germans came to town. And many of us were already awake, I suspect – it had been a sleepless night for me ever since midnight, and the Martians’ first landfall.

I had reached central London from Stanmore, not without difficulty. I stayed in a hotel on the Strand. I had taken the room at an exorbitant cost – everything had been heroically marked up in those final days and hours – but, unexpectedly free of the burden of my sister-in-law and being a journalist, I had determined to be in the thick of things: the story of London in the Second War, whether the Martians got that far or not, would be a tale for the ages. Bluntly put, I expected a retrospective commission from the Saturday Evening Post to boost my savings.

Before Sunday was over the telescopic spotters had done their work, and the government and the military authorities had already alerted the people through the papers and the Megaphones and the loudspeaker vans that the Martians were on the way, that this time they were heading for Middlesex and Bucks, well away from the city – that the Army was on the move and ready to deal with them. They were coming back! It was terrifying; it was thrilling – thrilling if we really were ready for them, at least.

What did I expect, that Sunday night? Perhaps to see a falling star or two, as when, under a starry sky on a short June night, Frank had watched the sixth cylinder of the ’07 wave fall towards Wimbledon, while my sister-in-law and I dozed – a green flash, falling silent beyond the hills – a gentle landing by comparison, as we know now. And then there would be the clatter of distant artillery as our boys got their revenge for what had befallen their fellows the last time.

Not a bit of it. As Churchill would put it later, the dastardly Martians returned to the pitch, but refused to play the game by the rules.

So there I was at midnight, fully dressed, waiting for the show.

And – peering from my sixth floor window towards the north, for I had made sure I got a room with a view on that side – I saw what appeared to be a sudden storm: tremendous flashes of white light like bolts of lightning that reached from the ground high into the air, miles high it seemed to me, and not a bit of green about them, all in a kind of eerie silence.

Then, a full minute later, the sound broke, like tremendous claps of thunder falling on the city; I heard the smashing of windows. There was a deep shuddering of the very fabric of the hotel too, and I sensed tremendous energies pulsing through the earth beneath us as through the air. (I was some ten miles from the nearest landfall of the Martians’ dummy projectiles, as I learned later.) It was over in a moment, though the horizon continued to burn red.

In the returning silence I heard people call, distantly, ‘Quake! Earthquake! Get out, get out!’ I had met survivors of the San Francisco event of 1906, and I could sympathise with the anxiety in that voice – though I strongly suspected this was no earthquake.

And then the hotel’s fire alarm bell was rung with vigour. I heard footsteps running in the corridors, voices calling for the building to be evacuated – and we were to take the stairs, not the elevators. Again I suspected this was unnecessary, but I was ready to go. I grabbed my rucksack, packed up as ever, and left my room, pocketing the key, and joined the swarms for the stairs.

Out on the street there was a surprisingly large amount of traffic, mostly motor-cars but a few horse-drawn chaises, most of it heading east towards Aldwych, away from the ‘storm’, and disregarding the traffic lanes despite the efforts of a couple of special constables near the hotel to impose discipline. I was one of a flood of guests spilling onto the pavement from the hotel, most of them in night-gear and overcoats, for the March night was chill. But people looked bewildered and a little shamefaced, for that tremendous light show, the terrifying noise, the shaking of the ground had already ceased. Aside from a suspicious redness to the sky off to the west, there was nothing to be seen. People speculated aloud about what had happened – had the Martians been shot down even before they landed? There were wild rumours of super-guns carried aboard German Zeppelins, and so forth.

But one old fellow with a Kitchener moustache held forth: ‘I tell you what we don’t hear, and that’s artillery fire. I was in Rye during the Battle of Paris in ’14, and even from that distance we could hear the bark of the Germans’ howitzers as they advanced to the centre. Middlesex is a lot closer than that. Now, whatever that herculean storm was, we don’t hear our boys’ guns firing in response, do we? So what’s going on? Every one of ’em spiked already, eh?’

It is telling of the temper of the cowed Londoners of the day that his wife plucked his sleeve to hush him, and others looked away uneasily, or glanced for special constables and the like who might put a stop to his demoralising words.

Well, with the show apparently over – and the hotel not shaking to pieces or bursting into flames – we guests were encouraged to return inside. A fair fraction seemed over-excited and unwilling to retire to their rooms. In an imaginative move the manager opened up the restaurants and bars; there were drinks to be had, and soon a cold buffet was laid on, with coffee and tea. I heard grumblings from the staff, roused from their own beds: ‘Wish them blessed Mar-shins would come in the middle o’ my shift and not at the end of it.’

I stayed a while, drinking strong coffee and trying to find any news. Every room private or public had a Marvin Megaphone, of course, but they brought nothing but bland assurances that the enemy had landed just where the astronomers had predicted and our forces were vigorously engaging them – just that, no specifics, amid lashings of uplifting patriotic music. I tried making a few calls to contacts in Middlesex, but all the lines that way seemed to be down. I even called the Observer, for that paper has run a few of my cultural pieces from New York, but the duty editor said the telegraph lines were down too, and there was no news by wireless.

Eventually I filled my pockets with sandwiches, attracting odd looks from the hotel staff, and retreated to my room. I thought I should stay until the dawn, even try to sleep. I lay in my bed, clothed save for topcoat and shoes; at least I got warm. I heard nothing more from the war front, if such it was – no more thunderous detonations, and no clatter of gun-fire, as the old soldier had pointed out. It all seemed alarming and mysterious and not at all what we had expected. It was as if not a Martian but some tremendous unpredictable god had stamped on the earth.

The sky was lightening, as seen through my open window, when I was woken by the smell of smoke.

That was the end of the night for me. I washed hurriedly, grabbed my coat and bag – slurped a last mouthful of cold coffee from the cup I had brought with me from the restaurant – and hurried out of my room and once more to the stairs.

In the street, there was a faint light to the east; looking along the Strand I could glimpse Nelson silhouetted on his column. But the dawn was matched by a lingering red glow in the darker sky to the west. The wind, though gentle, blew from that direction, and that was the breeze that brought the stink of smoke to my nostrils. I imagined the whole of Middlesex was ablaze, and as it turned out I wasn’t far wrong.

The street had been transformed since I had come out at midnight. There were roadblocks and temporary gates all along the Strand now, manned by special constables, most of them identifiable only by the arm-bands and tin hats they wore over their civilian clothes. No vehicles moved, and those few parked in the street had been slapped with military requisition notices, if they didn’t have them already: some new set of regulations had been hurriedly brought into play, evidently, a new phase of a well-rehearsed plan.

Yet amid all the restrictions people were up and about. Some had the look of office workers to me, early birds perhaps even now expecting a normal day in the office, while Middlesex burned. Others were evidently on the move; they brought children and old folk with them, some in prams or walkers or in bath chairs, and they could be laden with goods, with suitcases and packs on their backs. These were sights that brought back to my mind once more the ghastly days of ’07, those hot summer hours when Frank and myself and my sister-in-law had been caught up in a panicky, uncoordinated evacuation.

But this was different, it seemed, so far. The government had not yet given up. The special constables and fire wardens and others were standing their ground, and even exhorted people to go back to their homes, to do their duty. Individuals could be singled out. ‘You, man – that’s the arm-band of a firewatcher. St. Martin’s, that’s where you should be, with your whistle and your bucket of sand, not running like rabbits.’

A few argued back, in that dawn – the absconding firewatcher, for one. ‘Come off the high horse, Ted, you’re a doorman at the Rialto, not Winston bloody Churchill. The guv’mnt ’ave took my motor-car, they’ve took my dog cart, and if it had occurred to ’em they’d have took my mother-in-law’s wheelchair too – no, no, Ma, don’t try to get up, you keep it – but they can’t yet reck-wee-zish-un my two poor feet, and if you’ve got any sense left you’ll join me.’

Even I was picked on for not carrying my gas-mask – in fact I had it but not on show, it was in my rucksack. ‘You’ll regret not having it to hand when the Black Smoke comes, missus.’

If this was going on in the West End, I imagined the same scene played out across the city and the residential suburbs: the authorities struggling to keep the city’s shape with their rules and regulations and an appeal to duty, and no traffic moving on the streets save for military and other official vehicles. And yet a trickle of dark, struggling dots must already have been filtering through the streets and alleys, laden, on foot, yet making their clumsy way, a trickle that was the people of London swarming and converging and massing, I guessed, in the great trunk roads leading south and east – opposite to the direction from which the Martians, this time, would surely come.

And, even in the Strand, even at this very early hour, in amongst the gathering crowd of evacuating residents I saw already folk who had evidently come much further, and were travelling into London. Some walked only with difficulty; they had scorched clothes, blackened faces. These were families, with old folk and little ones, all on foot – and all much less heavily burdened than the Londoners who were only now beginning their journeys, and I imagined a litter of abandoned suitcases and trunks and valuables lining the roads out of Middlesex, just as in Surrey thirteen years before. There was a first aid post in the hotel, and VADs came fluttering out to offer assistance to the worse-off of these poor wretches; waiters and bell-boys came out too with cups of water. These first refugees, it would turn out, were survivors from residences on the fringe of the Martian landfall, driven out by the fires, or the collapse of their properties, or just sheer terror – those much further in had not survived at all. I guessed as much but could not confirm it at the time. I longed to talk to these refugees, to learn a story or two from individuals, but the special constables, ever vigilant over morale, kept us apart.

Restless, impatient, I gave up on the hotel and struck out myself along the Strand, heading for Trafalgar Square.

Charing Cross station was closed entirely now, barricaded with barbed wire; the rail lines, like the roads, had now been requisitioned for official use. It was still early but a few stores were open; I saw fist-fights in a grocery. And queues formed outside a bank branch with its door barred and firmly closed, behind an official notice proclaiming that all banking would be suspended for the ‘duration’; as the Bank of England had already suspended specie payments, the other banks had no choice but to close. That was the first inkling I had that the new Martian attack already had global implications; with the closure of London’s investment markets, through which in those days flowed much of the world’s money, there would be an instant financial crisis.

In the Square itself I stood on the balcony of the Portrait Gallery and looked out, with Nelson, at this great confluence of the city’s highways: the roads becoming steadily more packed with pedestrians, only a handful of vehicles, police and military, pushing through the crowds and the roadblocks. Even here, as the morning light gathered, I sensed a steady drift eastwards, an instinctive flight away from the glowing enigma to the west. The walls and lampposts were posted with fresh proclamations from the government, and a few fragments of news. The Chief Commissioner of Police urged us to keep public order. Parliament, the Privy Council and the Cabinet councils were all in session, we were told, and communications with the military commanders in the field were being kept up. In more than one message Marvin himself, handsomely portrayed, encouraged us to stand fast and do our duty. I saw one version of Marvin given a crayoned suitcase labelled ‘Berlin bound!’

About eight in the morning the newsboys appeared with their first specials of the day, and were mobbed; small fortunes in pennies were handed over in minutes. I did not join the scrums around the boys, but waited a few minutes until I could get my hands on a discarded but mostly intact copy of the Mail.

Hastily printed, heavy on headlines but short on images, the rag contained what seemed like authentic news to me – and I silently praised the publishers for defying the government’s ban on the truth when it mattered most. Major movements of troops and materiel were being reported from Aldershot, headquarters of the Army and home of three divisions, and north of the Thames out of Colchester, and special trains were carrying stocks of weapons and shells out of the Woolwich Arsenal. The Royal Family was no longer in London; even before the weekend they had boarded a warship that would take the King to the safety of Delhi. Evidently rumours of the Martians’ projected landfall, to the north-west, had leaked out in the final hours, and I read about fighting, the evening before, for places on the last publicly available trains heading to the south: the Great Westerns to Cornwall and Devon, the Brighton Line to Sussex, the south-east lines to Kent. Meanwhile food stores across the city were already depleted of stock because of panic buying, and the government was halting the inflow of fresh supplies from the countryside, diverting it to special warehouses with locations unspecified, to be doled out as the basis of a rationing system.

And, in screaming headlines, there were scraps of news from the front itself.

A few words, a handful of facts – alarmist, you might think, but, as I would learn later, the essence of the case was there, in a dozen words.

I read the paper twice, then gave it to a man begging to see it in turn. Restless, aimless, I walked, letting instinct guide me.

I went down to the river and along the Embankment – or at least, along the narrow strip of walkway still permitted to the public. I looked on the ugly bunker that had replaced the Palace of Westminster, and I thought that if war was coming perhaps its architectural strategy had been a sound one after all. I crossed Westminster Bridge, and there, on the river, for the first time I glimpsed large-scale military movements in the city itself. I saw military vessels pushing up-river. Some appeared to be barges laden with troops, but I thought I recognised the low profile of torpedo rams, like the Thunder Child which thirteen years before had done so much to preserve my own life. Such a boat, I realised, would be able to pass under the bridges and reach further into the upper stretches than most capital ships. I also saw what appeared to be heavy naval guns, dismounted and being lugged upstream on smaller boats and barges. I resolved to make my way to the Pool of London, further downstream, to witness the gathering of warships that must be clustered there – surely an inspiring sight. That, though, was a destination I was not to reach.

From the river I walked down the Bridge Road and then south of Waterloo. In Lambeth’s narrow streets, though the government’s proclamations bloomed as dense on the walls and lampposts as elsewhere, there was comparatively little sign of the alarm that was gripping the West End. When you had little, I supposed, you were even less motivated to abandon it. On the Cut the food stores were shut up, and I saw one had been looted, its smashed window left gaping like a missing tooth. Before the homely grandeur of the Old Vic I found a handful of children on the step, barefoot and begging. I gave them pennies, though much good it would do them with the shops shut up.

I wondered how quickly Marvin would get his new system of ration distribution up and running: quickly, I prayed, for in places like this hunger was only a meal-time away. Indeed, during the First War, even as the Martians rampaged in Surrey, the police had struggled to contain food riots in areas like this. That had consequences; Frank had been among the first of the medical teams to go into the East End after the War, and had never abandoned his mission – and the police, battle-hardened, had never softened.

One man, in his sixties perhaps but not much less ragged than the children, stopped me and asked if I had kept a copy of a special. I had not. But he asked me if it was true that the King was on his way to Delhi; I said that was the fact as far as I knew. He went off nodding in satisfaction: ‘As long as they’re out of it and safe, bless ’em.’ To me the King was nothing but a stampcollecting dullard, but I was often struck in those days by the ardent loyalty to the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas of their most disadvantaged subjects – even those who despised Marvin’s government.

And as he had asked about the King’s family, I wondered what had become of my estranged husband, somewhere in Middlesex. Indeed, I had already begun to wonder if he was still alive.

16 INTO THE CORDON

As Frank would later record in his nascent journal, he and his medical staff were told they were to be moved some seven hours after the first Martian landfall – a little after dawn that Monday morning.

But where Frank had expected the surviving units to be pulled back in the direction of London – and the wounded had already been taken that way, in ambulances, or the walking wounded on foot, all evacuated but for the moribund who waited to die in tents in a farmer’s field – now, so Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield came to tell Frank and Verity in person, a percentage of the surviving force was to be moved inside the Cordon.

‘Which is what we’re starting to call the great circular earthwork the Martians have created, all in an instant. Or a “marswork” perhaps,’ Fairfield said with a smirk, exercising his sometimes laboured humour.

The three of them stood in hot, murky air; smoke had swirled all night from the burning countryside around them, and some had tried to sleep in their gas-masks. Even now the westerly breeze was only slowly dispersing the smoke, and Frank had to blink to keep the grit out of his eyes. Overhead, aeroplanes buzzed like gnats. Frank had had a chance to shower, at least, and to change his clothes – he hadn’t slept – and yet he had an odd sense of unreality, as if the daylight was a sham, as if his hands and arms were still steeped in the blood and ordure of dying men. He had to concentrate hard to follow what Fairfield was saying.

Fairfield showed them aerial photos of a ring of craters, fifty-two in all – wounds executed with surgical precision, Frank the doctor thought.

‘It looks,’ said Verity Bliss, studying the photographs, ‘as if someone pressed a string of pearls into wet clay, and carefully lifted it away again.’

‘I suppose it does rather,’ Fairfield said. ‘But it’s difficult to get the scale of the thing. This is a composite photo, you know. The chaps worked through the night to assemble such images, and maps of the new terrain – and that’s not to mention the peril to the flyers who took the shots. Each of these craters is all but a mile wide, and it butts up against its neighbour, neat as a geometry exercise. Not that I was much use with the compass and straight-edge in my days at school. This smudge,’ and he pointed to a blur at the very centre of the circle, ‘is Amersham, a fair-sized little town. All but lost within the perimeter – see the scale of it?’

Frank recalled that Walter had spoken of a hundred cylinders on the way; only fifty or so had landed yet. ‘The second wave,’ he said. ‘That’s what comes next. All this is just a stage-setting. The next will be the war craft, like the cylinders of the last invasion. That’s the thinking. But where will these next cylinders come down? Can we say, yet?’

‘With some degree of certainty; they’re only eighteen or so hours out now. Some will hit the interior of the Cordon, landing a little later than the first lot, and the locations there aren’t secure yet. But others, the first to fall, will hit—’ He jabbed at the photograph with a forefinger, following the curve of the arc of craters. ‘Here, here, here… In the existing pits of the perimeter, you see. Not every crater will be targeted, as you can see, but a respectable number will get a new visitor.’

Verity seemed baffled. ‘Why would they land on terrain they already churned up?’

‘Because they smashed up any resistance there first, before they began to unscrew a single cylinder,’ Frank said. ‘Now they think they can land in peace.’

‘That’s the idea,’ Fairfield said. ‘But there’s still a flaw in their thinking – a loophole. They didn’t get us all, and we’ve time to respond – to bring up more troops and guns from the rear and from the reserve divisions. Surround them even before they land.’

‘“Surround them”,’ Verity repeated. ‘Which is why we’re going inwards.’

‘That’s the idea. The thing is, one of the cylinders appears to be coming down right on top of us. So we’re taking a fighting force inside the Cordon, you see, through the craters and to the relatively unharmed land within, so that there will be a welcoming party ready on all sides of the cylinder when it comes down. And meanwhile fresh troops will be brought up to plug the gaps we leave and wall them in from the far side.

‘And you’ll be coming with us. So I’m afraid it’s to be a day of walking for you, walking and digging in – it’s not far, but tricky countryside, as you can imagine. The scouts and sappers have gone on ahead.’ He eyed Verity. ‘I’m not ordering you to do this, Miss. You VADs are volunteers. If you wish to be released—’

Verity said boldly, ‘When the fun’s only just started? Not on your life, Lieutenant-Colonel.’

Fairfield grinned. ‘Carry on, then.’ He snapped out a smart salute and walked on down the line.

‘Brave of you,’ murmured Frank.

She snorted. ‘You should see the alternative – if I skulk away from here I’ll have to go back and face my mother, who says she once met Florence Nightingale. Sooner the Martian horde than that. Come on, Doctor Frank, let’s get our things packed up.’

Frank had always kept himself reasonably fit. After that confrontation at High Barnet he had taken up his school-days boxing again, since the skill had proven so useful in a crisis, and later he had responded with reasonable enthusiasm to the demands of the Fyrd trainers for their recruits to achieve physical readiness.

Even so, he would write, he was already exhausted by the time they had got the field hospitals and their ancillary stations emptied out and torn down and stowed away in motor-wagons and horse-drawn carts. At that, the equipment he and his medical staff had to handle was a good deal easier than the heavy weaponry, ammunition and other gear that the regulars had to manage. ‘I never saw a bunch of men look less fit than a random selection of British privates,’ he told me. ‘But give them a task of any dimension and they get it done, grumbling as they go – smoking, swearing, complaining, every one a miniature Hercules.’

In fact, at the time, he found the demands of the physical work a relief. Better to be engaged in the outside world than in the contents of one’s own head.

There was a brief respite for lunch at midday, of cold meat and bread supplied by the field kitchens. And then, in early afternoon, the column formed up to make its way north-west, and through the devastated area of the Cordon. Frank imagined the scene as viewed from above, like Fairfield’s photograph mosaic – perhaps as seen from one of the Martian cylinders that was falling to the earth even at that moment – the great circular scar in the landscape, and all around men and their machines and horses, creeping towards the barrier of smashed earth from both sides, and crawling gingerly through it. Fairfield and other officers walked or rode alongside the marchers and the vehicles, and scouts zipped up and down the line on motorcycles, fairly bouncing over the broken ground.

As Frank understood it, they passed through the Cordon at a point where two of the Martians’ craters, side by side, abutted each other. Here was to be found a ridge of relatively undisturbed ground – relatively, but Frank soon learned it was littered with smashed buildings and tumbled trees, or simply churned up to expose the chalky bedrock of the country, rock the colour of bone. In the worst of it the sappers had laid tracks of canvas and planking, but that was meant more for the benefit of the vehicles than the walkers, and Frank and his team, each laden with a pack, had to plod carefully. Smoke drifted everywhere.

And, every so often, they came upon horror. At the centre of each of the Martians’ craters, any building, any human being – any living thing – had been smashed to atoms, leaving no residue. But at the periphery of the craters it was different, the damage partial. They came to houses like shells, with one wall left standing and the interior floors, unsupported, hanging limp; broken water pipes leaked slow floods into the heart of the ruins. And here the destruction of the bodies had not been total. Frank imagined he could smell putrefaction in the air, the stink of rot under the lingering smoke. In one place he saw a splash of blood, a slumped form, where a child had been hurled against a wall, perhaps by the air shock, and, it seemed, had simply burst open, like a balloon full of water.

‘Eyes forward,’ Fairfield said sternly, as they passed such scenes. ‘The scouts and the sappers have been through this place. Nobody left alive, or they’d have brought them out. Eyes forward now, concentrate on your own destiny, not theirs, for there’s nothing we can do here…’

They had bypassed Uxbridge, or the site of it, when, close to a sign for a place called Denham, they came to a flood. The Grand Union Canal, badly disrupted by the Martian assault, was drowning the countryside.

The sappers had put together a pontoon bridge over which the vehicles were driven or dragged. The foot-sloggers had to walk through thickening mud, though. Frank soon found it wasn’t the wetness that troubled him but the way the mud sank under every step and clung as he tried to lift out his feet, draining what little energy he had left. Around him, all the mudspattered individuals started to look alike, officers and men, volunteers and regular, women and men. Just lumps of clay and mud, struggling on.

Frank and his group of medics came to a group of soldiers, as mud-covered and unrecognisable as the rest. They were working on an overturned cart; a bored-looking horse stood idly by. One of them called for help, and Frank was surprised to recognise a German accent. ‘Can you help us?…’

As a nod from Fairfield, Frank went over with a couple of his junior doctors, and a handful of VADs. They all took a break for a smoke and a sip of water from their flasks, and, standing in the mud, inspected the damage. The cart was undamaged but it had tipped over in a hole hidden by the brown flood, and it had dumped its cargo, a large and impressive-looking machine gun, into the water.

‘Even when we get it out,’ said the German who had called, ‘it will take us an age to clean it – but we must get it done, for we have an appointment with the Martians.’ He stuck out his hand to Frank. ‘My name is Schwesig. Heiko Schwesig. My rank is Feldwebelleutnant; I am in charge of this weapon and this team – we are on detachment from the imperial army, as is this fine G8…’

Schwesig’s unit had been assigned to guard duty at the German consulate in London – in those times it was necessary for an embassy from that power to a friendly city like London to be heavily armed. When the Martian threat had been announced, as a gesture of friendship between two allies, this unit and others had volunteered to bring their weapon to the fight. ‘The Martians are not waging war on Britain after all,’ said Schwesig in his precisely accented English, ‘but on all mankind. Of course we must be here.’

Verity, with a dubious eye, was sizing up the challenge of the stranded gun. ‘Never mind cleaning it, it’s going to take an effort just to haul the thing out of the mud.’

Frank flexed muddy fingers and laughed. ‘A bit of exercise – just what we need today.’

‘Need a hand?’ This was a brisk female voice.

Frank turned to find himself facing a sturdy woman of perhaps fifty, evidently muscular, her face broad and weathered, her legs in what looked like fisherman’s waders, leather coat buttoned around her barrel of a body, greying black hair tied back in a scarf. Behind her, its engine turning over – unnoticed in the general din of the day – stood a hefty-looking tractor.

Schwesig grinned. ‘Madam, you are the least muddy person I have met all afternoon.’

‘I should hope so too, or my husband will never forgive my loan of his leggings. But he’s had no time for his precious fishing that since he was called up by the reserve, and left me to run the farm for him.’ She pointed with a thumb. ‘Said farm being a few miles back that way, near a place called Abbotsdale if you know it. And this sort of pickle is the precise reason I thought I should bring Bessie out to meet you fellows.’

‘And glad we are of it too,’ Schwesig said, and he shook the farmer’s hand. She introduced herself as Mildred Tritton.

With Mildred’s expert handling, it was the work of a moment for ‘Bessie’, the tractor, to free the gun from the mud, get it loaded in its horse-cart, and on the move again. Then Fairfield briskly commandeered the tractor and its willing driver for more pressing assignments.

Verity watched her go with a sigh. ‘And there was me hoping for a lift. Never mind. On we go, Captain Frank…’

It wasn’t far to their final position, as checked by Fairfield on the mud-spattered, hand-marked map he carried. The medics weren’t the first to arrive, in this farmer’s field; already troops were digging in, setting up trenches and latrine ditches, and building parapets of hastily-filled sand bags facing back the way they had come. They had come far enough behind the cordon for them to find themselves in what felt like unsullied British countryside, a place of green hills and hollows and hamlets. A heron skated low over open water nearby. Dairy cattle were being shooed from a field to make way for the soldiers; they lowed in apparent irritation. It was still early in the day, comparatively, only mid-afternoon – they had come only a few miles from their old position.

They were all exhausted to some degree, Frank thought. None had slept much, if at all, last night. But still they were put to work, straight away. Frank observed an awareness of time, a sense of urgency. ‘Midnight they’re coming,’ went the whisper, in the trenches, the hastily erected field kitchens, among Frank’s own staff, the doctors and orderlies, the nurses and VADs. ‘Midnight, coming again, the Martians. Got to be ready…’

They had all seen the sheer blind destructive power so casually wielded by the Martians just the night before. They had all been briefed on the Black Smoke and the Heat-Ray. And here they were, the first line of defence for England and all mankind. Frank heard Fairfield and other officers and the bristling NCOs uttering exhortations as they worked their way along the line, urging on the work, but Frank scarcely thought it was necessary. They all knew.

At six they were fed, but they kept working. By now, despite the ‘nineteen hours’ window of opportunity still anticipated after the landings, a fight was expected, and the medics were set to digging their own protective trenches. The field hospitals were well back from front-line troops and the expected landing site of ‘their’ cylinder – marked as ‘No. 12’ on Fairfield’s map – but the Heat-Ray was known from the last War to have a useful range of several miles. So, trenches it had to be.

They ate as they worked, taking breaks of only a few minutes from the digging and hauling. By seven thirty the sun was down. Frank and Verity made a final tour of their installation.

‘Looks rougher than the first set-up,’ Verity said. ‘But then everything’s been dragged a few miles through the mud – as have we all.’

‘It looks fit for purpose,’ Frank said, trying to project a confidence he did not truly feel.

‘So it did last night,’ Verity said bleakly, ‘and we were all but useless.’

‘We’ll do all we can.’

She laughed. ‘Now that is a doctor’s line! Comforting and meaningless. You’ve been in the job too long, Captain…’

Night fell. The clocks worked their way towards midnight. Later Frank could not decide if the time had crawled or flown.

Fairfield, on his last tour of inspection before the deadline, wasn’t terribly sympathetic over the medics’ anxiety. ‘Had a couple of operations in my time,’ he said. ‘Bullet in the shoulder, picked it up in the Sudan. When you’re waiting for your turn on the slab – that’swhat this is like. Now it’s your turn to wait for the surgeon’s blade, Doctor!’

Frank used the latrines at ten, and again at eleven when they were getting more crowded. This routine reminded him uncomfortably of the night before, as if he were stuck in some over-scripted play that he must rehearse over and over.

A last cup of coffee, which he took to his position in the trench. He clambered down a short wooden ladder and settled behind a sandbag parapet, wondering if he would ever climb back up again. In fact he found it hard to imagine a time, any reality, beyond the midnight cut-off. In the dirt at his feet, gleaming in the light of the oil lamps strung along the trench, he saw a flint nodule, creamy white with a rich black interior.

‘Chalk country, Doc,’ came a familiar voice. ‘Sappers know the landscape. ’Ave to. Nat’ral geologists, you could call ’em.’

Frank turned, startled. ‘Bert Cook!’

Cook was wearing a reservist’s uniform, as muddied as the rest. Under his steel hat, Frank saw, he had blackened his face with burnt cork. The officers had suggested it, but most of the troops hadn’t bothered; Martians brought no snipers. ‘Hello, Doc,’ Cook said. ‘Heard you were ’ere – with this unit. Made my way along the perimeter to find a friendly face.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Just in time for the late sitting of the show, eh?’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised you’re here, Bert. I suppose you would always come back.’

‘“As a sparrow goes for man”, as your brother quoted me.’ He sounded charged, excited – yet calculating, Frank thought. ‘And here I am, right underneath ’em. This is what I’ve been waiting for, ever since the beggars died off in ’07 – waiting for them to come finish the job they started.’

‘You say it with such relish, Bert. You are a riddle.’

‘I’ll give you a riddle. What’s green and flashing and flies like a bird in the sky?’

Frank stared at him.

Cook grinned, and pointed upwards.

17 CYLINDER No. 12

It took Frank some time, with the help of other survivors, to put together a coherent account of what followed. But then, as it turned out, he would have the time – plenty of it.

It was at the stroke of midnight that Fairfield’s Cylinder No. 12 made its entrance, with a vivid flash of green overhead, and then a concussion, a slam on the ground. Frank, huddled down in his trench, felt it as a shuddering in the earth, and a gust of air that knocked the breath out of his chest. In the trench the duckboards creaked and cracked, some of the loosely constructed parapet of sand bags collapsed, and here and there people whimpered and huddled. It was a great blow, as if the earth had suffered a mighty punch – not as great as the calamitous infall of twenty-four hours earlier, Frank realised immediately, but nearer.

Then, just seconds after the cylinder’s fall, Frank heard shouting. ‘Advance! Advance!’

‘Bring those bloody guns up!’

‘A light here, throw a light!’

Frank stood on a firing step and looked ahead, out of his trench. He saw a greenish glow coming from a hole dug new into the churned-up ground, with earth scattered around, and small fires in the nearer distance where there were trees and grass and buildings left to burn. Men and field guns were silhouetted against the eerie green glow, and picked out by wavering torchlight, already advancing towards the new pit.

And, from somewhere far behind, Frank heard the cough of artillery: the big guns firing from behind the lines, the giant eighteen- and sixty-pounders. The plan was that those great shells would smash up the cylinders before the ground troops even closed.

Frank’s new friend Feldwebelleutnant Schwesig and his gun crew, mobile, fast, and well-trained like all German troops, were among the first to reach the perimeter of the new pit. Later Schwesig told Frank what he saw. There was the cylinder embedded in the earth, standing vertical, a great pillar of steel some thirty yards across – and, no doubt, a hundred yards long, as it had proved when the inert craft were finally dug out of the ground after the First War. Schwesig and his crew prepared their G8 gun for what seemed to them the remote possibility that anything from within that cylinder should survive the blast of the field artillery already being trained on the target. There was no rush; they had nineteen hours’ grace before the Martians could move out in force, so they believed.

But the rules of the game changed again. There was a crack, a flash of greenish light. Schwesig saw it as a band of light around the top seam of the cylinder, under its flat lid.

Then that disc of metal, itself weighing perhaps five thousand tons, was suddenly detached and cast aside like a straw boater, to fly across the pit. No hours of patient unscrewing this time! The cylinder had not waited inertly for the human attack, not for nineteen hours, not even for nineteen minutes.

Then, in another instant, a kind of tentacular, metallic arm lifted out of the craft bearing a compact device not unlike a moving-picture camera: a device that Schwesig remembered well from his briefings. It was a Heat-Ray generator. Schwesig hurled himself flat into the dirt. He saw a ghost-pale beam of light pass not feet over his prone body, and thought he felt the air itself blasted to a tremendous temperature. Around him men who had not been so fast to react flashed into white flame, as the Ray swept like a hose around the perimeter of the pit. All this in mere seconds after the opening of the cylinder.

Nineteen hours!

Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield was a little further back, on a slight rise, observing. He could not see the heat beam itself, or indeed the projector being wielded from the suddenly open cylinder, but he saw men, machines, vehicles and horses incinerated in a glare of light, all around the pit. Then he saw more beams, coming presumably from projectors within the cylinders themselves, reaching up into the sky, pale, barely visible in air that was already filling with smoke. He looked up, wondering – and saw detonations, high in the air, almost like fireworks, he would say later. These were the artillery shells, incoming from the remote big guns, on their way to smash the Martian cylinder before it ever opened – that had been the theory. None of them reached the ground, never mind its target. A few spotter planes too were caught like moths in an invisible flame, brief flares against the midnight sky.

And then, rising out of the pit, above the smoke, he saw a great cowl, like a bronze helmet, lifting smoothly three unfolding legs. It was a fighting-machine – a great tripedal engine of war, returned to the earth after thirteen years, rising out of the smoke, above the disintegrated corpses of hundreds of men. All this and not yet a minute since the cylinder had landed.

Fairfield saw it in an instant. If we had deduced that the Martians were at their most vulnerable on first landing, so had they themselves, and they had done something about it.

Verity Bliss, in the medics’ ditch with my brother, was too far back to see any of the first moments of the conflict in detail, but she quickly got the general picture – so she would tell me later. The Martians, who were supposed to be dormant in their pit, were fighting back; the soldiers were dying. And that great cowl of the first fighting-machine was already advancing, looming out of the pit. Verity grabbed my brother’s collar, and hauled him by main force out of the trench. ‘We must run! It is the only chance!’

Frank had heard the cries of freshly wounded; in his head he had been frantically preparing to go over the top, to help who he could, he and his staff. Back into the horror. But he could see he had no choice but to agree; the whole position would soon be overwhelmed. Out of the trench he came, and he and Verity rounded up the rest of their staff, yelling and pushing: ‘A doctor’s no use to anyone fried! Run, scatter!’

But even as Frank ran away from the pit – heading deeper into the Martian Cordon – Frank saw that others were running forward: gunners scrambling to man their weapons, even individual troopers hurling themselves into trenches and taking pot-shots at the Martian with their rifles. And Frank saw, looking back over his shoulder, that the Martian was advancing remorselessly into the fire. He saw again that peculiar threelegged motion of the thing, this mobile war-machine without wheels. It was a tripod, like a milking stool tipped over and bowling along at a tremendous speed – a traumatic memory of thirteen years before, he told me. But even as it advanced the fighting-machine kept its upper body steady, that great cowled ‘head’ a superb platform for targeted fire. And it was already picking its targets precisely, Frank saw: weapon emplacements, ammunition dumps, vehicles. A stray pass caused Frank’s field hospitals, a row of muddy tents, to flash into flame. A bit of him mourned, but at least they had been empty. Individual soldiers fled in terror, but they were generally spared – though any who shot back got a dose of that ghostly, lethal beam as it raked the trenches and dugouts.

Then Verity gasped, pointing back to the pit. ‘Here comes another fighting-machine. And another. How can they come so fast?’

‘Down, you fools!’

A firm hand in the back forced Frank to the ground, with Verity sprawled alongside him. Frank twisted to see the sootsmeared face of Bert Cook, grinning, his teeth white in the light of Frank’s torch. ‘Sorry about the rough handlin’, Miss.’ Frank protested, ‘Bert –’

‘Lie still, I say!’

And Cook kept them pressed down even as a fighting-machine swept over them.

Frank, twisting, saw one immense leg, the best part of a hundred feet tall, swing through the air over him, as the cowl far above twisted this way and that. And Frank saw the metallic net on the thing’s ‘back’, a detail with grisly associations. Though the Heat-Ray stabbed this way and that, it never came close to the three of them. He survived – they survived – and the Martian passed.

‘Can you see the pattern?’ Cook yelled in Frank’s ear. ‘They’re going for equipment, guns and ammo – and men who fight back, they’ll get a lick of the Ray too. But if you submit – well, you might get stomped on accidental—’

‘They’re leaving us alive,’ Verity said.

‘’Course they are. That’s why they’re not using the Black Smoke, I imagine. And we all know for why, don’t we?’ He smacked his lips, as if hungry. ‘They’re harvesting. And you know why? Because we’re defeated already. Already. Oops – here comes the second machine – down!’

Again he pressed their heads into the dirt, as hundreds of tons of articulated metal waved in the air above them.

And then came a third fighting-machine, and a fourth.

‘This is the life!’ yelled Bert Cook, through the din. ‘This is the life!’

18 THE FLYING-MACHINE OVER LONDON

On the Monday night I had slept badly.

Before midnight, when the next batch of Martians were due – so the rumours had it, and by now they were well informed – I had returned to the West End. I had been out on the Strand, in fact, in the night air. With the restrictions on traffic the city was free of engine noise, and I could clearly hear the voices of people out and about as I was, and somewhere the clank of a train leaving Charing Cross, perhaps a troop-carrier. And to the north, I thought by Covent Garden, I heard voices raised in revelry, even the shrill sounds of a ragtime band, and then a thin police whistle. Marvin’s regime had not quite sucked all the gaiety out of the city, then; not even the Martians had managed that.

It is an odd thing, looking back, how bright London had been made in the night, in those years between the Martian Wars. It was not quite Times Square, but the West End would ever be ablaze with electric lighting, and even the meaner districts to the east and south of the river would shine with electric, and with old-fashioned gas where the supply was kept up. All of it bright enough that the sky above was masked from sight – as if the British who had been threatened from the sky now wanted to shut out the night altogether, to pretend it did not exist.

But in spite of the customary glare that night, at midnight, as Tuesday began, I saw green flashes, off to the north-west: the Martians coming down for the second night in a row, really not so far away from London, and right on top of my ex-husband. I heard a brief barrage, like a flash storm, far beyond the horizon, and thought I saw a few flickers of white light, like immense explosions. But it was over quickly – within a minute or so. Could the battle be concluded so soon? I refused to be drawn into the speculation of the anxious strangers around me, as ignorant as I was myself. But I stood, and waited, and listened.

After perhaps half an hour of silence from the front, it might have been more, I went back indoors. Again the hotel had kept the bars open, though there were markedly fewer guests there than the previous night – and fewer staff too, and many of those still working wore armbands proclaiming their volunteer dedication to one service or another, and might not be around much longer. I took more sandwiches for my pockets, and a glass of hot toddy, and retired to my room. Of course there was no news to be had on the Marvin’s Megaphone, nothing but patriotic music, sad or uplifting. I turned it off and tried to nap.

I was out again at dawn.

That Tuesday was a fine, clear day, with a nip in the air although March was nearly done with us, and the sky was deep blue and streaked with low cloud to the west. I had my rucksack on my back, with all my worldly goods, for I did not know what the day might bring. None of us did. But I did not check out of my room at my hotel on the Strand – I had the key in my pocket; perhaps I would yet return. (I never did; I have the key still, before me as I write.) I walked to the river, the heart of the city.

Though I do not count myself a Londoner I suppose it was an instinct to go there, at such a moment. The river could be a strange sight in the dawn light, even on days when Martians weren’t attacking, for you would see folk picking their way through the exposed mud of the banks, seeking treasures that might have been washed down the drains to this great natural sewer: coins, lighters, pens, cigarette and card cases, even bits of jewellery. These ‘mudlarks’ were a symptom of the return of extreme poverty under Marvin, a condition Dickens would have recognised.

But that morning the water itself was crowded and noisy from engines, hooters, bells, and raised voices. There were some of the Navy boats I had seen the day before, gun platforms and torpedo rams among them. And I saw too a scattered host of civilian ships, ferries and yachts and quite grand river-boats, all making their cautious way downstream – towards the sea, and away from the fighting. Some of those on the yachts and cruisers stared curiously back at the mudlarks, and at me, and at the city’s great buildings. Some of them raised Kodaks to take photographs. I imagined great houses further upstream, at Marlow and Maidenhead and Henley, being abandoned for the season now that the noisy new neighbours from Mars had moved in.

I remember distinctly that none of the mudlarks looked up to watch this grand procession of well-heeled refugees drift by.

And nor did the mudlarks see the flying-machine.

I saw it out of the corner of my eye at first, a shift in the light, off to the west. When I looked that way I saw a disc, flat and wide, a smooth profile – and very large, and evidently moving very rapidly, for it was greyed with distance, and rose up beyond the clouds. It was a Martian machine, of the kind which I had seen once before, in the sky over Essex, from the bobbing deck of the paddle-steamer on which I, Frank and Alice escaped to France during the First War. The great flyer moved smoothly and silently, with a grace that made it seem to belong to the realm of the air, like a cloud, like a rainbow, rather than to the dullness of the ground. But then it has long been remarked that all Martian machines have a sense of living grace about them, as if, sparked with electricity, they were alive themselves, in contrast to our own clanking, steam-driven, spatchcocked gadgets. I strained my eyes, trying to make out any details – any differences of form or operation from that glimpse thirteen years ago.

It is a remarkable truth that of all the gadgets humans retrieved after the First Martian War, it was the flying-machine that was the first to be made operational. It flies, in fact, not by dragging its way through the air with propeller blades as our aeroplanes do, but rather it gathers in the air, raises it to a super-hot temperature, and then lets it expand explosively from an array of vents which may be swivelled and turned. It is as if the machine is fitted with a series of rockets, but rockets which can be directed and varied in their thrust, and which will not run out of propellant, since it is the air itself that replenishes them. As for the heating agent, this seems to be a development of the Heat-Ray technology; the energy generators used by a flying-machine seem to be closely related to those used in that weapon.

According to Rayleigh, Lilienthal and others, the Martians’ flying-machines, in the First War, appeared to have been a design adapted to Mars’ air, so much thinner than ours, and of different composition. In thin air one would not use wings to rest on the air to support the craft, as our heavier-than-air aircraft designs have since the Wright brothers’ experiments. Rather, you would shape your craft to push the air out of the way, streamlining the ship like a stingray, a form to which the Martian machines have been compared.

It had taken days in the First War before that flyingmachine had been spied. Everyone supposed that the Essex machine must have been constructed from components carried in several cylinders, brought together and assembled. But now I was seeing this new machine only hours after the Middlesex cylinders had landed. In addition there had always seemed an uncertain, experimental aspect to the flying-machines as observed during the First War; this beast seemed much more confident. I realised with unease that Walter was right, that the Martians must have learned a great deal from their first dealings with humans, and had come back far better prepared, for our thicker air and other terrestrial conditions.

The machine came out of the west, following the line of the river – and thus heading for my position. I remembered that the Essex machine had been scattering the Black Smoke across the land, but there was no evidence of that dark agent this time. The machine passed directly over me; I ducked, but kept looking up. I saw that the hull was brazen, like the cowl of a fighting-machine, and its undersurface was grooved, perhaps for stability in the air, and its sharp rim was oddly feathered at the back. I imagined a battery of cameras trained on the machine as it passed over the city.

And I saw that the flying-machine had escorts: biplanes, two of them, which swooped and darted like flies beneath the belly of the behemoth: human planes, challenging the Martian. I thought they must be Albatros, or another German design – or even Russian – rather than anything British. I wondered what harm even the Red Baron, hero of the Russian front, could do to the Martian machine, if he ever got close enough. Yet it was cheering to me to see that the invaders did not have the skies entirely to themselves.

I watched the Martian and his escort pass on down the Thames, until I lost him in the glare of the rising sun. And then I heard the cries of the newsboys, for the day’s first specials were out.

I hurried from the Embankment and back into the city. Though the sun was barely up the crowds were out, and I had to battle to get hold of a flimsy Daily Mirror, exorbitantly priced at a shilling:

And even as the newsboys made fresh fortunes, the government was stirring, the bill-posters slapping fresh proclamations onto the lampposts, the loudhailer vans cruising the blockaded streets to issue fresh orders to the populace:

This new directive was set out over a portrait of the King, who looked a bit bewildered in an elaborate military uniform, but a better choice to stir the soul than a picture of Marvin, I knew by now.

I saw that ‘all able-bodied men between sixteen and sixty, not already engaged in vital war work’ were ‘encouraged’ to grab a pick and a shovel (bring your own; equipment not supplied) and to make their way to the ‘King’s Line’, which was to be a defensive perimeter cutting across the country between the Martians and the city. A map was appended, showing the Martian Cordon where it swept closest to the city to the northwest, near Uxbridge. Our Line would be a bow-shape five to ten miles back, I saw, and following the lines of the trunk roads – though advanced a little ahead of those highways, perhaps for ease of communication. Thus the Line would run from Ashford, north-east up through Twickenham and Richmond, then roughly north through Brentford, Ealing and Wembley to Hendon, and then north-west to Edgware – its terminus coming alarmingly close to Stanmore, where my sister-in-law might have returned, I noted. Tractors and digging machines both civilian and military were already drawing up to the Line, I read, which was being surveyed by the Royal Engineers and marked out by scouts; there would be a complex of trenches, earthworks, pillboxes and redoubts, manned by troops hastily deployed from Aldershot, and with artillery batteries reinforced by Navy guns. Then the British forces would be joined, in a gesture of friendship, by German detachments already being rushed across the Channel from occupied France.

A woman close to me, middle-aged, well-dressed, sternlooking, read the poster through a pince-nez. ‘My husband fought the Boers, you know.’

‘Did he?’

‘Died out there, in fact. They resisted like this, with entrenchments and tangled-up barbed wire so you couldn’t advance. I suppose we are now against the Martians as the Boers were against the British, rebels against a superior army.’

‘The Boers put up a good fight even so.’

‘That they did. But this defence line—’ She snorted. ‘“Ablebodied men”, indeed.’

I smiled. ‘No women, you mean?’

‘They’d rather use a German than a British woman.’ She glanced at me, taking in my trouser suit, short hair and pack, not with any trace of disapproval. ‘And do you think this line of theirs will work?’

‘Do you?’

‘If the Martians kindly give us a chance to build it.’ She flicked the poster with a fingernail, and walked away.

It was a morning of maps. On an inside page of my Mirror I found an extensive report on ‘The Flight From London’ during the Monday. The great trunk routes out of London to the south and east had been packed by civilians, making for Southampton and the West Country beyond, or for Portsmouth, Brighton, Hastings, Dover – even for Essex as Frank, Alice and I had once fled – all hoping for refuge from the Martians, and perhaps a boat out of England. The police and military contented themselves with setting aside lanes along the highways so that the walkers did not at least impede the flow of personnel and material into and out of the capital. And the Red Cross, with government approval, was hastily setting up reception camps at places like Canterbury, Lewes and Horsham. At least this time there was some order to it – so far, anyhow.

As for myself, my own instinct was still to remain in central London. To be in the thick of it: Julie Elphinstone, War Correspondent! It had a ring to it. But I had my personal duty as well. I thought of Alice, helpless if she had returned to Stanmore – and just beyond the limit of the King’s Line, where you might expect the fighting to be worse if the Martians thought as the Germans would have, and tried to turn the British flank. Perhaps I should go to her. As I stood there undecided, another flock of newsboys came out, another set of specials, with the ink not yet dry on the first. This time there was news brought back from spotter planes who had been bravely flying over the Middlesex salient.

The fighting-machines were already on the move, already pushing out of their huge Cordon.

19 THE FIRST HOURS WITHIN THE CORDON

In the early hours of Tuesday, after the Martians’ lightning-fast scattering of the Army’s resistance, Frank and Verity and a handful of their staff, and a number of troopers detached from their units, had huddled in hastily improvised foxholes and trenches. And they watched through the rest of that night as the fighting-machines stalked across the broken landscape within their Cordon, probing at the wreckage of our military emplacements. The night was dark, but Frank was able to follow their movements from the light of the burning of vehicles and dumps of fuel and ammunition. He would see their legs, long, graceful, articulated, passing before a crimson glare. Once or twice a searchlight was opened up, pinning the Martians in brilliance, but the source once revealed was incinerated in an instant. Frank heard little gun fire, saw little evidence of any resistance, confused or otherwise.

After a few hours of this, Verity whispered to Frank, ‘Anything that moves – anything mechanical – they fire on. Even if it isn’t a weapon, a gun. I imagine they’d fire on a field ambulance if we could get to one. But they are sparing the people, unless you’re silly enough to take a pot-shot. Just as your friend Bert Cook said – and, don’t worry, I do understand why. The Martians have to feed – as will we, in fact, at some point. Where is Cook, by the way?’

‘Long gone,’ Frank said, pointing west, towards Amersham. ‘To where the Martians are. Bert was always going to follow his own agenda, rather than the Army’s.’

‘I think it’s starting to get light.’

‘Hmm. I wish it wouldn’t.’

Verity glanced around at their charges, the young medics and the VADs, many of whom were huddled up against each other for warmth, as innocent as small children. ‘Look at them. I envy them their ability to sleep.’

‘They’re all exhausted. No sleep on the Sunday night for most of us either, remember.’

‘True.’ Evidently hearing something, she twisted and looked out of the trench.

Frank raised himself carefully, up on his elbows. In the gathering pre-dawn light, he saw yet another fighting-machine, picking its way with speed but apparent care through the ruined landscape. And at its feet scuttled something smaller, a fat body on multiple legs like a crab or spider, the whole the size of a small motor-car perhaps.

Verity breathed, ‘What’s that?’

‘A handling-machine. It’s odd to see one outside a museum… If the handling-machines are out they’ll be bent on construction as well as destruction.’

‘Maybe they’re building a fortress.’

‘Something like that. A stockade, presumably all the way around this zone they conquered.’

She glanced at him. ‘It really is a cordon, then.’

‘It seems so.’

‘With us on the inside…’

‘Just as well I’m here, then.’

The woman’s clear voice, contrasting to their whispers, coming from behind him, startled Frank. He rolled on his back, scrambling for his revolver, and clumsily slipped down into the trench.

A horse whinnied.

Feeling foolish, and though it defied instinct to abandon his cover, Frank got to his feet. He found himself facing Mildred Tritton, who was seated on a battered old dogcart to which two sturdy horses were harnessed. ‘Good morning,’ she said cheerfully. ‘And as it is just about morning, the light ought to be good enough to tell you I’m not quite a look-alike for an invader from Mars.’

‘I apologise,’ Frank said, sheepishly holstering his gun. ‘We’ve had rather a bad night. What can I do for you, Mrs Tritton?’

‘Mildred, please. I have a feeling it’s more a question of what I can do for you just now. This is actually the third trip I’ve made out to the perimeter this night, or morning – once I discovered, by means of a rather nerve-wracking experiment, that the Martians would not fire on a wagon pulled by a horse, not unless it’s loaded up with a howitzer I suppose. The Martians go for machinery. They did for old Bessie, you know. My tractor.’ Her face worked. ‘I find that rather hard to forgive.’

Verity said, ‘The poor Martians! They’ve made a formidable enemy.’

‘You said three trips?’ Frank asked.

‘Yes, collecting up benighted souls like yourselves and taking them home.’

‘Home?’

‘I mean my own home – my farm is near Abbotsdale, which is a village some ten miles thataway,’ and she jerked her thumb over her shoulder, ‘in the vicinity of Amersham. First trip was out of the goodness of my heart. Second trip I picked up your Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield. Pleasant chap, and one of the more senior officers to have survived – in this part of the Cordon, at least. And he told me that while the telephone and telegraph are out – the Martians seem to be busily cutting the wires – the field units have wireless telegraph, and that still works, and there’s some coordination going on among the survivors. Those caught within the Cordon are being withdrawn from the perimeter for now, and brought back to suitable rest stops – suitable meaning away from a Martian pit at least, for the cylinders fell throughout the cordoned-off zone, not just at the edge. I took Fairfield to Abbotsdale, and he requested I come back out for the rest of his unit – I think he was particularly keen to find you, Doctor Jenkins.’

‘Frank,’ he said heavily. ‘And we’re more than grateful that you did.’

‘Load up, then,’ she said briskly. ‘I can take a round dozen in the cart. Any of you who feel up to walking, you’re welcome to follow. I’ll come back for the rest, have no fear. I brought breakfast. I have hams, cheese, bread, and buckets of fresh milk – a couple of your strong lads can unload. Oh, and clean drinking water. Given what the Martian Smoke can do to the soil, you’re advised not to drink from streams and broken mains and such just yet.’

‘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 fighting-machines, 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 fighting-machines 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

As the dawn gathered that Wednesday morning, the Martians took their time to form up. In the First War, in striking from Surrey towards central London, they had been observed making a crescent formation, advancing bow first: an arc of armour and firepower whose flanks it would be all but impossible to turn, military analysts had since concluded, and not unlike the Prussians’ advance towards Paris in the war of the 1870s.

Now again they formed a crescent as they came out of the Cordon, with its prow pushing along the Western Avenue over the ruins of Uxbridge, its arcs reaching back beyond West Drayton to the south and Bushey to the north. And this time there was no mere handful of machines; observers counted at least fifty during the course of the day, perhaps a fifth of the entire force that had been landed in the heart of England in this new armada of cylinders.

Thus they advanced. All across a swathe of the western suburbs of London the alarms started to sound, and Army units, men and materiel, scrambled to their positions.

And we, my sister-in-law and I, were in Stanmore, to the west of the great improvised barricade that had become known as the King’s Line. I could not see the action yet but I could picture it: to the west of us the Martians, to the east of us the British defence line, and we two between them – caught in a closing trap!

Alice had indeed returned from Buxton, where she would have been safe, for now, but her instinct was to come home. I had made what preparations I could for our evacuation. I was determined that we would use our bicycles first, so that we could flee as fast as possible – but that laid a constraint on how much we could carry. Since my arrival on the Tuesday, I had kept my rucksack packed, and with every means of persuasion short of physical force I had induced Alice to compress her essentials into a single suitcase – she would have used more space for family jewellery and photographs of George than for underwear, which tells you all you need to know of her priorities. And she would chatter on about her spa holiday –who had said what to whom. That had taken all evening, until it had been too late to leave on the Tuesday night, and I had watched with envy and a kind of shame as the neighbours had one by one slipped away, a few in motor-cars somehow not requisitioned by the government, the rest on foot.

And all that day, as best I could, I followed the news of the Martians’ attacks on targets around the country: fast, precise, evidently ruthlessly planned.

On the Wednesday, we woke from a restless sleep to the sound of church bells and sirens and police lorries with loudhailers urging those remaining to hide in cellars or to flee. I learned that the Martians were moving this day on London, I felt profound regret that I had not succeeded in getting us away earlier – and a deepening fear that whatever we did now would be too late.

Even so I had to shake my sister-in-law out of her bed. ‘George would not want us to run like rabbits,’ she said, as I argued with her over the necessity of brushing her hair.

‘We should go north,’ I said, thinking fast. ‘If we can get to the Midlands towns there may be trains further north, to the Lakes, to Scotland even—’

‘George and I – this was our home, his library is still here, his surgical tools.’

‘George is thirteen years dead! It’s up to us now, Alice. We must save ourselves, for George can’t.’

‘France.’

‘What?’

‘Not Scotland. France. George had a patient there, a man from Nantes, came to England for treatment. He wrote to me after ’07, and said that if the Martians should come again to England we should go back to France – to him.’

‘France, again…’ Even then it occurred to me that there was no reason to believe the Martians would spare France, any more than they had England. Where was safe? And even to get to France we would need to reach the south coast. To cross London! ‘Alice, the city’s going to be a boiling ant-hill today. We cannot—’

‘We must,’ she said. ‘Or I won’t go anywhere.’

And that was the compromise we came to; I could not shift her. We would flee, yes, but only by plunging into the capital on this day of turmoil.

We left the house at last, with the sun rising on a pointlessly clear and fine spring day – the last day of March. The house was near the station, and I remember those big beautiful villas all shut up, their owners long gone, their windows blank rectangles with the curtains closed and the low sunlight glinting. Alice told me that some of the residents had boasted of burying hoards of coin or jewellery, like Saxons before the Vikings. At my insistence we cut north at first, for I knew that the King’s Line did not extend far north of Edgware, and at its terminus we might be allowed to pass, and then turn south.

Thus began our flight. And meanwhile, to the south-west of us, the Martian front was approaching the King’s Line. Already we heard the boom of guns, like gathering thunder.

24 ON THE KING’S LINE

When the Martians had imposed their Cordon in Middlesex and Buckinghamshire, Eric Eden, formally restored for the duration to his rank of Major, had happened to be outside the perimeter, rather than trapped inside, and he and his fellows had been hastily ordered back.

But now Eden found himself once more on the front line of a Martian war.

This time he was in an entrenchment that had been hastily cut across the line of Western Avenue, close to the junction with Hanger Lane, just north of Ealing – a section of the King’s Line. He was standing on a fire step, peering over a parapet of sandbags and looking west, the direction from which the Martians would come. His view was impeded by a heavy gas mask, and he held his rifle in his hands, tipped with bayonet. With the goggles, and with the roar of the guns opening up behind the lines, he could see, hear very little.

And yet he was confident, for he knew that at this point, where since the landings it had been expected any Martian advance on London must first come, human resistance had been made the strongest.

Winston Churchill himself, Secretary of State for War, had patrolled the lines the day before, even as frantic construction works had proceeded. It was said that he had been the most senior figure in the government to have stayed in the city, and had done much to organise its defences. If ever there was a time for a man like Churchill, it was on the eve of a war. I have always wondered since if he stayed in London that day in a kind of bold, all-or-nothing personal gamble, of the kind he had made all his life; if Churchill survived, whether the city stood or fell, he would be a hero forever. And he deserved to be. Now, forty-five years old, tall, bold, more soldierly than ministerial, he had stood on the trench parapet, fists on hips, mud on his shoes, and pronounced, ‘Break them here, men, break through their thin crust, and we’ll break them everywhere. For there aren’t so many of them. And if you should go down into the sleep of the just, take one with you. Hundreds of them, millions of us: we cannot help but prevail!’

That had won him cheers aplenty. He was a man to lead you to triumph or disaster, but at least to lead.

And Eden knew that there was cause for optimism beyond Churchill’s public words. Because of his own special experiences, Eden was among a privileged few to have been told that a little further behind this line, should it be breached, along with more artillery and machine-gun nests and troops, there was a most secret weapon.

At last the time came for all these hasty plans to be put into operation.

It was still early morning when the guns started firing.

It began with an artillery barrage launched from deep behind the lines. The heaviest weapons were some miles back – some were Navy guns, dismounted and transported on lorries and railway carriages. The shells flew over the King’s Line, over the manned trenches, and pounded the ground ahead, to the west, like tremendous footfalls.

Eden, cautiously poking his head over the parapet of his trench, could see the shells falling, and the sprays of dirt rising from the shattered ground, the fires starting in abandoned properties, and the scraps of forests and parks and common churned up and ablaze. He knew the plan: there would be a ‘creeping barrage’, as the great guns were tilted up, and the lines of shell-fall worked steadily back over the ground, as if to clear it. The Martians were not immune to shell-fire, as was well known from the First War. The plan was that the bombardment would do most of the work; the great fighting-machines would be smashed and toppled, and then it would be the turn of the troops to rush ahead with automatic weapons and rifles, to pick off individual Martians as they tumbled from their broken craft.

Even as the shells fell, Eden looked around, to left and right. The trench line twisted and turned out of his sight line; it was built in a zigzag scrawl so that the blast of a detonation could not spread far along its length, a lesson the British had picked up from the Boer resistance fighters in South Africa. Everywhere men were lined up, on the firing steps and on the duckboards behind, ready to go over the parapet, and spotters peered through binoculars into the wall of smoke and flame. This was a war machine, he realised, the entire set-up, a unified system of men and machines and earthworks dedicated to a single purpose – planned and set up in mere days.

And now, at last, the cries started up.

‘There!’

‘And there!’

‘Yes, yes, I see – all along the front – here they come!’ There was a stir all along the line, the men on the fire steps pointing.

Eden wiped mud from his goggles and peered hard into the swirling smoke. And he saw them come, the triple narrow legs spinning and flexing, the great feet falling to the ground, and the knot of equipment above – the cowl, the dangling metallic tentacles – with, somewhere within each one, a living Martian. They seemed to coalesce from the smoke itself, as if emerging from a dream, and they came in great lines, a leading rank with more visible behind. Even at first glance the Martians towered over the human works, giants in the mist. They made no sound that Eden could detect– there was only the clamour of the guns still firing.

And now the fighting-machines responded to the barrage. Eden saw how, even as the machines walked forward with that peculiar bowling gait, their bronze cowls turned and twisted, and their agile appendages aimed Heat-Ray projectors this way and that, with dazzling speed. And one by one artillery shells that had travelled miles from their guns popped in the air, breaking into harmless shrapnel above their targets. He wondered what miraculous spotting technology the Martians must have to be able to snatch the shells from the air so systematically.

But the spotting was not perfect; even the Martians were mortal. A big round smashed one Martian square in the ‘face’. A great howl went up from the trenches, and Eden saw fists waved. The fighting-machine staggered, its hood now a tangle of twisted metal and crimson – perhaps the splash of Martian blood. The balance was lost, the controlling intelligence gone, and it staggered and fell, tumbling against one of its fellows, and the two of them began a stiff-legged tumble to the ground, like great trees falling.

‘Two!’ cried a young private close to Eden, his face hidden by his mask. ‘Two!’ He stood up, waving a gloved fist.

‘Down, you fool!’ Eden grabbed him by the scruff and dragged him below the parapet.

The Martian hit the ground. There was a detonation as if a fifty-pound shell had landed not yards away, and Eden, huddling, felt a surge of intense heat, as if the door of a great oven had been opened. There were screams, now, as men not in shelter were struck by this fiery pulse.

When he dared glance over the witnessed one of those remarkable cooperation and aid among the Martians which had struck observers during the First War. Even while the artillery barrage continued, even while men behind the trenches brought up field guns and howitzers for some close-in turkey-shooting, other Martians broke off their advance. Some leant over the wounded, making a kind of tall tent over the fallen ones, even as they continued to shoot the shells out of the sky. They were so close parapet again, Eden instances of mutual that Eden could hear the rattle of shrapnel harmlessly hitting their hulls. And meanwhile others bent over the fallen, and with extensions of their long metallic tentacles began to drag the wounded machines back from the line of fighting. If precedent was followed, Eden knew, the fallen Martians and their machines would be taken all the way back to their pits inside the Cordon.

But all this was a sideshow, Eden saw. Most of the Martian line came on unscathed, and now moved beyond the artillery barrage; the curtain could not be drawn further back without the shells landing on the British lines themselves.

Eden heard the men around him muttering their dismay and fear, and he felt his own tension rise as those great feet steadily approached the trench system.

Still the troops held their position, or most of them, with a rattle of automatic fire, even snipers’ bullets, pinging harmlessly off the legs of the giant machines. But now the Heat-Ray generators were free to play on the ground positions almost at their feet. The fighting-machines raked their beams along the lengths of the trenches, systematic and calm, as a farmer might sluice out a drainage ditch with a jet of water. Eden had to watch men not yards away from him caught in the beam and erupting into flame.

Eden himself held his ground, waiting for the lash of the Heat-Ray on his own back – but when at last the whistles blew and the bugle sounded, and the NCOs began to yell ‘Fall back! Fall back!’, he did not hesitate to follow.

The over-eager young man whom Eden had already saved once jogged alongside him after they had scrambled back out of the trench. ‘Next stop Shepherd’s Bush,’ he said. ‘That’s where we’ll stop ’em.’

And Eden, who knew more than most, said through his mask, ‘Maybe we will, Tom. Maybe we will.’

25 HOW THE RETREAT BEGAN

The Martians advanced along Western Avenue towards Wormwood Scrubs. Even as the Martian wedge drove into the great thick curve of the King’s Line, everywhere the Army fell back, heading for deeper, prepared positions.

And where the Army retreated, so perforce did what was left of the civilian population.

That dreadful morning I and my sister-in-had ridden our bicycles as far as we could, my sister with her suitcase slung over her shoulder with a bit of rope. Then when the roads got too busy we abandoned the cycles and trekked, making southeast, heading steadily for central London.

We passed down the Edgware Road, through Colindale and West Hendon and Cricklewood. We had to fight our way – often literally – through a wash of refugees heading generally eastward, rather than south as we were. There were some grand folk who even now insisted on carrying valuables, either in carts or wheelbarrows or even on the backs of servants – and some more pathetic types, such as a middle-aged woman I saw who was struggling to push another lady, much older, jaw sagging, in a bath chair, a mother or an aunt perhaps. I would have stopped to help but Alice hurried me on, and perhaps it’s as well she did. And just behind this froth of civilians came the military: ambulances and lorries and omnibuses carrying the wounded, and a few units dishevelled but apparently unwounded, some walking in neat formation but others more or less running, their discipline already gone. We had some difficulty, then, and lost a good deal of time, before we reached town.

From Paddington we hurried through the densely-packed streets south of the Marylebone Road until we reached Marble Arch. Here there seemed some semblance of civil order still, though there was a thickening flood of refugees coming down the Bayswater Road from the west and into Oxford Street. Specials and a couple of regular police were on duty at the Arch, and in Hyde Park the camps that had been set up for the soldiers were open to the newly displaced, and signs promised tea, water, food, rest, medical care.

Alice was unduly impressed. ‘Oh! The spirit of London – the great city is not done yet. Can we not stop for a while, Julie? We have walked so far already today. A cup of char would be a tonic!’

But I heard gunfire coming from the west, and thought I smelled burning. ‘We may have little time,’ I urged my sister-in-law. ‘Come, stick to the plan. We must press on.’ So I urged her, and won the day by sheer persistence.

And it is just as well that I did, for I think that by that hour – it was still early morning – the Martians were already at Wormwood Scrubs.

26 THE MARTIANS AT WORMWOOD SCRUBS

In the last stretch of the retreat down Western Avenue, the order came filtering down to try to slow the Martians’ advance before they reached the Scrubs. Eden knew something of what was at stake. He passed on the new orders; he turned and pushed back himself, shouting, arms waving, ordering the men to hold.

And the Martians came again, advancing out of the west from under a lurid, smoke-laden sky. By now they had pushed past the positions of the great guns themselves – every weapon that had not been removed was savaged by the Heat-Ray – and now they came into London itself, towering over the rows of houses, the heat beams casually flickering to and fro, each iron-hot lick causing houses and vehicles and people to burst enthusiastically into flame. Now they were so close that Eden seemed to see every detail of the Martians’ construction clearly, even the chains of metallic rings that comprised their supple tentacular upper limbs, and he felt again a shudder of horror, an echo of those long hours when he had been trapped in that cylinder on Horsell. And yet he walked towards this army of monsters even so, as did the men around him, firing rifles, hurling grenades. One man commandeered an empty ambulance and drove it into the whirling legs of a fighting-machine; the Martian stumbled but did not fall, and then kicked the ambulance across the road as a boy might kick a can, and moved on. A few seconds’ delay of a single machine’s advance, bought at the cost of a man’s life.

When the Martians drove into the tangle of streets just south of the green spaces of the Scrubs itself, a bugle sounded, calling a general retreat. Eden waved to his men. ‘Fall back! Fall back!’

But even as the retreat began, glancing to his right, Eden saw the looming walls of the prison – a gaol hastily commandeered by the order of Churchill as the King’s Line was established in the last hours and days – and he saw great doors opening. A group of lorries towing flat-bed trailers burst from the gates. On the back of each truck were devices covered in tarpaulins, and men and women in protective suits. Careless of the men who scrambled to get out of the way, these vehicles lined up, taking positions that roughly blocked the road before the Martian advance. As soon as the lorries were stopped, their drivers dived out of their cabins and ran back to the protection of the prison.

The tarpaulins were whisked away – and Eden saw the men around him goggle. For, arrayed on the back of each truck, were Heat-Ray cameras. Old now, battered, some visibly patched, these weapons had been retrieved and stored from the wreckage of the earlier Martian expedition. At great risk, and considerable loss of life, as Eden, drafted in as a relative expert on Martian technology, had witnessed for himself, human engineers had discovered how to work them. Now brave souls standing on the trailers swivelled the generators on the big mounts to which they had been attached. They looked like searchlights, Eden thought. And one by one they were turned towards the advancing Martians.

At the last moment Eden threw himself over a low wall and out of the way, peeking to see what happened.

The Martians slowed. It seemed to Eden that the lead machines, or their occupants, looked down at the humans, their crude vehicles, and the purloined Heat-Ray cameras, as if curious.

And then – Nothing! Eden could see the operators frantically working controls rigged up to enable them to operate the Heat-Ray projectors, controls that no longer did their bidding.

After that brief hesitation, the Martians resumed their advance in complete safety.

In a flash Eden thought he saw why this ploy – Churchill’s secret weapon – had not worked, and it occurred to him that he should have anticipated it before. But if he had warned his superiors, would he have been believed?

For all Walter Jenkins’s boasting, he, Eden, was probably the man who had seen the Martians closer than anybody else, for he had spent long days cooped up in the Horsell cylinder. And he had seen the Martians work together, and with their technologies. Like Jenkins he had come to believe that the Martians communicated through a semblance of telepathy, though in his view this was more likely to have been achieved through some subtle technology with equivalent function. As I learned later, the dissections of retrieved specimens from ’07 had turned up oddities whose functions have yet to be explained. For example, each Martian has, embedded deep in his hind brain, a peculiar mass of crystal, egg-shaped… One would think it mechanical if not for its location. But we know that the Martians have achieved a union of the biological and the mechanical, externally at least: their great machines are like suits they don for specific purposes. If that’s so outside their bodies, why not within too? At the very least, such evidence is suggestive.

In any event, if a Martian mind could talk direct to another Martian mind, why not to a Martian machine?

The Heat-Ray generators would not fire, it seemed, not if there was a Martian in their sights. It seemed an obvious precaution for the Martians to adopt.

‘Undone by a safety catch!’ Eden muttered to himself, behind his wall.

But the day was not yet lost, he thought. For in his visits to the laboratories where the Heat-Ray engines had been studied, he had seen other ways in which the generators could be destructive. There was still time; the Martians had not yet reached the line of the lorries with their projectors. Gathering his courage, Eden dumped his rifle and scrambled over the wall. As the position broke down people were already fleeing before the feet of the advancing Martians. But Eric Eden did not flee. He ran straight for the nearest abandoned trailer, and scrambled aboard.

The Heat-Ray generators were heavy, and it took him precious seconds to turn one, then the second – but at last he had one generator barrel pointing into the mouth of another, both of them turned away from the Martians. The human-built control box was simple – and, he saw with relief, it had a timer mechanism. He says he would have stood his ground and followed through his plan even without that stroke of luck, and I believe him, but he much preferred to inflict some damage and save his own life in the process. With the Martians closing on his position, he set the timer for thirty seconds. Then he scrambled off the trailer and, ducking, running, rolling, made for the cover of another wall, low but stout.

He saw what came next.

Ignoring Eden, if they saw him at all, the Martians made for the two Heat-Ray generators he had pushed together. As always in such cases, the Martians were more interested in retrieving their own technology than in the antics of humanity. Two machines leaned over the assemblage, as Eden watched, and he counted down the second hand on his wristwatch: ‘Four – three – two – one—’

Whatever disabling mechanism protected the Martians themselves from the Ray might not save the Heat-Ray cameras themselves: that was his hasty theory. A camera would not fire on a Martian, but, perhaps, it would fire on another camera. So Eden hoped.

And so it proved. When one Heat-Ray was triggered, it fired at point blank range into the carcass of the other, injecting lethal energies, sublimating the hull, liquefying the many mysterious parts of the camera, perhaps shattering the arrays of crystals and mirrors within – and, at last, destroying the casing of the mysterious power generator of the Heat-Ray, that featureless sphere no larger than a cricket ball which, experts like Einstein and Soddy had argued, must somehow harness the energies of the atom.

Energies suddenly released, in a London street. Even amid the ongoing battles in the west, the detonation was heard all over London.

Two fighting-machines were smashed, broken to smithereens which wheeled through the air. Three others were damaged, two enough to disable them.

Much of what occurred during the early days of the Second War was to remain classified as secret; it was many years before I learned from Eric himself (in an airship sailing over the Arctic wastes, as I shall relate in its proper place) what he had done that day. It was the act of a franc-tireur, people would say, but in that act Eric Eden inflicted more damage on the Martians than in any other single incident that day. He himself was badly burned, but survived.

But he did not stop the Martian advance.

Once the wreckage of their fallen had been cleared away and sent back to the Middlesex pits, the surviving fighting-machines, still more than forty of them, resumed their march into London. Now, with the King’s Line breached and the Army’s last attempt at a surprise attack survived, there was nothing and nobody to stand in their way.

27 A FLIGHT ACROSS CENTRAL LONDON

My sister-in-law and I had continued to flee.

From Marble Arch we pushed our way down Oxford Street and Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus and the Strand, and then to the Embankment, myself urging my sister-in-law along – or sometimes vice versa, for it had already been a long day of flight and terror for both of us. Of detail I can remember little. The streets seemed full of people, rushing hither and thither, but all heading away from the Martian advance. It was like a tide receding across a stony shore, perhaps, the detail chaotic and unpredictable, the general drift evident. And there were so many people – for even if London had been drained in those few days of millions, millions more remained.

And meanwhile the Martians were coming. The western sky, livid red since dawn, was stained by smoke and flame, a sullen glow that seemed to be advancing closer. Already, looking that way, you would glimpse a Martian or two, a terrible machine towering above the houses and offices and shops, like a man wading across a coral reef.

As for ourselves, we still had our basic purpose in mind: to head south and east, to get to the coast – to flee to the continent, as we had the last time the Martians came. But as we reached the Embankment, I readily admit my capacity for planning was exhausted. How were we to cross the river? The water was full of shipping, boats and yachts and even barges heading steadily downstream, although a few Navy boats struggled in the other direction. None would stop for us, not if we waved gold bullion as payment. The trains and the underground were all long shut down; no driver would bring his train back towards the Martians. Even the bridges were crammed with people, though I thought that might be our best chance of further progress, even if we had to fight our way through.

But as I retreated into myself, my sister-in-law came into her own. Suddenly she took the lead, hurrying me along the river, heading west through Aldwych and Blackfriars – past the medieval heap of the Tower, which still bore the scars of Heat-Ray licks from the ’07 War – and then through the wharves and warehouses of Wapping.

And there she brought me, bemused, to the mouth of the road tunnel to Rotherhithe.

We found our way blockaded by burly men, dockyard workers, who had piled up scrap in the road entrance, and barriers thrown across the spiral stairs meant for pedestrians. One man, arms folded, stepped in front of us. ‘Tunnel’s closed.’

‘Is it?’ Alice asked, breathing hard, sweating, somewhat dishevelled, somewhat weighed down by her suitcase, but determined.

‘Ain’t choo ’eard? Martians in town.’

‘But our intention is merely to pass through. If you would stand aside—’

‘Local folk on’y. No toffs.’

I closed my eyes, wondering if it would be class war that killed me.

But Alice was unperturbed. ‘Is Fred Sampson here?’

‘’Oo?’

‘I’m sure you know him. The local union organiser. Fred and his wife Poppy, and their children—’

‘’Oo wants ’im?’

‘If you would kindly tell him that Mrs Elphinstone is here – Alice Elphinstone – he might remember me as “the Fabian lady”…’

When the message was transmitted, to my astonishment, Fred Sampson did indeed remember his ‘Fabian lady’.

For some years, I now learned, and since the deprivation under Marvin had begun to bite, Alice and others of her Fabian Women’s Group had been coming to Limehouse, Wapping and other dockyard areas to alleviate the plight of the working poor. Alice herself, with her medical connections through her deceased husband, had brought aid to Fred’s own smallest child, an asthmatic whose lungs did not prosper well in the river-side district’s damp, smoke-laden air.

As we waited at the barrier I frankly stared at Alice, as if at a stranger. ‘The “Fabian lady”? I thought they were banned.’

‘Not banned. Frowned upon, compromised – yes. I joined anyhow. One thing led to another,and here we are.’ She looked at me coldly. ‘I know you think I’m weak and foolish. That is how your brother-in-law portrayed me in his Narrative – a cruel sketch. And with George gone, after the war, that is how people perceived me.’

‘That is the way you behave!’

‘Are human beings only one thing? Yes, I was terrified that day, scared out of my wits, but that isn’t me. And I don’t care to explain myself to the likes of you – despite your bullying, Julie, for that’s what it is, even if I’ve had cause to come to appreciate your help in the years since. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

So there you had it, an astounding personal revelation on that most astounding of days. I sometimes wonder if there was anybody Walter mentioned in his wretched Narrative who had not come away mortally offended.

Anyhow we were ushered, as polite as you please, into a road tunnel that had become, in the hours and days since the Martian landings, a shelter – a veritable town under the city, with food, latrines, a water supply – even electric lights working off a small generator. We had meant to go on, but discretion proved the better part of valour. Exhausted, bedraggled, there we stayed, safe and snug, at least for a time.

It was only later that I learned how the Martians completed their work of that terrible day.

28 THE FALL OF LONDON

The Martian vanguard, before which Eric Eden’s unit retreated, had proceeded along Western Avenue, and then through White City and Bayswater, until they came to Regent’s Park. From there they crossed the Park, and then to Primrose Hill.

As everybody knows, it was on the Hill that the Martians of 1907 had begun the building of their largest single excavation, a vast pit that had crawled with their handling-machines and excavators, before the plagues killed them all. And here too had been left a single, inert fighting-machine as a symbol of that defeat – inert, or so we believed. I had thought I saw the thing twitch, in those last days before the Martians returned to earth – and now witnesses saw it move again, turning its cowled head, defanged as it had been by the loss of its Heat-Ray camera, and trying to lift legs that had been set in a concrete plinth. Truly it can be said that Martian machinery has the quality of life, even loyalty to its masters.

And now, on the last day of March 1920, about twenty fighting-machines stood tall on Primrose Hill, from where they were visible from afar across the city – and of course, since the Heat-Ray was a line-of-sight weapon, anywhere the Martians could be seen was vulnerable to the fire. Meanwhile the rest of the machines, another twenty or so, fanned out in twos and threes towards specific targets. Targets, yes: that was to be the game for the rest of that day, and into the night. With human resistance already vanquished, the machines turned on the greatest city in the world.

And this time the damage was not random and haphazard, as it had seemed to be when that first war-party had ventured from Surrey into the city in ‘07. Now they had intelligence from that first expedition; now they had the recent scouting of their flying-machine. This time the destruction was deliberate and purposeful. Beams delivered by the raiding parties stalking across the city, or delivered direct from Primrose Hill – for the Heat-Ray has a range of some miles– destroyed our great transport links, beginning with the rail termini; Euston, King’s Cross, Charing Cross, London Bridge, Waterloo, Victoria, Paddington. Our war-making abilities were smashed, too; Chatham and Woolwich Arsenal were already wrecked from the fighting-machines’ strikes of the day before, and now the explosives factory at Silvertown was targeted, going up with glow like a sunrise – it created a bang that was heard in France. Many of our great buildings and show centres were cut down, Olympia and White City and even the Crystal Palace.

The symbols of our power were wrecked; the headquarters of the British military at Horse Guards, Whitehall, our seat of government in the ugly new block at Westminster which did not withstand the Heat-Ray any better than its elegant predecessor had. At the Bank too, the heart of Britain’s – indeed the world’s financial system was cut up. How much of the purpose of these buildings was understood by the Martians on the day has since been a matter of debate – what would a Martian know of stocks and shares? For myself I believe that save for sites with obvious functions like the Woolwich munitions factory, the Martians judged the significance of a site on the grandeur of the buildings, and the density of human activity they had seen around them; they did not need to understand a specific purpose to judge a target’s importance to us.

It went on all day. With much of London already ablaze, the targets became less prominent: the gasometers were blasted, the cathedrals broken – St Paul’s demolished at last – the Albert Hall stove in, and it was as if the Martians used the spires of the Wren churches for target practice. Even Bart’s hospital was smashed, it turned out. And there was casual massacre, the refugee boats on the river washed with fire, the crowds on the bridges incinerated, before the bridges themselves were cut, one by one.

The Martians did not have it all their own way. For much of the day gun emplacements still operated across the city – some of them, I learned later, having been set up years earlier in anticipation of a possible air war with Germany. And, I would learn, capital ships had come up the river as far as Greenwich – any further and there would be a fear of grounding – and had fired their own huge guns into the carcass of the city, seeking Martians. One or two shots hit home – the machines on the Hill were particularly vulnerable, and one fell. But each aggressor was eventually silenced by the Heat-Ray. And besides, it seems that more damage was being done to the city itself, and no doubt its inhabitants, by the almost random landing of the shells; it must have taken a stern heart to order Navy guns to fire into the centre of London.

Rather more damage was wrought, in the event, by aircraft. Towards evening, from out of the darkening sky – and as imagined in a thousand lurid coming-war fictions – German Zeppelins approached London, not in enmity but in solidarity. Flying from occupied airfields in France, this stately flotilla was led by Heinrich Mathy in his L.31, the ‘Super Zeppelin’ – Mathy, the German hero of daring raids on Paris during the worst of the fighting there. The Zeppelins came in high, and got their bombs away, and did some damage; a couple of fighting-machines were toppled like nine-pins, and one got a three hundred-pounder in the cowl which knocked him out of the game. Also there were British craft in the air: RFC Be.2cs flying out of their bases at Hounslow and Romford, buzzing like hornets around the great carcasses of the Zepps.

But it was not long before the Martians responded. With their swivelling hoods, their manipulator arms directing the Heat-Ray cannons, they were able to mount an anti-aircraft response much more effective than any human force could have managed; they shot down the planes as easily as they had swatted artillery shells from the sky. One beam caught Mathy’s own ship as she tried to turn. The airship flashed to flame, and to the horror of those Londoners watching the show, it took the craft three or four minutes to drift to the ground, a grisly lantern. One could only think, I was told, of Mathy and his crew, roasting slowly in the sky.

I can record one more bit of heroism. Battling through the invisible lanes of the Heat-Rays, while its fellows burned and fell all around, one of our planes, a feeble Be.2c biplane, kept on going, making for that nest of monsters on Primrose Hill. It hurtled at one cowled beast as if to ram that bronze carapace, and it fired off a round of incendiary bullets before the Heat-Ray, inevitably, smashed it and its pilot to atoms. But those bullets got through, and one evidently penetrated some break in that cowl, and the head of that machine blossomed in flame before it fell. This was seen all over London. I learned later, and record here, that the pilot was Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson of the RFC, twenty-five years old.

But that, at any rate, was the end of resistance from the air – and indeed of any organised resistance at all, though the slaughter and destruction continued for hours.

After the War I returned to the Strand, and saw the detailed destruction inflicted there by the passage of a single fighting-machine, towering over the buildings. The Martian had inflicted a sequence of blasts, the first at Exeter Street, just off the Strand, which caused damage to the Gaiety theatre; the next close to the Strand Theatre at Catherine Street; the third and fourth in Aldwych; and then the Martian veered north, striking at the area between Aldwych and New Inn, and then the Royal Courts of Justice, and in Carey Street. Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, four centuries old, was demolished. If you visit the site today you can still see the traces of that single Martian’s few minutes of passage, decades later. All that from a single pass by a single machine. Imagine such damage, repeated and magnified across the city! But you cannot imagine the night, the screaming and fleeing people, the gas mains flaring, broken water mains gushing, the chaos and the noise and the light.

In one extraordinary final touch, a fighting-machine came to the museum district of South Kensington. At the Natural History Museum, the roof was cut open by a careful slice of the Heat-Ray, and the pickled specimen of a Martian in the entrance hall, that grisly souvenir of the First War, was retrieved and carried away to the Middlesex pits. A longstanding duty had been fulfilled.

And as the night fell, the Martians on the Hill began to call. ‘Ulla! Ulla!’

It was heard across London – we even heard it in our tunnel. And if some self-proclaimed expert (not Walter Jenkins, to his credit) tells you that Martians are disembodied creatures of brain without emotion, let him listen to the recordings that were made of those cries, of victory, of vengeance, of exultation.

‘Ulla! Ulla!’

In our tunnel, deep beneath the sheltering Thames, Alice and I huddled with the families of the dockyard workers and prayed for it to end.

‘Ulla! Ulla!’