Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

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!’

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.