Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

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.

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.