Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

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.

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.