Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

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.

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.