Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

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.’

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.

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.