Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

It went on all day. With much of London already ablaze, the targets became less prominent: the gasometers were blasted, the cathedrals broken – St Paul’s demolished at last – the Albert Hall stove in, and it was as if the Martians used the spires of the Wren churches for target practice. Even Bart’s hospital was smashed, it turned out. And there was casual massacre, the refugee boats on the river washed with fire, the crowds on the bridges incinerated, before the bridges themselves were cut, one by one.

The Martians did not have it all their own way. For much of the day gun emplacements still operated across the city – some of them, I learned later, having been set up years earlier in anticipation of a possible air war with Germany. And, I would learn, capital ships had come up the river as far as Greenwich – any further and there would be a fear of grounding – and had fired their own huge guns into the carcass of the city, seeking Martians. One or two shots hit home – the machines on the Hill were particularly vulnerable, and one fell. But each aggressor was eventually silenced by the Heat-Ray. And besides, it seems that more damage was being done to the city itself, and no doubt its inhabitants, by the almost random landing of the shells; it must have taken a stern heart to order Navy guns to fire into the centre of London.

Rather more damage was wrought, in the event, by aircraft. Towards evening, from out of the darkening sky – and as imagined in a thousand lurid coming-war fictions – German Zeppelins approached London, not in enmity but in solidarity. Flying from occupied airfields in France, this stately flotilla was led by Heinrich Mathy in his L.31, the ‘Super Zeppelin’ – Mathy, the German hero of daring raids on Paris during the worst of the fighting there. The Zeppelins came in high, and got their bombs away, and did some damage; a couple of fighting-machines were toppled like nine-pins, and one got a three hundred-pounder in the cowl which knocked him out of the game. Also there were British craft in the air: RFC Be.2cs flying out of their bases at Hounslow and Romford, buzzing like hornets around the great carcasses of the Zepps.

But it was not long before the Martians responded. With their swivelling hoods, their manipulator arms directing the Heat-Ray cannons, they were able to mount an anti-aircraft response much more effective than any human force could have managed; they shot down the planes as easily as they had swatted artillery shells from the sky. One beam caught Mathy’s own ship as she tried to turn. The airship flashed to flame, and to the horror of those Londoners watching the show, it took the craft three or four minutes to drift to the ground, a grisly lantern. One could only think, I was told, of Mathy and his crew, roasting slowly in the sky.

I can record one more bit of heroism. Battling through the invisible lanes of the Heat-Rays, while its fellows burned and fell all around, one of our planes, a feeble Be.2c biplane, kept on going , making for that nest of monsters on Primrose Hill. It hurtled at one cowled beast as if to ram that bronze carapace, and it fired off a round of incendiary bullets before the Heat-Ray, inevitably, smashed it and its pilot to atoms. But those bullets got through, and one evidently penetrated some break in that cowl, and the head of that machine blossomed in flame before it fell. This was seen all over London. I learned later, and record here, that the pilot was Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson of the RFC, twenty-five years old.

But that, at any rate, was the end of resistance from the air – and indeed of any organised resistance at all, though the slaughter and destruction continued for hours.

After the War I returned to the Strand, and saw the detailed destruction inflicted there by the passage of a single fighting-machine, towering over the buildings. The Martian had inflicted a sequence of blasts, the first at Exeter Street, just off the Strand, which caused damage to the Gaiety theatre; the next close to the Strand Theatre at Catherine Street; the third and fourth in Aldwych; and then the Martian veered north, striking at the area between Aldwych and New Inn, and then the Royal Courts of Justice, and in Carey Street. Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, four centuries old, was demolished. If you visit the site today you can still see the traces of that single Martian’s few minutes of passage, decades later. All that from a single pass by a single machine. Imagine such damage, repeated and magnified across the city! But you cannot imagine the night, the screaming and fleeing people, the gas mains flaring, broken water mains gushing, the chaos and the noise and the light.

In one extraordinary final touch, a fighting-machine came to the museum district of South Kensington. At the Natural History Museum, the roof was cut open by a careful slice of the Heat-Ray, and the pickled specimen of a Martian in the entrance hall, that grisly souvenir of the First War, was retrieved and carried away to the Middlesex pits. A longstanding duty had been fulfilled.

And as the night fell, the Martians on the Hill began to call. ‘ Ulla! Ulla! ’

It was heard across London – we even heard it in our tunnel. And if some self-proclaimed expert (not Walter Jenkins, to his credit) tells you that Martians are disembodied creatures of brain without emotion, let him listen to the recordings that were made of those cries, of victory, of vengeance, of exultation.

‘ Ulla! Ulla! ’

In our tunnel, deep beneath the sheltering Thames, Alice and I huddled with the families of the dockyard workers and prayed for it to end.

‘ Ulla! Ulla! ’

At the beginning of May, 1922 – with the Martian boot having been planted firmly on the neck of England for nearly two years, and with all of educated mankind, I suspect, looking fearfully at the skies, where Mars was swimming towards its next opposition in June – I was summoned to Berlin, to visit my estranged brother-in-law Walter Jenkins.

Summoned? Is that the correct word? Persuaded to go , perhaps, by Major Eric Eden. But it had begun with Walter himself, who had written to me from Berlin, asking for help in a scheme he had come up with to ‘deal with the Martian canker in England’. All Walter’s mail was routinely scrutinised by his doctors and the military people in Germany and England, and so this came to Eden’s attention. And he, perhaps surprisingly, saw some merit in the plan – whatever it was being kept a secret for me for now.

It was my duty to see Walter! So even Alice told me, she who had hardly been out of our apartment in Bagnolet since we had arrived in Paris.

If the reader has stuck with my account thus far, then you will know I am not one to take kindly to pressure from overbearing men, with which my world has always been overstocked. I took my time over whether to accept the commission – indeed I slept on it, through a still, unnaturally warm Parisian spring night. Yet I was still undecided when I woke to my morning view of the ruin of the Eiffel Tower, smashed by German shells eight years before.

In the end I went back to Walter’s letter, and I concentrated on his own words, directed to me personally. ‘Please come… Of all my extended “family” it is only you, Julie, whom I feel comfortable in contacting at this time. Of course my choice is somewhat limited since my brother, your former husband, is lost behind the Martian Cordon…’ Which put me in my place! Still, whatever his motives, whatever his state of mind after years of analysis by Freud and his colleagues, it had been me to whom he had turned in his need.

I had the resources to respond, and was without burdens. Even my sister-in-law, Alice, had slotted easily enough into the gloomy culture of a defeated Paris, and had even found worthwhile work aiding the poor of that occupied city; short of a cross-Channel invasion by the Martians she could last without me for a while. As for my own work, I was making a respectable if precarious living as a correspondent for the New York papers, with the help of much mediation from Harry Kane. I was no war reporter, but Harry said that my accounts of aspects of life in an occupied city, on everything from clumsy German policing to the Parisians’ desperate attempts at fashion and art, held a certain audience in Manhattan and Queens and New Jersey in grim fascination. But it was an eminently interruptible career, and, who knew? Perhaps I could get good material out of this fresh adventure.