Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

‘The French military port, I know.’

‘A warship for him, a fishing tub for us. The fact is that crossing the Channel isn’t the pleasurable jaunt it might once have been, not with Martians on the prowl.’

Martians on the prowl? I was not privy to military intelligence, but I didn’t like the sound of that.

We came to Bremen’s main station, and I was surprised to see a crowd there, gathering in the subdued half-silence that seems appropriate in the small hours – and most of them, in this German station, evidently British or French. There was plenty of khaki, and the blue of Navy uniforms – mostly men, some women. But there women, children were civilians too, men out of uniform, looking sleepy-eyed and dismayed. My journalist’s eye caught details: a man hugging a little girl to his chest, both weeping; a girl of perhaps sixteen fixing a flower to the cap-badge of a sailor no older than she was; a boy of eleven or twelve standing to attention before a father who was evidently giving him orders of the ‘be a man for your mother’ sort. The predominant language seemed to be English, but there was plenty of German, even French spoken too, some attempted by tongues strong with the accents of the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne. The two years since the Martians landed had been plenty of time for fraternisation, it seemed.

It was not a large station and the crowd’s murmur, subdued as it was, seemed to fill up the space beneath the vaulting roof. ‘My sister and I have been rather tucked away in Paris. I had no idea so many troops were stationed here.’

Gray was glancing around, evidently looking for a muster point. ‘It’s more or less a continuous process, Miss. People and assets crossing back and forth. We have bases in northern Germany, and across the Low Countries and France the provinces facing the North Sea and the Channel – Southern England is a war zone after all, and our allies are generously allowing us sites for stores, training camps, hospitals, even weapons development. Anyhow I think I see our train.’ He dug papers out of his tunic pocket. ‘If you’ll follow me…’

So my journey resumed, with a short rail trip from Bremen to Germany’s North Sea shore – short, but scarcely pleasant, in a compartment so cramped it was standing room only, windows slammed shut to keep the engine smoke out, and before the sun was high it was a pit, the air stinking of sweat and thick with tobacco smoke. Well, if Second Lieutenant Ben Gray could withstand it, a man from a much gentler background than me, so could I, I told myself. After all, I had seen worse in the First War.

I did wonder how Eric Eden, a landlubber himself, was faring.

As it happens, as he would tell me with some relish later, Eric was having the time of his life, at that point in the morning anyhow.

Having completed a mission involving our ambiguous German allies – a mission of which I would learn later – he, along with a number of other senior Army officers, was hitching a ride aboard the HMS Invincible , which as Gray told me had sailed from Brest; in fact she had put to sea the day before. She and her sister ships would sail north through the Channel, there to join more capital ships coming down from Scapa Flow, to shield our convoy from Martian attention as we dashed across the North Sea from Germany to England.

Invincible was a battle cruiser, in the jargon. Such ships were heavily armed but bore lighter armour than the great dreadnoughts, the idea being to sacrifice resilience for mobility and speed. Indeed, at sixteen years old Invincible was the lead ship of her class, and probably the oldest and slowest of her kind – not a cheery prospect for Eden to reflect on.

But Eden, as was his wont, had not restricted himself to the officers’ cabins, as many of his peers would have. The night before sailing he had toured the mess halls giving the crew impromptu lectures on his brief but unforgettable encounter with the Martians on Horsell Common, of the kind he had given many times during his book tours, in his amusing, selfdeprecating style: how, while those around him had laid down their lives, he had been clumsy enough to have fallen ‘arse over tit’ into the great cylinder itself… English heroes don’t go in for bombast, which is where Bert Cook got it wrong, in my view. The novices aboard showed much interest in the Heat-Ray, its performances and characteristics, as well they might. The more experienced men told them grimly to wait and see.

The Invincible put to sea in the dark; Eric, sleeping soundly, missed the departure. He was roused in the small hours by bells ringing and a gruff cry: ‘All hands to breakfast!’

The evening before, Eden had been speaking to a group of stokers and other men of the engine room, and his imagination had been caught by the technicalities of their posts. Now he found himself breakfasting with them in the mess, squeezed onto benches by one of the great tables that had been set out. On such ships the various specialisms work, sleep and mess together in dedicated halls, and when the ship is underway a meal-time is a rush, an industrial process in itself, the feeding of hundreds of men of the thousand-strong crew . The meal, of bacon, scrambled eggs, toast, and potatoes boiled to mush, was surprisingly good. Eden had heard that men of the lower classes would sign up solely on account of the availability of decent food and board, and now he could believe it.

Eden’s friendly stokers had just come off a night shift. The Invincible was old enough that she still ran on coal, and the men, dressed in loose pants and vests, were sweating, black with soot and coal dust, and breathing hard. They drank sweet tea in soup bowls, great measures that they gulped down one after another.

When the meal was done, inspired by his companions, Eden cheerfully volunteered for a shift shovelling the coal. ‘I’m no expert but how hard can it be?’

The officer he spoke to was dubious, but evidently decided it would be good for morale to have a hero of the First Martian War mucking in with the rest, and he gave the nod. So, half an hour later, down in the bowels, Eric Eden found himself stripped to the waist, handed a shovel, and stationed at a sprawling hillside of black coal before the gaping man-high doors of a furnace.

He was welcomed with the usual inter-service banter: ‘Bit o’ hard work, for once, sir?’

‘We do work in the Army, you know. I’ll show you how to use a trenching tool some time…’

The labour of shifting a shovel-load of coal and chucking it through the big doors into the flames was heavy, but simple enough – if you only had to do it once. But Eden soon found himself tiring. And he quickly realised there was a rhythm to it, for the trick was not to release too much heat from the furnaces as they were fed. So it was a two-man job at each door; one would shovel and chuck with a rhythm, the other would open the door in time to catch the load, then shut it again to trap the heat. Expert crew could manage a shovel-full per second, if the two stokers worked together well.

As he worked Eden’s thoughts softened to fancy. He could feel the ship was underway, from the thrumming of the deck plates beneath his feet. He knew intellectually, of course, that it was the release of heat energy from the burning coal that powered the big Parsons steam turbines that drove the ship forward. But down in that pit it felt as if it was the labour of the stokers, toiling in synchronised rhythms like parts of the machinery themselves, that pushed that heavy boat through the waters of the Channel.

Stuck down there as he was, however, Eden saw or heard nothing of the wider picture as, in the gathering light of that morning, in a coordinated action across hundreds of miles and all along the coasts of Britain and Europe, the great ships of the Channel Fleet and the Grand Fleet put out from their bases at Brest and from Scapa Flow – the British base most out of reach of the Martians – and units of the German High Seas Fleet sailed too, in a grand coordinated operation. Safety in numbers: that was the idea behind the convoy, and the swarm of shipping I was to join was one of the largest yet to put to sea.