Stephen Baxter: The Massacre of Mankind

‘If it is the Martians ’aving another go, ’aven’t I, of all people, the right to know? Of all people? Eh? Oh, I’ve ’ad enough of this.’ He got to his feet, a little unsteadily, grasped the champagne bottle by the neck and lumbered to a door. ‘Show time is – what is it, Eden?’

‘Six o’clock. A bookstore on Broadway which—’

Cook belched loudly. ‘Time for a kip, a crap and a wash, not necessarily in that order.’ He winked at me, lasciviously. ‘And then we’ll see what’s what after the show – eh? Plenty of ’ealthy young American women drawn to a proven survivor like me – survival of the fittest, eh? “Like a sparrow goes for man.” Hah!’

I think we were all relieved when he closed the door behind him.

There followed an awkward interval for us all, as we waited for Walter’s call. We allowed Eden to order coffee for us, which came with a heap of sugary cakes on a tray.

‘So, Miss Elphinstone – Julie.’

‘Yes, Major, that’s my name.’

‘Short for Julia? Juliet?’

Harry snorted.

‘Short for nothing. I was christened Julie. I was born in ’88, and in that year Strindberg had his “Miss Julie” in the theatres, and my mother was taken by it.’

He nodded. ‘Then you were nineteen in ’07, when the Martians came.’

I shrugged. ‘I was an adult.’

‘I was but twenty-five myself. Many of my men were older than I. In the Army they follow their sergeants, not their officers. Just as well! But there were much younger recruits in the Schlieffen War, you know, called up by the Russians and indeed the Germans as the fighting dragged on.’

I wondered how he could know that. There had always been rumours of British ‘advisors’ at the side of the Germans in the great killing fields in the east, exploring new weapons – some, it was darkly hinted, based Martian technology.

Eden went on, ‘We did well to stay out of that – a quick knock-out defeat for the French.’ He actually mimed a one-two punch combination. ‘I was a fair boxer at school. Never kept it up, of course…’

Harry burst out laughing, then apologised quickly.

But our conversation rather dried up. Evidently Harrow, Oxford, and officer training in the British Army (for such had been Eden’s career), and indeed a thrilling adventure aboard a Martian space-cylinder, do not necessarily inculcate a talent for small-talk.

At last, to our mutual relief, the telephone rang.

Harry and I let Eden speak to the chain of operators, from the hotel’s own switchboard through to the new transoceanic exchanges, and finally the handlers in Vienna with their ‘strong German accents but beautiful articulation,’ according to Eric. At last he passed the handset to me.

I was surprised to hear, not Walter, but another English voice,strong, cultivated. ‘Mrs Jenkins?’

‘Actually I prefer Miss Elphinstone.’

‘Ah… Yes, I see the detail from the note in your brother-inlaw’s file. My apologies, then. A heroically long connection to make such an error!’

‘To whom am I speaking? Where is Walter?’

‘I apologise again. My name is Charles Samuel Myers. I am one of the specialists who have been treating Mr Jenkins for his neurasthenia for the last several years.’

I frowned. ‘Neurasthenia?’

Eric Eden pulled a face. ‘The privates who faced the Martians – they called it heat stroke. Or the hots, Bert says. Or, the sweats…’

Once again Harry twirled a finger by his temple. ‘Julie, you’re talking to a bump-feeler!’

Heat stroke. The hots. The sweats. Ghastly soldiers’ slang for a ghastlier condition.

Later I would learn that my brother-in-law had encountered such terms when he had been referred for his first consultation with Dr Myers at a military hospital at a house called Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh. This was in the autumn of 1916, already nine years after the War.

In a dusty office that might once have been a smoking room, Myers had had a series of books with him, like exhibits, Walter had thought: all of them memoirs of the Martian War, including Walter’s own, and the first of Bert Cook’s self-glorifying pageturners. But the desk was heaped too with records from another conflict, mostly in German: despatches from the eastern front of the still-current Schlieffen War.

‘ Heat stroke ,’ Myers said. ‘A word coined in those brief days of our Martian War – days long enough to inflict grievous psychic shocks on those who fought in it. But the condition had in fact been tentatively identified before; British Army surgeons reported the after-effects of shellfire on the men during the Second Boer War, and even before that it was noted during the War Between the States. And of course since ’14 the Germans in the east, and their Russian foes, have been coming up with their own labels – Kanonenschrecken . I myself have been phenomenon in a peer-reviewed publication, the Lancet. ’

‘Good for you,’ said Walter, uneasy. At that time he was fifty years old, and by his own admission had not felt strong, robust, since the War. Indeed, he still suffered from his burn scars, especially to his hands. Now he was already feeling trapped, he would tell me later. ‘I don’t see what this has to do with me.’

‘But I’ve told you,’ Myers said patiently. ‘I believe that the Germans’ Kanonenschrecken is a similar phenomenon, psychologically, to Cook’s sweats. And what it has to do with you, sir, is the contents of your memoir.’

Walter bridled. ‘I have suffered much criticism for my “unreliability”, as Parrinder has called it. I meant the book as an honest account of my own experience of the War, and my reflections since, for I believed I was in a unique—’

‘Yes, yes,’ Myers said, cutting him off, ‘but what’s actually unique about it, man, is that unlike some accounts of the War that you read – Churchill’s stiff-upper-lip boys’-story heroics, or else the self-aggrandising of the likes of Cook – what you have delivered is a desperately honest account of your own psychological affliction. Can you not see? An affliction from which to some extent you already suffered , even before the experiences of the War. Even after the fighting you have clearly had problems: the fracturing of your relationship with your wife-’

‘I admit that my experience of the War troubled me. No one of intelligence or sensitivity could fail to bear such scars, surely. But – some psychological disjoint before ? I cannot accept that, Doctor.’

‘But it’s all here, man. In your own words. Book I, Chapter 7. “Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods.” Yes! Exceptional indeed. You describe a sense of detachment from the world, even from yourself, as if you are an outside observer… You spent your life before the War dreaming of utopias, did you not? The perfectibility of a world looked at as if from outside, and of a mankind to which, even then, you felt only a peripheral attachment.

‘But when the Martians came – look at your own account of your response to the War, from the beginning. You say you fled from that first Martian pit, at Horsell, in panic, only to snap back to equilibrium in a trice.’ He clicked fingers and thumb. ‘In a trice! You showed a peculiar mix of curiosity and dread; you were consumed by fear, and yet could not keep away from the spectacle, the mystery – the newness. At one point you describe yourself actually circling a Martian site, at a constant distance – ha! A circle, a locus imposed by two forces, perfectly matched, warring in you. As for your detachment from humanity, you could be ruthless, could you not? To save your wife you took the dogcart of, of—’