Stephen Baxter: The Massacre of Mankind

‘A local publican.’

‘Yes! Leaving the man, who knew less than you about the situation at that point, to die. And later you killed directly, did you not? The clergyman you called a curate – did you ever trouble to learn his name, his position? He was called Nathaniel—’

‘There is no value in my knowing it! And I believe that, in the course of a dark night of the soul, even at the height of the War, I came to terms over that – action.’

‘Came to terms with who? God? Yourself? The curate? Even that “dark night” line is a quote from a mediaeval mystic. The truth is you called on God, whose existence you once spent a whole book demolishing!’

‘So I did,’ said Walter, increasingly uneasy. ‘And yet I was brought up within the great carcass of that antique religion. I was even forced to accept confirmation to take up my first post, a teaching position. And when faced with the unimaginable, that which lies beyond familiar categories, perhaps the mind reaches for the trappings of familiar myth—’

‘Was murder unimaginable to you, afore you did it? I suppose you’d say the Martians drove you to it?’

‘Drove me to it, yes, that’s it. For it was not pre-meditated.’

‘Was it not? Are you sure ? You are a man of detachment of mind, remember. And a man of detachment of consciousness altogether, at times.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I refer to the later passages of your own book. You describe the great existential shock of the Martians and their weaponry, imposed on the English countryside: “a sense of dethronement”, I think was your term. Very well. But at the end of the War – when, as you admit, you were not the first to discover the Martians’ extinguishing through the plagues – you had a threeday blank, man! Classic fugue. And even later – you wrote this book in ’13, six years after the War was done – you describe visions, memories still intruding even then. You saw living people as ghosts of the past – “phantasms in a dead city”. And so on and so forth.’ He looked at Walter with more sympathy. ‘Your relationship with your wife broke down, Jenkins. Why do you suppose that is?’

This cut Walter to the core. ‘But I spent much of the War seeking her out.’

‘That’s what you say .’ He tapped the memoir. ‘That’s what you say in here. But – look what you did ! You went to Weybridge and London, never to Leatherhead where your wife was sheltering: north to the Martians, not south to your family. That’s what you did . And are you aware that you don’t refer to your wife by name in this book, not once?’

‘Nor do I name myself. Nor, for that matter, my brother. Or Cook the artilleryman. It was a literary affectation which—’

‘A literary affectation? You name the Astronomer Royal, man. You name the Lord Chief Justice! And you don’t name your own wife? How do you imagine she would feel about that? And didn’t your hair turn grey? In a matter of days, during the War.’

‘But – but…’

‘There could hardly be more striking a sign of physical as well as mental affliction.’ Myers sat back. ‘I put it to you, sir – and I have already penned a paper for the Lancet on the case – that you are suffering a form of neurasthenia: the sweats, heatstroke, gun-dread. Symptoms of this include tics, mutism, paralysis, nightmares, tremors, sensitivity to noise, fugue, hallucinations. Do these sound familiar? The difference with you , compared to the common soldier of the eastern front, is your articulacy, your intelligence, your self-awareness – even your greater age. Which makes you a fascinating reference point. Sir, our own government, in particular the military authorities—’

‘Ha! What’s the distinction, under our blessed Prime Minister Marvin?’

‘—have encouraged me to refer you for treatment. At this hospital, and others in Germany where gun-dread is being studied. Are you willing to partake in my study? The treatment should be beneficial for you, and may lead to a greater good: the more effective handling of traumatised soldiers of all nationalities.’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘But that,’ Walter told me, his voice a whisper punctuated by pops and crackles from the long, tenuous wires that connected us, ‘was the one question he would not answer. Could not, I suppose, for Myers thought himself an ethical man. Of course I had no choice.’

I rolled my eyes at Harry, who was listening in with Eric Eden, their heads together over the room’s second handset. Despite Myers’s attempt to prepare us, the call, when we were finally put through to Walter, was disorienting. It was hard to know what to say.

I essayed, ‘Walter, I wouldn’t take that guff about Carolyne too seriously. Why, I broke up with Frank, remember, and he didn’t even write a book!’

‘Ah, but I think I my brother has too much of me in him for his own good. A sense of purpose that takes him away from his humanity sometimes, even from his nearest family…’

‘And the treatment? How was that?’

‘I wouldn’t recommend it over a spa cure,’ he said dryly.

In 1916, in the midst of their European war of conquest, the Germans were necessarily the pioneers in the treatment of this ailment, the ‘Kanonenschrecken’ as they called it – but their attitude was shaped by their own culture. To be brought down by fear was dishonourable, shameful. And therefore their treatment programme, called the ‘Kauffmann regime’, was a question of psychological pressure and – unbelievable to me – the inflicting of pain.

‘I was referred to a doctor called Yealland, British, a follower of Kauffmann, who used a technique he called faradisation. The use of electricity to combat symptoms directly. If you were mute, for example, your tongue and larynx would be prodded with a charge, and the room locked to keep you in, and you were strapped down in a chair, until you did speak.’

‘Dear God. And does it work?’

‘Yes! There’s a recovery rate they call “miraculous”. What they don’t report is a rather high rate of relapse.’

‘And in your case—’

‘Yealland tried to “treat” the unwelcome memories. You will recall I was badly burned in the course of the War, especially about the hands. And sometimes, when I have nightmares of imprisonment or flight, or when I see the ghosts of the past in the London streets of today, my old wounds ache, as if in sympathy. By provoking pain deliberately in that injured skin, Yealland sought to break the link between the memories and the phantom physical pain, as he saw it, thereby lessening the impact of the former on me.’

‘And the outcome—’

He said only, ‘After a couple of sessions I chose to terminate the treatment.’

Eden said with feeling, ‘Good for you, old man.’

After that Walter had been taken back by Myers and a colleague called William Rivers, who, sceptical of ‘faradisation’ and similar techniques, had become followers of Freud and his school.

‘Now I am in the rather more pleasant environs of Vienna, and instead of volts it is verbiage, from Freud and his followers. We talk and talk, you see, as the doctors try to discover how a trauma deep in a wounded mind connects to the surface behaviour. I can see there is something in it – but I am sceptical of Freud’s claim, as are the British doctors in fact, that every human impulse is at root sexual in nature. For you have the Martians as your counter-example! The Martians, as we know, are entirely without sex – we have physical proof that to reproduce they bud asexually – and so what use Freudian analysis to a Martian? And yet they are conscious beings, they evidently have motivation…’