Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

There we were, arrayed on the brick ledges like toys in a shop’s store room, with candles under-lighting our faces and the shallow water casting shimmering reflections on the brick roof. Talking softly, we broke out water and food and blankets from our packs. I was obscurely fascinated by the details of the men’s equipment, up so close: their uniforms, the greenish khaki, a woollen tunic, trousers, puttees, boots with iron toecaps and heels, the peaked cap – and the contents of the their kit-bags: each man had a toothbrush, soap, towel, spare bootlaces, a mess tin and fork, a razor – even a sewing kit – along with reading matter, mail from home, photographs and locks of their children’s hair… A mouth-organ or two. And probably French letters, tucked discreetly away.

The toilet was just an offshoot of the tunnel, a little way out of sight in either direction – more easily managed by men than women, but I found a way. We were in a sewer, after all.

‘A strange place to stay the night,’ I said to my companions, as Lane broke a chocolate bar and shared it with us. ‘But I have been more uncomfortable.’

‘And it’s as safe a spot as you’ll find anywhere within fifty miles of here,’ Lane murmured. ‘You want to try kipping in a trench in Siberia.’

‘I wonder where we’ll all be this time tomorrow.’

Gray said, ‘I know where we’re supposed to be, which isn’t always the case, and that’s good enough for now.’ He wriggled down and pulled his cap over his face.

I lay down too and made myself as comfortable as I could. I did not expect to sleep, not in such circumstances – deep in a sewer, under occupied London, with the men snoring all around me. But the echoes off the brick walls and the water and the breaths of my fellows merged into a kind of susurrus, broken by the plinking of water drops somewhere, and I was neither warm nor cold. Physically worn out, emotionally drained by the experiences of the day, I drifted gently to sleep.

I woke once to the sound of someone whimpering, off in the candlelight. It sounded like a child. There was a gruff rumble, a murmured, ‘Yes, Sarge,’ and then silence.

The next morning we completed our subterranean journey under London and surfaced, blinking in the dawn light, in the ruins of Hampstead. There was no time to sight-see.

We were hastily bundled aboard a small fleet of motoromnibuses, waiting in a rough, shell-cratered car park that might once had been the yard of a school now a blackened ruin. The vehicles were nothing but London buses, I saw, their company markings roughly covered over with camouflage paint, the dull green and brown and black that were the colours of England that summer. They did have peculiar flaring fins attached to the engine compartment at the front.

I was still more surprised to find Eric Eden waiting for me on one of the buses, somehow spruce in a clean-looking uniform. He grinned. ‘Beat you here – don’t ask me how! I’m glad to see you’re healthy and in one piece given your travels so far, Miss Elphinstone. We had to send you by the most secure route, uncomfortable though it may have been; I am a less valuable shipment.’ He eyed me now. ‘And I take it you are – I mean, the special package has been no burden?’

He meant, of course, the tainted blood that coursed in my veins. ‘Oh, everything is tickety-boo,’ I snapped back.

We boarded promptly and the bus rolled away, one of a small convoy on an otherwise empty road– heading west, I saw, from the angle of the rising sun, towards the lair of the Martians. Here, I learned, the scouts had assured the officers that there were no Martian patrols nearby, and it was comparatively safe to dash across this last bit of open ground. Eden sat with me on a scuffed leather seat, with Gray and Lane sitting behind. The rest of our group, groaning theatrically, slumped down in their seats, broke out water flasks, and started cadging cigarettes from each other.

Ted Lane, an NCO himself, watched this display with amused contempt. ‘Look at ’em, all grumbling and groaning. You wouldn’t think they’d all just come from eight hours’ lovely kip safe in that rat-hole, and a slap-up breakfast on top of that.’

Eden laughed. ‘Well, they can grumble about me all they want when my back’s turned, as long as they follow orders. And as long as we’ve got the right quality. In a set-up like this you need a mix. You want your fighters, but also men who have been miners, navvies, gangers on the railways – that sort, with practical skills. And a well-trained sapper is worth his weight in gold, of course.’

For me, from the beginning, this long journey had been one step in the dark after another, all the way from the bright daylight of Berlin. I asked now, ‘What “set-up”, Eric?’

Eden said, ‘Well, this foray is a little unorthodox. You understand that we’ve established a number of muster points around the Trench itself – in anti-clockwise order from here, St Albans to the north, then Aylesbury and Reading to the west, Windsor to the south.’

‘The Trench?’

He grinned. ‘You’ll see.’

After only a short journey further west, the troopers grew restless, pointing ahead. When I looked through the paintsmeared windows I saw a rise in the ground, spanning the horizon, like a ridge, or a line of sand dunes.

‘Eric. What is this place?’

‘Put all your preconceptions aside, Julie. Like nowhere else on the earth.’

Maps of the Martians’ territory in England, as they possessed it at that stage in the Second War, are now readily available and familiar – not then! So you can imagine it as seen from above, from a Zeppelin, or a falling Martian cylinder. It would have looked like a tremendous archery target, I suppose, or a dartboard. At the bull, you had the main group of Martian pits in the ruins of the Buckinghamshire town of Amersham, a complex now being busily extended which had come to be called the Redoubt. From that centre, draw a circle of radius ten miles or so, to encompass Uxbridge to the south-east, and panning anti-clockwise to Watford, Hemel Risborough, Marlow, Maidenhead and Hempstead, Princes Slough. Use a thick pencil, for that was the line of destruction wrought by the fall of the ‘dummy’ cylinders at midnight of March 29, 1920, and the perimeter of the zone we came to call the Cordon.

Within that circle, the earthly kingdom of the Martians. And outside the circle, two years later, had been constructed the most significant human response to the Martian incursion, called, laconically, the Trench. It was another great band around the perimeter of your dartboard: a band of people and machines and watch-towers and weapons. Of course it was not a perfect containment – Eric’s own encounter with the Martians of Dogger Bank was proof of that – but it was the best we could do. And it was to the Trench that I was brought now.

Off the buses, we were met by a couple of NCOs, who formed us up into a rough column. We walked in our file the last hundred yards or so to that great earthen rampart I had seen, and then we climbed. It had not been a dry winter and the ground, not yet bound by the new grass, was as muddy as you might expect, but there were paths to follow, of wooden duckboards pushed into the ground. Overhead there was a persistent buzz of aircraft, the hornet whines of aeroplanes or the deeper thrum of Zepp engines; the Cordon was continuously, if cautiously, patrolled from the air.

Eden walked beside me. ‘Don’t worry about the mud. You’ll get used to that . And now, as we top this ridge, prepare for a marvel…’

It opened out slowly.

The ridge flattened out into a parapet reinforced with more duckboards. I found I stood on the lip of a tremendous ditch, a furrow in the ground. The inner face of the ridge before us was very steep – it cut down from the perimeter at an angle a lot sharper than forty-five degrees – and it must have been fifty feet deep, a cut into the English ground. Netting and wire had been flung down this great dug-out face, to stabilise it in case of rain I imagined, and there were rope ladders and rope-and-pulley arrangements reaching down the artificial cliff. When I peered down into the trench to its very base, I saw people, all in khaki, making their way along a kind of narrow roadway, a path walled by sandbags and floored by duckboards. I would learn that the inhabitants called this deepest crease the ‘gully’. Beyond that tangled lane a wall of earth rose up on the far side, mirroring my own side by riddled with detail, with walkways and ladders and shelters. That far side of the ditch did not slope so steep as my side, and was broken up into terraces that spanned its length, to left and right as far as I could see, with shelves and steps everywhere. The vertical face had been dug into, to create rough caves, quite neat troglodytic apartments, faced by corrugated iron or wooden planks; the smartest even appeared to have glass windows. Here and there I saw the bright paint of red crosses. And at the upper rim of this great complex, facing into Martian country, there was a parapet of more sandbags and wooden spotting huts, with searchlights and what looked like Navy guns, and soldiers staring steadfastly away from us, to the west, into the Martian territory. Glancing to left and right, I could see that this remarkable structure, this huge inhabited ditch, went on to left and right, sweeping to the horizon roughly to north and south – we had come on it from the east – with the slightest of curves visible in the distance, suggesting a vast closed circle spanning the land ahead of me. It reminded me of some relic of prehistory, a Saxon dyke perhaps, on a tremendous scale. But no nation of the Stone Age or the Iron Age had made this; I saw marks like the scraping of huge claws where digging machines had been used to gouge it out. Men and women moved like maggots everywhere. A chorus of voices rose up, like the crowd in some strange amphitheatre.