Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

‘There,’ Eden said to me, grinning. ‘Can you see the logic?’ He pointed forward. ‘ That way, to the west, are the Martians, and that’s where they come from when they attack. So we built our cabins and stores into the east-facing walls, so there’s some shelter when the attacks come, and made the west-facing walls steep so it’s hard to clamber out, even for a fighting-machine. The Trench goes on in a great circle all around the Martian Cordon, an integrated system more than sixty miles long which is the distance from London to Hastings, say – actually the best part of two hundred miles of digging, for actually there are three such systems, one inside the other. We call them the “ditches.”’

‘ Three .’

‘Connected by a series of tunnels – you’ll get used to tunnels here. This is actually the rear ditch, for supplies, training, medical support – you see the aid centres in the opposite wall. The middle ditch is for reserve troops, and the third, the innermost, is the front line. Anyhow that’s the thinking, a kind of amalgam of the sort of trench-working we learned about agin the Boers, and developed by the Germans during the Schlieffen War.’

Lane grinned. ‘And it works, does it? We can’t do much about their flying-machines. But a fighting-machine, now – even a hundred-foot giant might trip over a fifty-feet ditch.’

‘That’s the idea, Sergeant. Make ’em think at least, eh?’

I was still staring at the far wall, the swarming military humanity there – the detail of the workings, the shelters, the ladders and steps and galleries. ‘It’s like a cut-open termite nest.’

Ben Gray shook his head. ‘Reminds me of the Amalfi coast, the sheer cliffs down to the beautiful sea, a town cut into a cliff face… Have you ever been to Italy, Miss Elphinstone? A rather more attractive populace there than a bunch of muddy Army types, though! Well, we’d better get on with it, we’re holding up the line…’

Already I heard the NCOs calling to the newcomers: ‘All right, lads, that’s enough sight-seeing, and it’s down you go. Old ladies and officers take the pulley lifts. The rest of you use the rope ladders; they aren’t so bad, and the worst danger is getting your fingers stomped on by the lout coming down after you. But if you’re a sportsman you’ll take the slide.’

A woman’s voice called, ‘I’ll show you boys how it’s done!’ It was a QA, a Queen Alexandria’s nurse, I saw, in cape and skirt. She grabbed a bit of sacking, evidently left there for the purpose, sat down on it, slid on her backside over the crest – and then plummeted down the ditch face on a kind of slippery track, polished, I supposed, by the hundreds of backsides that had gone before hers. She whooped as she slithered, and finished with an undignified tumble at the bottom. But she got up laughing, and bowed to acknowledge the applause that broke out.

I was told we were to spend one night in the Trench before moving on in the morning, at seven a.m.

As I was attached to Eric Eden – a major, and something of a folk hero to troops facing Martians on the modern front line – I was privileged to be given a berth in a shelter on the ditch’s second terrace up. The three officers who regularly shared this place called it a ‘tamboo’: English Army slang is full of Indian words.

Close to I discovered the shelter was built on a frame of railway sleepers, the better, I supposed, to withstand blasts or landslips. It had a stove of its own, electric light run from a generator somewhere nearby, a table, chairs, bunk-beds, pictures pinned to the walls, a telephone – it even had a scrap of carpet on the floor. The washing facility and lavatory were basic, and connected to some system of sewage that alone must have been a miracle of engineering.

They had but a single room to share, but the officers posted here, all calm young fellows, seemed used to having women ‘day pupils’, as they put it – yes, it did have the flavour of a public school lark about it – and they set up a system of curtains and so forth to give me privacy. Their conversation was banter, or Trench gossip, and all the officers were ‘muffs’. They were very young men, and a little silly despite their experiences of war. It would not be quite true to say that they were perfect gentlemen around me. That evening, after a dinner of bully beef, potatoes and greens served by a batman, and when the drink came out, a decent whisky, and the cards and the cigars, they rather forgot themselves and there was fruity talk about the nurses, and so on. But I, that bit older, with my short hair and trousers, did not seem to attract their attention in that way.

They did have an old Marvin wireless receiver, the worse for wear but serviceable, and we listened to the news from the government station. It Bulletin read out in gramophone, which they wound up to play sentimental songs from musical-theatre shows I had not seen.

I got a little restless as the evening wore on, and when Eden checked in on me about nine o’clock I swallowed my pride somewhat and requested his permission to go for an explore. He frowned, and I am sure he would have preferred me to stay was little more than the National sonorous tones. And they had a where I was, under his nose. But to my relief he put a call in on the telephone, asking if Sergeant Lane was free.

Then Eden bade me goodnight, and left. It was an informal parting. I was not to know that it would be months before I saw him again, in a transformed world.

Ted Lane turned up outside the tamboo not five minutes later. He carried an electric lantern and a torch, and I saw he had a candle stuck in his pocket, in case, I supposed, all else failed – the kind of instinctive planning that gives you the measure of the man.

‘I’m sorry to drag you away from your free time, Ted.’

‘Not at all, Miss. Mind your step, now…’

We clambered down a ladder; he insisted on going first in case I fell.

I would not claim that the late spring twilight made the bottom of that ditch a magical place. That could hardly apply to a gully where a couple of dogs, whimsically called Lloyd and George, ran after rats with the inhabitants placing penny bets on their success, or where a ‘sanitary man’, an older soldier with a pronounced limp, worked his way along the duckboards, emptying brimming latrines into sump holes and spraying them with creosote and chloride of lime. But the lanterns hung prettily from the terraced wall rising steeply above me, giving it something of the look of Amalfi, as Gray, better travelled than I have ever been, had perceived. As the light faded, even the searchlights that raked the darkling sky, looking for Martian flying-machines above or fighting-machines on the march across the ground, had an oddly jaunty air, I thought.

Heaps of stores sat in boxes and crates, waiting for sorting. I saw that some had come from Germany, and some from America – our transatlantic cousins were staunch allies in a pinch, disapprove of our accommodation with the Kaiser as they might. There was a kind of library, heaps of battered, muchread editions that included some classics and quality literature, not all of it William le Queuex and other of the lowbrow entertainments you might have imagined – Ford Madox Ford was a particular favourite, I had time to observe. And there was a post office marked by red and white flags; there were, I learned, several deliveries a day, the mail from home being considered a cheap but essential boost to morale.

We passed medical stations – ‘casualty clearing stations’, they were called. If you were injured in combat, you would be taken first to an aid post in the front-line ditch, and then sent back through a communication tunnel to this, the support ditch. Here, there would be a kind of triage process: you could be treated in situ ; you could be shipped out to hospitals in places like Windsor or Aylesbury – or, of course, you could be patched up and sent back into the fight. We did not see many badly injured that night; with some days since the last contact with the Martians, we were told, those who needed better treatment had already been removed.