Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

We came across groups of enlisted men in the gully, sitting together outside their shelters, patching clothing or writing letters and talking softly, even music from singing by one fellow with a mouth-organ, and a better performance it was too than my pet officers’ gramophone records. Those gully promenaders were mostly men, women being largely confined to the medical posts as nurses, or as cooks or clerks or drivers or in other support roles, even construction work – anywhere save the front line – and the men seemed inhibited by my presence. But they opened up to Ted Lane, especially when he offered them cigarettes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told me when I commented on this largesse; ‘I got a packet from the Major for the purpose; I wouldn’t be wasting my own.’

So I learned something of the structure of this strange society. Of course the basic military hierarchy was in place here. As one man explained it to me at Lane’s prompting, ‘You got your privates, which is us poor slobs, and you got your NCOs lording it over us, no offence, Sarge, and you got your officers lording it over them, and then your staff officers, and you got your generals above them . And every one of us complains about the sheer bleeding in com -petence o’ all the rest above and below, and it’s a wonder anything ever gets done around here.’

‘But it never does, Sid!’ someone called.

However, I learned, cutting across this familiar ladder of rank were the specialisms. The Trench system itself had mostly been constructed by recruits with appropriate civilian experience, by agricultural workers, and ‘navvies’ and ‘gangers’ from the railways, and bricklayers and carpenters and concretemixers, all under the command of the Royal Engineers. I learned new bits of language. An electrical worker was a ‘sparkie’, the ‘toshers’ kept the rudimentary sewage system working, and every man had a ‘banjo’, a shovel, for the times when the rains came and threatened to flood or collapse the whole affair, and it was a case of everyone digging to save the day. Even on this calm night, I could see the work of maintaining the system continuing, with workers labouring at the drainage of that lowest walkway, or at the revetting of the walls, or repairing sandbag parapets.

Yet the unity was something of an illusion, I would learn. There were many colonial troops serving on the Trench, especially Indian, and the latter had had to be kept apart from the British regulars, because of taunts of the ‘It’s your turn now, sahib !’ kind. Meanwhile Ted politely steered me away from some less salubrious districts of that great circular city – such as a place they called ‘Plug Street’, semi-officially sanctioned brothels.

I tried to gather my impression of the place. ‘This whole great earthwork is like – what? Like one vast body, this Trench curled like Ourobouros around the Martian canker, and these soldiers toiled like antibodies in the bloodstream to keep the whole intact and healthy.’

Ted Lane pulled a face. ‘That’s a bit poetic for me, Miss. It’s the best we can do, that’s all. We have to try to contain the Martians. It’s that or let them rampage around the countryside as they choose.’

As I thought it over that night, I did wonder about the wisdom of the stratagem. If these Martians had come here to learn about us – to learn the craft of war against humans, in order to complete their failed conquest of the earth – then here we were providing them with a kind of idealised training ground, as we sat there and threw the best we had at them, and let them learn how to counter it. But then, what else were we to do? As Lane had said, we couldn’t simply wave them through.

I was to remember these reflections on the Martians’ potential adaptability the next morning.

On the way back to my tamboo I saw a man tending a row of pea plants, growing out of the earth under shoved-aside duckboards. This was a Tommy garden, as they called it. When your eye got attuned, you saw them all over the face of the Trench, splashes of homely green.

I slept well enough; by this stage in my odyssey I was too exhausted not to. But I was woken once in the night, by the firing of a single gun somewhere on the earthwork, an artillery piece that coughed over and over, and then the whistle of the shells fading in the night, the crump of explosions. I had no idea what strategic purpose could be served by rounds from a lone gun. It seemed madness to me, and perhaps so it was.

I’d been told I would be roused by a bugle. In the event Ben Gray came in the dark and shook me awake. ‘Get dressed. I’ll get your pack.’

I stirred reluctantly. Beyond the curtains of the tamboo’s windows, I saw greyish daylight, and I could hear shouting, running footsteps. ‘What time is it?’

Gray was gathering my gear and stuffing it without ceremony into my rucksack. ‘Early. Not yet four a.m.’

I pushed my way out of my bunk. The young officers were already gone; a half-drunk bottle of whiskey and scattered playing cards stood on the table. ‘But we aren’t meant to be travelling until seven a.m.’

Gray looked me in the eye. ‘The Martians have decided not to follow our plan. Now get your boots on, empty your bladder, and meet me outside. That’s an order.’

‘Where’s Eric Eden?’

‘Fighting the Martians. Now come on. ’

Outside the tamboo, boots and hat on, rucksack over my shoulders – I had lingered long enough to make sure Walter’s packet of sigil sketches was safe in there, for as far as Ted Land and Gray and others knew, to deliver the sketches to the Martians was still the plan – at first I stood astounded by the sight before me. In the grey dawn light, the great ditch swarmed with activity.

On the far wall, the steeper eastern face, I saw people clambering up or down the ladders, even scaling the stabilising netting, the main priority seeming to be to get off the face and to shelter. Lodes of materiel were suspended from the pulley cables, apparently abandoned. In the deep gully, and all across the terracing of my inhabited western face, people ran, some without their proper uniforms – some even barefoot – grabbing weapons and ammunition packs as they went, and dashing to their stations. Lanterns shone everywhere, and searchlights mounted on the parapets raked over this great linear hive of activity. There was a barrage of noise too, whistles, bugle calls, shouts, though the human sounds were dwarfed by the great scale of the ditch.

But now I heard the crack of an artillery gun, a huge pounding that shook the earth. All around me people stopped in their tracks, and looked up at the lightening sky. I twisted my head, and looked up too, up, up past the terraces and the rows of tamboos.

And I saw it loom over the parapet of the western face, coming out of the Cordon: a cowled hood, a flash of bronze, tentacular appendages clutching what might have been a heavy camera.

‘Down!’ That was my own cry, I think; next thing I knew I had shoved Gray down and lay half-across him with my hand on the back of his neck. That was the veteran in me. Yet even now the journalist in me longed for a Kodak, to capture the sight!

And the Heat-Ray spat. I saw the thread of it, the characteristic pale distortion of its guide-light in the air. It swept over the sheer eastern face, and where it touched, climbing men and women and bundles of materiel flashed to flame and vanished, human beings popping like pockets of flammable gas.

I was distracted by the sound of guns barking now, coming from behind our lines. Shells flew over our heads. In ’07 the Martians had come to an England where the most advanced weaponry on land was horse-drawn guns. Now we had motorised artillery, and were able to respond much more rapidly. But while some of the shells splashed against the face of the Trench itself, creating peculiar angled craters and adding to the din of noise, none reached the Martian itself. Then, like a man stepping cautiously into a stream, the Martian folded its great legs, and pivoted, and stepped down into the gully itself. Once all three feet were down, it swivelled its cowl this way and that. Now that ghastly beam raked the gully itself, and the inner face of the Trench. I saw structures detonate and collapse across the wall, and people running like ants from a kettle of water. It all came back to me; I had seen such scenes before, in ’07 and indeed in ’20. I wished with all my heart at that moment that having escaped the Martians twice I had not been so foolish as to return to give them a third go.