Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

We clambered up the ladder, each of us with undone shoelaces and leather helmets not yet on our heads. Clambered up and into the belly of the machine. It was a space we were to share with the engines, I immediately discovered, which dominated that compartment, two huge, gleaming monsters that I would learn were Sunbeams, diesel engines designed for submarines. Gigantic differentials and cross-shafts spanned the rest of the interior, delivering the motive force to the tremendous wheels we had seen. Every wall and floor surface had been painted white, and the whole was brilliantly lit with electrics – I could not see a scrap of daylight. It was a complex interior of compartments and bulkheads, and gangways and ladders to the gun turrets and the bridge tower – a cramped and cluttered space, but geometric and orderly: even the rivets were white-painted. I felt like a mouse under the bonnet of a car.

And it was extraordinarily cluttered too, like a mobile ammunition store, with every wall fixed with racks that held shells for the big guns and bullets for the small arms. In underfloor lockers there were lodes of various specialised tools, as well as access to the vehicle’s mechanisms. In the few spaces remaining were heaps of other useful items, such as towing cables, water flasks, grease guns, protective clothing, hard hats, gas masks and goggles.

Then the engines started up, the noise a howl in that confined space, and the whole shook and shuddered.

‘No room for the crew!’ Verity protested, yelling over the noise.

‘We find a way,’ Eric shouted back. ‘Look, don’t worry, you’re in the best possible hands; our drivers are Stern and Hetherington themselves, and it’s all their fault!’

I could barely hear either of them. Later I would observe the crew communicating in a kind of improvised sign language, and even by slamming spanners into the pipes.

Eden yelled, ‘Now, look, you two, make yourself useful. Julie, we’re one crew member light, so get up into this sponson – there’s a door in the hull just there, see? You can be a spotter even if you can’t work the gun; we have telephone links throughout. I’ll be up on the bridge. And, Verity –’ He moved a heap of spare clothing to reveal a first aid box, painted with a red cross on white; it was alarmingly small, I thought. ‘You’re a nurse, aren’t you?’

‘Just a VAD.’

‘Better than what we had before, which was nobody. But when the action starts, just keep out of the way! Oh, and stay away from the engine. Every surface in there gets hot enough to fry bacon…’

So I clambered up into my sponson, which was a blister barely big enough for a kind of reclining chair into which I wedged myself, with the controls of a tremendous gun in front of me. With my legs up, my head bent forward on my neck, and barely able to move around the weapon, I was soon stiff and sore and increasingly uncomfortable.

Then the landship moved forward, with a crude jerk that I imagined was something to do with the gigantic gearing, and a ferocious rattling thanks to the lack of any kind of suspension.

We were underway! The crew cheered, and I clung on for dear life.

Our pilots, Stern and Hetherington, were, I learned later, significant figures in the short history of landship development – I suppose we were lucky to have them aboard.

Captain Albert Stern was a civilian given a volunteer commission, and Commander Tommy Hetherington of the 18 thHussars a dashing cavalryman with a vivid imagination. The vessel we rode, it seemed, had started life as a sketch on a napkin made by Hetherington, at a dinner with Churchill at a London club. Only Churchill, one might think, could push such mad visions to actuality. But at the time our greatest war machines had still been ocean-bound, and little use against the Martians. Churchill could see, as few others did, that this was a way of bringing that great technology to land combat.

The great engineering concerns of the north of Britain had been involved, under the emergency government’s orders, in the development and construction of these beasts, from Metropolitan Cammell of Birmingham to Mirrless Watson of Glasgow. Churchill had taken a key interest in the project throughout, and had inspected training exercises on a military range in the Highlands, although many trials had taken place on the continent, I learned – and some of the smaller models had even been tried out in battle, in the bloody secrecy of the Germans’ Russian front.

As we got underway I explored ways to see out of my lumbering metal prison. The simplest were my sighting slits, gaps in the hull from which I could draw back rather stiff metal covers. These gave a view out to the sides, and a limited view ahead. I had a small periscope, too, through which I got a narrow view, front and back and to the sides.

Through these means I could see the countryside across which we rolled, and the vehicles that followed us, a fleet with ourselves at the crest: landships small and large, though none so large as us, proceeding in billows of exhaust smoke and with the soil of English fields being thrown up around their tracks, so that we left an ugly brown scar that stretched back the way we had come. The clumsy vessels reminded me of lungfish, creatures of the water crawling painfully over the land. Smaller vehicles, cars and motorcycles, darted around us, and aircraft flew overhead, bright little toys in the morning sunlight, whose noise was quite drowned out by the engine roar of the advancing land armada.

But we made progress slowly. Our own top speed off the road was only four or five miles an hour, and there were a lot of breakdowns and other delays. The cars and ’cycles could make much greater speed.

As the journey wore on I took breaks from my small prison. Every so often I needed to bend my spine back into something resembling a natural posture. And, so that she need not leave her station, I brought Verity cups of water from a spigot that ran increasingly hot as the journey wore on.

Hot – the whole of our living space was hot, noisy, oily, cramped and crowded, and we were jarred with every rabbit hole we crossed. The crew, wearing face masks and goggles, laboured at their engines, continually tending the clattering pistons and hissing valves. At least the air we breathed seemed fresh enough; I imagined there must be some circulation system to stop the build-up of exhaust gases. But I thought we might all melt in the rising temperatures, as that long morning wore on.

The crew of the landship, however, despite the heat and clamour, worked steadily. They were technical, highly trained, competent, efficient young men. Despite their khaki fatigues they had the air more of Naval officers than soldiers – indeed, they called their commander ‘Captain’. They might have been tending some tremendous power generator, perhaps, as opposed to a weapon of war. I wondered if this was a vision of the war of the future, of calm young people working their precise controls and dispensing remote death. Perhaps we were becoming like the Martians after all, I thought, who made war with a similar lack of passion.

The lavatory was a hole in the floor covered by a metal hatch. I used it once; there was no partition, but in the circumstances modesty was hardly an issue. We were dehydrated, I think, and I could not remember when we had last eaten a decent meal.

And while we lumbered through the mud, I would learn later, the Martians were devastating Los Angeles, and had landed in Melbourne, Australia.

It was with some relief that I realised we were approaching the Cordon at last. It had taken us hours to get to the perimeter – we reached it after two in the afternoon, I think.

The support vehicles fell away now, leaving only the landships, the vehicles of serious intent. I could hear a dull booming, like thunder, coming from directly ahead of us. This, I learned, was an artillery barrage; guns many miles away were targeting Martian emplacements close to the site where we were aiming to breach the Cordon perimeter, softening up the invaders before we fell on them. We were rolling into gunfire, then, and the battle had already begun, with ourselves still far from the front.