In that German dawn, curiosity and dread warred in him; not for the first time, curiosity won. To the heart of Berlin!
He told me he grinned as he climbed aboard that bicycle, and pedalled away.
He headed towards the Rheinstrasse, one of the great highways that leads to the centre of the city.
Long before he got to the junction with the main road he was panting, his legs and backside aching. When the Martians had first come to England he had been forty-one years old; now he was in his late fifties and he felt a lot more used up. But he pedalled grimly, sweating inside his heavy coat.
He saw nothing unusual about the morning, at first. Cars and motor-cycles passed in an orderly fashion, and people came and went, many of them in smart office clothing. He was passing through a suburb of commuters; people would travel by motor-car, tram and bus to jobs in the offices and department stores in the centre of the city. He saw no schoolchildren heading for their classes – but then this was a Saturday; Walter was not sure of the local routine, but maybe lessons had been suspended. Perhaps the alarm had not yet spread. Perhaps the Kaiser’s government was still giving out reassuring messages: Work as usual! – the menace will be contained.
He came upon the first soldiers at the junction with the Rheinstrasse.
Vehicles, trucks and armoured cars and motor-cycles, and a few small artillery pieces, had been gathered at the side of the road. Landsers – German tommies in grey greatcoats – stood around smoking and talking quietly, while field wireless sets crackled. In a small park opposite, others were digging, hastily constructing a complicated earthwork. Walter got off his bicycle to see better; it would be a star-shaped formation surrounded by a trench, with machine guns placed at the corners, and a big Howitzer at the centre.
Walter approached a couple of men beside a batteredlooking artillery piece, drawn by a couple of patient horses. Walter chose these men because they weren’t smoking; now he produced the pack he had brought for this very purpose. In his clumsy German, he asked, ‘You are going to meet the Martians? I heard they landed near Dessau.’
One of the men took Walter’s cigarette with no apparent interest in conversation. The other was a corporal, smaller, darker, more shrewd-looking. He said, ‘That’s what we heard. Waiting for more units to get their backsides out of bed and form up here, and then we advance. Air cover as well, we’re promised that.’
‘They’re on the move, then. The Martians.’
‘Out of the Dessau pit, yes.’ The German word he used for ‘pit’ was Adlerhorst, ‘eagle’s nest’. ‘We already put up some resistance at Brueck, Treuenbritzen. Quite a force coming, apparently. Nobody knows quite how many. The scouts were too busy running away to count, probably. But it’s said that some of the Martians have peeled off to head for Brandenburg and Potsdam.’
There was a droning noise, high in the sky. Walter glanced up to see a brace of high-flying aeroplanes, heading back the way he had come: scouts, perhaps. ‘Soon there will be better information.’
‘Yes.’
‘Stop them before they get to the city. That the plan?’
He eyed Walter, taking in the residual burn-scars on his face. ‘You English?’
‘Is it obvious? My German is poor, I know.’
‘You seen anything of the Martians over there?’
‘Some. Especially the first lot.’ He gestured at his face. ‘I got this fleeing from their advance. But I was never a fighting man.’
‘Even so,’ said the corporal, ‘even so, to see them up close… No doubt I’ll have the privilege before the day is out.’
‘They are overwhelming.’
Again a glint of shrewd intelligence in the man’s eye; this was a veteran who would take nothing for granted, and not underestimate his interplanetary enemy. ‘What about you? Where will you go?’
‘Into the city.’
The corporal eyed him, then shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’
There was a revving of engines, a stirring among the men. Walter had seen enough of the military to understand; somewhere orders had been issued and received.
The corporal nipped out his cigarette and stored the stub behind his ear. ‘Thanks for the smoke. Now you’d better get out of here before my lieutenant requisitions your bicycle.’
20
TO THE CAPITAL
It was only a few miles from Dahlem to central Berlin.
But Walter made slow progress. As he neared the centre the roads were increasingly crowded, with motor-cars, buses, even a few horse-drawn vehicles – and pedestrians, fewer officeworker types by this time, more of them with the familiar look of refugees, families on the move with children, old folk, suitcases. Walter was forced to dismount and push his cycle through the crush. Just as in London in 1907, there were boys selling newspapers, literally hot off the press, bearing the latest news of the coming of the Martians. Every so often, too, an official car would come by, military or police or government, perhaps a black Mercedes with official flags fluttering, and the civilian traffic would squeeze out of the way. There were soldiers everywhere, and police – in short, Walter reflected dryly, a plethora of uniforms.
If the Dahlem commuters had not quite fully grasped the significance of the day, by now Berlin was waking fully to the implication of the extraplanetary force that was approaching. And yet – so far at least – there was none of the sense of the breakdown of society that Walter had observed in London coming so quickly in those dreadful June days of ’07. Perhaps he should not have been surprised. Of course, if the Martians came, they would come to Berlin! And of course the Germans would be ready. To Walter’s astonishment, a cleaning truck came by, toiling along the gutter, brushes whirling. On such a day! That was Berlin for you.
But even as the truck passed he heard a sound like distant thunder – coming from the east, surely the sound of guns, big ones – and then came a stink of burning. The crowds stirred.
There was a greater sense of urgency as the pedestrians pushed on, the motor-cars began to bunch up at blockages and sounded their horns, and soldiers and police shouted commands.
Walter reached Potsdamer Platz, which he thought of as Berlin’s equivalent of Piccadilly Circus. Here the traffic was chaotic, the pavements even more crowded. But the brilliant electric advertising panels still glowed brightly in the May morning, and many of the shops and department stores were open, Walter saw, somewhat bemused.
And then, quite unexpectedly, Walter glimpsed a fighting machine. Faintly misty in the air it was, rising above the buildings to the north and east of his position. He saw its bronze cowl, unmistakeable, glinting bright in the flat sunlight – there and gone, moving out of sight as its animal grace took it away. A brace of aeroplanes tore over the city in that direction, very high.
Electrified, Walter began to battle his way north: where the Martians were, that was where he wanted to be.
21
WITH THE MARTIANS IN BERLIN
Walter reached the Ebertstrasse, which runs along the eastern edge of the Tiergarten, the city park. Here, Walter found, people were mostly heading south, more urgently now, and he had to battle to make way – and, after a hundred yards, regretfully, he finally had to abandon his bicycle.