I thought I recognised our expedition leader: Otto Yulevich Schmidt, well over six feet tall, a scholar and outdoorsman famed for leading expeditions into the Russian Arctic over a decade. I was not surprised to learn that, in addition to Schmidt, there were heroes of polar exploration among our crew, such as Richard Byrd, first to fly to the North Pole. I was told that our newly crowned King Edward’s American wife was on board. Their union had been seen a symbol of a new age of transatlantic amity despite a mild controversy over her previous divorce. But I did not see Queen Wallis. There was even a rumour that the Kaiser Wilhelm III was aboard, taking part in this ambitious flight of the most prestigious of his country’s aerial vessels. If so, I never glimpsed him either.
‘Even more aggressive than his unlamented father,’ Eric murmured to me. ‘If we come within biting distance of a real, live Martian we may need to muzzle the man.’
When the time came for our boarding, however, I soon forgot my companions, for I was enthralled by our great craft itself. I first saw the Vaterland in bright morning light. Even penned in its hangar it was a tremendous sight, a huge cylinder lying flat on the concrete apron, dwarfing the buildings and service vehicles which attended it. Its great belly rested on wheels and rails, and there were huge stabilising fins on its flanks and at the tail where a vast engine block was fixed. Then came the calclass="underline" ‘Airship forward!’ A kind of netting was fixed over the ship’s pale grey surface, and workers like ants dragged the vessel from its shed by hand.
As we passengers walked towards the craft – there was a sickly-sweet smell which I was told was associated with the replenishment of hydrogen – the airship became only more impressive, more towering. It was no less than a third of a mile long from bow to stern, with the capability of carrying a hundred tons of cargo, driven by its Daimler-Benz engines at a top speed of ninety miles per hour. But it was the symbolism of the craft that struck me most. A new age of global federations we might be living in, but you wouldn’t know it from a glance at the Vaterland. Everywhere were the colours of imperial Germany, strong yellow and black, and a mighty eagle, all in black, was emblazoned on the nose – that design alone must have been a hundred feet tall. And Eric pointed out to me the three great compartments which the ship carried slung under its belly. The front was the passenger gondola, the rear was for engines and fuel – but the middle section, Eric said, was essentially a bomb bay.
The passenger gondola, I observed on boarding, was split into two decks, the upper for the kitchens and stores and quarters for the crew, and the lower for our cabins and the lounges and dining rooms. There is always an enormous amount of room on a big airship. Even as we boarded, a player at a grand piano treated us to selections from Wagner. It did not take us long to find our rooms and get settled. Later I would explore the cabin’s own ingenious features: the padded walls, the fold-away bunk and table, the telephone, the electric lights.
For now, though, I hurried back to the main lounge for the takeoff.
I sat with Eden and Hopson – Walter had retired to his room, intent on his note-taking, his endless studies. I could already hear, indeed feel, the throbbing of the great engines transmitted through the ship’s frame. The lounge was fitted out in the most modern styles, all beige colours on the walls and uplighting on the ceiling, and glass-topped tables and chairs with chrome rails. There was even a small vase with fresh flowers set on our table. It all made the dear old Lusitania, fond in my memory, seem shabby.
‘Cast off!’ came the cry.
And then we rose.
On an airship, you know, the windows are all in the walls and floor, so one can look down at the landscapes that slide silently below, while above your head the sky is shielded by the great bulk of the lift envelope. And the moments of launch offer perhaps the most spectacular views of all. The aerodrome shrank below us, the workers standing by the mooring tower and waving, turning into tiny dolls. The sprawl of Murmansk itself was soon visible to the south, and to the north the Barents Sea opened up, blue open water close to the shore but with ice floes scattered not far out. On the horizon the ice merged into a solid mass that, I knew, stretched all the way to the pole. Not far out to sea I saw a small convoy, a couple of icebreakers and some low-slung cargo ships. The Russians’ Great Northern Sea Route, a six-thousand-mile passage all along the northern coast of Eurasia, is open for only a few months of the year – mere weeks in a bad season – and it pays to set off early if you don’t want to spend a winter trapped in the ice.
Even as we lifted small aircraft jumped into the sky to see us off. Monoplanes, with hulls of glittering aluminium and the sigils of the imperial Russian air force bright on their wings, they ducked and darted around us, making what seemed impossibly tight curves.
Eric Eden was impressed. ‘Those must be reaction-engine flyers – following the principle of the Martians’ flying-machines, and a product of the German-Russian war, of course. Our
planes still use screw propellers to drag themselves through the air.’
‘Silly asses,’ muttered Hopson, puffing on an unlit pipe smoking was not allowed aboard our hydrogen-lifted craft.
‘Flies buzzing an elephant.’ But despite this languid dismissal he craned to see the feisty little craft as much as any of us.
7
A JOURNEY ACROSS THE ARCTIC
It would be a journey of some two thousand miles to our destination, which was the Taymyr Peninsula. Running at a comfortable speed we would cover this journey in around fortyeight hours. It was on the Tuesday that we set off from Murmansk; we were expected to arrive at the Taymyr some time on the Thursday.
I tended to stick to the company of my stout companions. It was generally known that I was a friend of Harry Kane, and he had recently made himself notorious by writing a trashy radio drama, produced by his wife Marigold and broadcast on the Edison Broadcasting System, about a sudden arrival of a fresh fleet of Martians in the Midwest. Well, as a new set of close oppositions were approaching, the show had caused a panic, frantic phone calls to police and Army, even a few scattered evacuations. I didn’t want to be quizzed about that scandal, and I kept my head down. Besides, the company was pleasant. In relaxed circumstances Eric Eden and I shared for the first time our reminiscences of the Martian War, aside from the times we had been thrown together; it is largely on the basis of those conversations and the notes I made that the relevant sections of the present memoir have been drafted.
We were not allowed to be bored, however.
On the Tuesday afternoon, while a magical landscape of water and ice slid beneath our prow, Otto Schmidt treated us to an off-the-cuff lecture. He was a Russian, despite his name, but he spoke to his international audience in heavily accented German. In his late forties, tall, commanding, and with a beard like Santa Claus, he looked every inch the Jules Verne heroexplorer to me, and sounded like it too. He described to us something of the history of the Russians’ inner colonisation of their own vast empire, which, I was surprised to learn, went back to the days of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth centuries, when explorers and exiles and fur trappers and religious schismatics had wandered east. By the time of Peter the Great the first towns were being established, and in the nineteenth century the establishment of the Trans-Siberian Railway was a major triumph. But it was only in the twentieth century – and after the great trauma of war against the Germans and then the Martians – that the development of the region had been accelerated, and conducted in a systematic fashion. Schmidt himself had led the first successful crossing of the Great Northern Sea Route. It was thanks to such explorations and surveys, of course, that the presence of the refugee Martians had been confirmed, and as a consequence the Russian Arctic science academy had proposed this international mission to the Federation of Federations.