Many had believed that England would not be subject to a second Martian attack, but enough had believed it possible, and more had feared it, that the authorities had been compelled to prepare. The result had been a reconfiguring of our military and economy, a recasting, perhaps for the worse, of our international relationships, and a coarsening of the fabric of our society. All this had however delivered a much more effective home army, and when the attack had finally come the mobilisation, after years of planning and preparation, had been fast and effective.
But as a result of that promptness a little less than half the new British Army, as measured in numbers of regular troops and front-line materiel, was destroyed in the first minutes of the assault – most of the lost troops leaving no trace. And even those on the periphery of the landfalls, like Frank, endured great trials.
The violence was astonishing, overwhelming. To Frank, lying in the dirt, it felt as if the world itself were coming apart, the very bedrock shuddering, dirt thrown high into the air, his own body hurled and wrenched. Waves of heat washed over the trench above him, and then a kind of hail – fragments of hot rock, he thought, that stung where they hit him. The contrast with a moment before was astounding – the orderly processes that had led him to this point smashed and shattered in a moment – as if he had suddenly been born into some new, primordial realm, a helpless mote.
He lay flat on his belly, face pressed into the dirt, hands over his head. He stayed down behind the sandbags until the ground had stopped shaking, the waves of heat and noise had roared past them, and the thin hail of hot rock fragments had ceased to fall.
Then he dared to look up, over the parapet. There was only billowing dust, as if the world had been erased.
Verity’s face was a coin in the gloom, as blank and bewildered as he felt. When she spoke it sounded as if she had had the breath knocked out of her. ‘What was that? The Heat-Ray?’
‘Not that… I don’t know.’ Frank stood up. ‘A terrible disaster.’ He glanced around. He saw the camp in disarray, tents blown over, even a great field gun toppled on its side. Officers stood over communications specialists with their telegraphs and field telephones, striving to no avail to contact lost units. And Frank saw now that his field hospitals were blown down, the beds and other supplies scattered. ‘This will take some clearing up.’ His very words seemed foolish as he spoke. How could any human agency cope with this?
There was the sound of a motorcycle revving. Verity pointed. ‘Look.’
A scout, goggles and gas-mask fixed, headlight bright, rode a motorcycle into the billowing smoke: immediately heading into the zone of destruction. Soon more prepared to follow.
‘That’s where we need to be,’ Frank said. ‘Where the wounded are – if any survive at all. Come on. Pick up your bag.’
‘But the hospitals—’
‘Plenty of muscle here to put all that back together. What we must do first is to find our patients.’
He led the way beyond the parapet, digging a torch from his pocket to light the way. They both donned their gas-masks, meant for protection against the Black Smoke, but now the goggles and filters served to protect eyes and lungs from the dust of the shattered landscape. Glancing around, Frank saw that more of the VADs were following their lead, carrying torches and lanterns.
‘We must go in,’ he said.
The staff around him, MOs and VADs, all terribly young, terribly scared, only looked at him. He had to take the lead, he saw. He turned into the dark, took one step, two. They followed.
The ground was broken, as if a great wave had passed through it, pocked as if a hail of meteorites had struck. And it was littered, he saw, littered with wrecked guns and vehicles, and with human remains. A limb here, an open hand there, a detached skulclass="underline" some of the more complete bodies lay draped over the parapets of trenches. Disarticulated: a clinical word that floated to the top of Frank’s stunned mind. Not even burned, most of them, just torn apart. Yet he saw movement, obscured by dust, a little deeper into the zone.
Verity stood at his side, her gloved hand over her mouth. ‘Perhaps this all seems very small, if you’re looking at it from Mars.’
They came upon a couple of soldiers, one dragging the other, who appeared to have a broken leg and was badly burned on the face. Frank and Verity ran to the men, and helped lower the wounded fellow gently to the ground.
‘It’s nothing,’ the man said, his speech distorted by the damageto his face. ‘A cushy. Nothing…’
‘Don’t talk,’ Frank said.
The soldier who had been doing the carrying didn’t seem badly injured. He just stared, apparently unable to speak.
‘Shock,’ said Verity briskly. ‘Nothing to be done for him now. Just take him back.’ A couple of VADs took the shocked man in hand and led him away.
Verity briskly examined the wounded man. ‘He’s bleeding out. He needs a tourniquet on this leg. Cold water for the burns on his face. Get the leg set and splinted…’ She looked at Frank, her uncertainty evident despite the masked face. ‘If you agree, Doctor.’
‘Of course. Go ahead.’
As she worked, Frank stood and looked around once more. The dust was clearing a little now. Still a tremendous heat came from the direction of the cylinder’s fall – whatever was left of Uxbridge must be burning vigorously, he thought, and the fields and the forests around the town. From the camp, others were coming out, medical staff but also common soldiers, NCOs, even the officers, meeting the handful of men and women who came limping out of the disaster. Frank already had an intuition that the percentage of survivors would be small, that the wounded they encountered from the periphery of the infall.
One older man, an experienced MO, bent over and vomited helplessly. When he straightened up, wiping his mouth, he said, ‘What can we do here? It’s a butcher’s yard.’
‘Yet there is life.’ Frank pointed. ‘I saw movement, there.’
Verity walked that way. ‘It is a horse. I think its back is broken.’ She took her revolver, and, hesitantly, but murmuring words of comfort, she pressed it to the animal’s temple and pulled the trigger. The report seemed shockingly loud. ‘Never had to do that before; I’m no country girl.’
‘What can we do?’ the older man asked again. ‘What can we do?’
‘Medicine,’ Frank said, as determinedly as we could. ‘Whatever we can. Come, Follow me. Fan out…’
So they found their patients, among the dead. Most of the beds of the field hospital remained empty. But throughout the night Frank and his team went back into the broken landscape to seek survivors, or at least to tend the dying, over and over. All this was lit sporadically by torchlight and lanterns: human forms coming together, dimly glimpsed in air laden with soot and smoke.
15
MONDAY IN LONDON
Monday morning has never been my favourite time of the week. Especially if one is tied to the routine of an office and the commute, it is a grey dawn on the brightest of days, when a lazy Sunday evening at the end of which one somehow feels as if one is oneself again is revealed to have been a deception, and with a hurried breakfast heavy in the stomach, there’s nothing for it but to swarm ant-like to the great hives of the office districts. And bit by bit one’s own identity is shed for the duration. But there can scarcely have been a more dreadful Monday morning to wake to than that of the 29th March – in London not since the days of the First Martian War itself, perhaps, or in Paris since 1914 when the Germans came to town. And many of us were already awake, I suspect – it had been a sleepless night for me ever since midnight, and the Martians’ first landfall.