From the river I walked down the Bridge Road and then south of Waterloo. In Lambeth’s narrow streets, though the government’s proclamations bloomed as dense on the walls and lampposts as elsewhere, there was comparatively little sign of the alarm that was gripping the West End. When you had little, I supposed, you were even less motivated to abandon it. On the Cut the food stores were shut up, and I saw one had been looted, its smashed window left gaping like a missing tooth. Before the homely grandeur of the Old Vic I found a handful of children on the step, barefoot and begging. I gave them pennies, though much good it would do them with the shops shut up.
I wondered how quickly Marvin would get his new system of ration distribution up and running: quickly, I prayed, for in places like this hunger was only a meal-time away. Indeed, during the First War, even as the Martians rampaged in Surrey, the police had struggled to contain food riots in areas like this. That had consequences; Frank had been among the first of the medical teams to go into the East End after the War, and had never abandoned his mission – and the police, battle-hardened, had never softened.
One man, in his sixties perhaps but not much less ragged than the children, stopped me and asked if I had kept a copy of a special. I had not. But he asked me if it was true that the King was on his way to Delhi; I said that was the fact as far as I knew. He went off nodding in satisfaction: ‘As long as they’re out of it and safe, bless ’em.’ To me the King was nothing but a stampcollecting dullard, but I was often struck in those days by the ardent loyalty to the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas of their most disadvantaged subjects – even those who despised Marvin’s government.
And as he had asked about the King’s family, I wondered what had become of my estranged husband, somewhere in Middlesex. Indeed, I had already begun to wonder if he was still alive.
16
INTO THE CORDON
As Frank would later record in his nascent journal, he and his medical staff were told they were to be moved some seven hours after the first Martian landfall – a little after dawn that Monday morning.
But where Frank had expected the surviving units to be pulled back in the direction of London – and the wounded had already been taken that way, in ambulances, or the walking wounded on foot, all evacuated but for the moribund who waited to die in tents in a farmer’s field – now, so Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield came to tell Frank and Verity in person, a percentage of the surviving force was to be moved inside the Cordon.
‘Which is what we’re starting to call the great circular earthwork the Martians have created, all in an instant. Or a “marswork” perhaps,’ Fairfield said with a smirk, exercising his sometimes laboured humour.
The three of them stood in hot, murky air; smoke had swirled all night from the burning countryside around them, and some had tried to sleep in their gas-masks. Even now the westerly breeze was only slowly dispersing the smoke, and Frank had to blink to keep the grit out of his eyes. Overhead, aeroplanes buzzed like gnats. Frank had had a chance to shower, at least, and to change his clothes – he hadn’t slept – and yet he had an odd sense of unreality, as if the daylight was a sham, as if his hands and arms were still steeped in the blood and ordure of dying men. He had to concentrate hard to follow what Fairfield was saying.
Fairfield showed them aerial photos of a ring of craters, fifty-two in all – wounds executed with surgical precision, Frank the doctor thought.
‘It looks,’ said Verity Bliss, studying the photographs, ‘as if someone pressed a string of pearls into wet clay, and carefully lifted it away again.’
‘I suppose it does rather,’ Fairfield said. ‘But it’s difficult to get the scale of the thing. This is a composite photo, you know. The chaps worked through the night to assemble such images, and maps of the new terrain – and that’s not to mention the peril to the flyers who took the shots. Each of these craters is all but a mile wide, and it butts up against its neighbour, neat as a geometry exercise. Not that I was much use with the compass and straight-edge in my days at school. This smudge,’ and he pointed to a blur at the very centre of the circle, ‘is Amersham, a fair-sized little town. All but lost within the perimeter – see the scale of it?’
Frank recalled that Walter had spoken of a hundred cylinders on the way; only fifty or so had landed yet. ‘The second wave,’ he said. ‘That’s what comes next. All this is just a stage-setting. The next will be the war craft, like the cylinders of the last invasion. That’s the thinking. But where will these next cylinders come down? Can we say, yet?’
‘With some degree of certainty; they’re only eighteen or so hours out now. Some will hit the interior of the Cordon, landing a little later than the first lot, and the locations there aren’t secure yet. But others, the first to fall, will hit—’ He jabbed at the photograph with a forefinger, following the curve of the arc of craters. ‘Here, here, here… In the existing pits of the perimeter, you see. Not every crater will be targeted, as you can see, but a respectable number will get a new visitor.’
Verity seemed baffled. ‘Why would they land on terrain they already churned up?’
‘Because they smashed up any resistance there first, before they began to unscrew a single cylinder,’ Frank said. ‘Now they think they can land in peace.’
‘That’s the idea,’ Fairfield said. ‘But there’s still a flaw in their thinking – a loophole. They didn’t get us all, and we’ve time to respond – to bring up more troops and guns from the rear and from the reserve divisions. Surround them even before they land.’
‘“Surround them”,’ Verity repeated. ‘Which is why we’re going inwards.’
‘That’s the idea. The thing is, one of the cylinders appears to be coming down right on top of us. So we’re taking a fighting force inside the Cordon, you see, through the craters and to the relatively unharmed land within, so that there will be a welcoming party ready on all sides of the cylinder when it comes down. And meanwhile fresh troops will be brought up to plug the gaps we leave and wall them in from the far side.
‘And you’ll be coming with us. So I’m afraid it’s to be a day of walking for you, walking and digging in – it’s not far, but tricky countryside, as you can imagine. The scouts and sappers have gone on ahead.’ He eyed Verity. ‘I’m not ordering you to do this, Miss. You VADs are volunteers. If you wish to be released—’
Verity said boldly, ‘When the fun’s only just started? Not on your life, Lieutenant-Colonel.’
Fairfield grinned. ‘Carry on, then.’ He snapped out a smart salute and walked on down the line.
‘Brave of you,’ murmured Frank.
She snorted. ‘You should see the alternative – if I skulk away from here I’ll have to go back and face my mother, who says she once met Florence Nightingale. Sooner the Martian horde than that. Come on, Doctor Frank, let’s get our things packed up.’
Frank had always kept himself reasonably fit. After that confrontation at High Barnet he had taken up his school-days boxing again, since the skill had proven so useful in a crisis, and later he had responded with reasonable enthusiasm to the demands of the Fyrd trainers for their recruits to achieve physical readiness.