They were all exhausted to some degree, Frank thought. None had slept much, if at all, last night. But still they were put to work, straight away. Frank observed an awareness of time, a sense of urgency. ‘Midnight they’re coming,’ went the whisper, in the trenches, the hastily erected field kitchens, among Frank’s own staff, the doctors and orderlies, the nurses and VADs. ‘Midnight, coming again, the Martians. Got to be ready…’
They had all seen the sheer blind destructive power so casually wielded by the Martians just the night before. They had all been briefed on the Black Smoke and the Heat-Ray. And here they were, the first line of defence for England and all mankind. Frank heard Fairfield and other officers and the bristling NCOs uttering exhortations as they worked their way along the line, urging on the work, but Frank scarcely thought it was necessary. They all knew.
At six they were fed, but they kept working. By now, despite the ‘nineteen hours’ window of opportunity still anticipated after the landings, a fight was expected, and the medics were set to digging their own protective trenches. The field hospitals were well back from front-line troops and the expected landing site of ‘their’ cylinder – marked as ‘No. 12’ on Fairfield’s map – but the Heat-Ray was known from the last War to have a useful range of several miles. So, trenches it had to be.
They ate as they worked, taking breaks of only a few minutes from the digging and hauling. By seven thirty the sun was down. Frank and Verity made a final tour of their installation.
‘Looks rougher than the first set-up,’ Verity said. ‘But then everything’s been dragged a few miles through the mud – as have we all.’
‘It looks fit for purpose,’ Frank said, trying to project a confidence he did not truly feel.
‘So it did last night,’ Verity said bleakly, ‘and we were all but useless.’
‘We’ll do all we can.’
She laughed. ‘Now that is a doctor’s line! Comforting and meaningless. You’ve been in the job too long, Captain…’
Night fell. The clocks worked their way towards midnight. Later Frank could not decide if the time had crawled or flown.
Fairfield, on his last tour of inspection before the deadline, wasn’t terribly sympathetic over the medics’ anxiety. ‘Had a couple of operations in my time,’ he said. ‘Bullet in the shoulder, picked it up in the Sudan. When you’re waiting for your turn on the slab – that’swhat this is like. Now it’s your turn to wait for the surgeon’s blade, Doctor!’
Frank used the latrines at ten, and again at eleven when they were getting more crowded. This routine reminded him uncomfortably of the night before, as if he were stuck in some over-scripted play that he must rehearse over and over.
A last cup of coffee, which he took to his position in the trench. He clambered down a short wooden ladder and settled behind a sandbag parapet, wondering if he would ever climb back up again. In fact he found it hard to imagine a time, any reality, beyond the midnight cut-off. In the dirt at his feet, gleaming in the light of the oil lamps strung along the trench, he saw a flint nodule, creamy white with a rich black interior.
‘Chalk country, Doc,’ came a familiar voice. ‘Sappers know the landscape. ’Ave to. Nat’ral geologists, you could call ’em.’
Frank turned, startled. ‘Bert Cook!’
Cook was wearing a reservist’s uniform, as muddied as the rest. Under his steel hat, Frank saw, he had blackened his face with burnt cork. The officers had suggested it, but most of the troops hadn’t bothered; Martians brought no snipers. ‘Hello, Doc,’ Cook said. ‘Heard you were ’ere – with this unit. Made my way along the perimeter to find a friendly face.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Just in time for the late sitting of the show, eh?’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised you’re here, Bert. I suppose you would always come back.’
‘“As a sparrow goes for man”, as your brother quoted me.’ He sounded charged, excited – yet calculating, Frank thought. ‘And here I am, right underneath ’em. This is what I’ve been waiting for, ever since the beggars died off in ’07 – waiting for them to come finish the job they started.’
‘You say it with such relish, Bert. You are a riddle.’
‘I’ll give you a riddle. What’s green and flashing and flies like a bird in the sky?’
Frank stared at him.
Cook grinned, and pointed upwards.
17
CYLINDER No. 12
It took Frank some time, with the help of other survivors, to put together a coherent account of what followed. But then, as it turned out, he would have the time – plenty of it.
It was at the stroke of midnight that Fairfield’s Cylinder No. 12 made its entrance, with a vivid flash of green overhead, and then a concussion, a slam on the ground. Frank, huddled down in his trench, felt it as a shuddering in the earth, and a gust of air that knocked the breath out of his chest. In the trench the duckboards creaked and cracked, some of the loosely constructed parapet of sand bags collapsed, and here and there people whimpered and huddled. It was a great blow, as if the earth had suffered a mighty punch – not as great as the calamitous infall of twenty-four hours earlier, Frank realised immediately, but nearer.
Then, just seconds after the cylinder’s fall, Frank heard shouting. ‘Advance! Advance!’
‘Bring those bloody guns up!’
‘A light here, throw a light!’
Frank stood on a firing step and looked ahead, out of his trench. He saw a greenish glow coming from a hole dug new into the churned-up ground, with earth scattered around, and small fires in the nearer distance where there were trees and grass and buildings left to burn. Men and field guns were silhouetted against the eerie green glow, and picked out by wavering torchlight, already advancing towards the new pit.
And, from somewhere far behind, Frank heard the cough of artillery: the big guns firing from behind the lines, the giant eighteen- and sixty-pounders. The plan was that those great shells would smash up the cylinders before the ground troops even closed.
Frank’s new friend Feldwebelleutnant Schwesig and his gun crew, mobile, fast, and well-trained like all German troops, were among the first to reach the perimeter of the new pit. Later Schwesig told Frank what he saw. There was the cylinder embedded in the earth, standing vertical, a great pillar of steel some thirty yards across – and, no doubt, a hundred yards long, as it had proved when the inert craft were finally dug out of the ground after the First War. Schwesig and his crew prepared their G8 gun for what seemed to them the remote possibility that anything from within that cylinder should survive the blast of the field artillery already being trained on the target. There was no rush; they had nineteen hours’ grace before the Martians could move out in force, so they believed.
But the rules of the game changed again. There was a crack, a flash of greenish light. Schwesig saw it as a band of light around the top seam of the cylinder, under its flat lid.
Then that disc of metal, itself weighing perhaps five thousand tons, was suddenly detached and cast aside like a straw boater, to fly across the pit. No hours of patient unscrewing this time! The cylinder had not waited inertly for the human attack, not for nineteen hours, not even for nineteen minutes.
Then, in another instant, a kind of tentacular, metallic arm lifted out of the craft bearing a compact device not unlike a moving-picture camera: a device that Schwesig remembered well from his briefings. It was a Heat-Ray generator. Schwesig hurled himself flat into the dirt. He saw a ghost-pale beam of light pass not feet over his prone body, and thought he felt the air itself blasted to a tremendous temperature. Around him men who had not been so fast to react flashed into white flame, as the Ray swept like a hose around the perimeter of the pit. All this in mere seconds after the opening of the cylinder.