I was out again at dawn.
That Tuesday was a fine, clear day, with a nip in the air although March was nearly done with us, and the sky was deep blue and streaked with low cloud to the west. I had my rucksack on my back, with all my worldly goods, for I did not know what the day might bring. None of us did. But I did not check out of my room at my hotel on the Strand – I had the key in my pocket; perhaps I would yet return. (I never did; I have the key still, before me as I write.) I walked to the river, the heart of the city.
Though I do not count myself a Londoner I suppose it was an instinct to go there, at such a moment. The river could be a strange sight in the dawn light, even on days when Martians weren’t attacking, for you would see folk picking their way through the exposed mud of the banks, seeking treasures that might have been washed down the drains to this great natural sewer: coins, lighters, pens, cigarette and card cases, even bits of jewellery. These ‘mudlarks’ were a symptom of the return of extreme poverty under Marvin, a condition Dickens would have recognised.
But that morning the water itself was crowded and noisy from engines, hooters, bells, and raised voices. There were some of the Navy boats I had seen the day before, gun platforms and torpedo rams among them. And I saw too a scattered host of civilian ships, ferries and yachts and quite grand river-boats, all making their cautious way downstream – towards the sea, and away from the fighting. Some of those on the yachts and cruisers stared curiously back at the mudlarks, and at me, and at the city’s great buildings. Some of them raised Kodaks to take photographs. I imagined great houses further upstream, at Marlow and Maidenhead and Henley, being abandoned for the season now that the noisy new neighbours from Mars had moved in.
I remember distinctly that none of the mudlarks looked up to watch this grand procession of well-heeled refugees drift by.
And nor did the mudlarks see the flying-machine.
I saw it out of the corner of my eye at first, a shift in the light, off to the west. When I looked that way I saw a disc, flat and wide, a smooth profile – and very large, and evidently moving very rapidly, for it was greyed with distance, and rose up beyond the clouds. It was a Martian machine, of the kind which I had seen once before, in the sky over Essex, from the bobbing deck of the paddle-steamer on which I, Frank and Alice escaped to France during the First War. The great flyer moved smoothly and silently, with a grace that made it seem to belong to the realm of the air, like a cloud, like a rainbow, rather than to the dullness of the ground. But then it has long been remarked that all Martian machines have a sense of living grace about them, as if, sparked with electricity, they were alive themselves, in contrast to our own clanking, steam-driven, spatchcocked gadgets. I strained my eyes, trying to make out any details – any differences of form or operation from that glimpse thirteen years ago.
It is a remarkable truth that of all the gadgets humans retrieved after the First Martian War, it was the flying-machine that was the first to be made operational. It flies, in fact, not by dragging its way through the air with propeller blades as our aeroplanes do, but rather it gathers in the air, raises it to a super-hot temperature, and then lets it expand explosively from an array of vents which may be swivelled and turned. It is as if the machine is fitted with a series of rockets, but rockets which can be directed and varied in their thrust, and which will not run out of propellant, since it is the air itself that replenishes them. As for the heating agent, this seems to be a development of the Heat-Ray technology; the energy generators used by a flying-machine seem to be closely related to those used in that weapon.
According to Rayleigh, Lilienthal and others, the Martians’ flying-machines, in the First War, appeared to have been a design adapted to Mars’ air, so much thinner than ours, and of different composition. In thin air one would not use wings to rest on the air to support the craft, as our heavier-than-air aircraft designs have since the Wright brothers’ experiments. Rather, you would shape your craft to push the air out of the way, streamlining the ship like a stingray, a form to which the Martian machines have been compared.
It had taken days in the First War before that flyingmachine had been spied. Everyone supposed that the Essex machine must have been constructed from components carried in several cylinders, brought together and assembled. But now I was seeing this new machine only hours after the Middlesex cylinders had landed. In addition there had always seemed an uncertain, experimental aspect to the flying-machines as observed during the First War; this beast seemed much more confident. I realised with unease that Walter was right, that the Martians must have learned a great deal from their first dealings with humans, and had come back far better prepared, for our thicker air and other terrestrial conditions.
The machine came out of the west, following the line of the river – and thus heading for my position. I remembered that the Essex machine had been scattering the Black Smoke across the land, but there was no evidence of that dark agent this time. The machine passed directly over me; I ducked, but kept looking up. I saw that the hull was brazen, like the cowl of a fighting-machine, and its undersurface was grooved, perhaps for stability in the air, and its sharp rim was oddly feathered at the back. I imagined a battery of cameras trained on the machine as it passed over the city.
And I saw that the flying-machine had escorts: biplanes, two of them, which swooped and darted like flies beneath the belly of the behemoth: human planes, challenging the Martian. I thought they must be Albatros, or another German design – or even Russian – rather than anything British. I wondered what harm even the Red Baron, hero of the Russian front, could do to the Martian machine, if he ever got close enough. Yet it was cheering to me to see that the invaders did not have the skies entirely to themselves.
I watched the Martian and his escort pass on down the Thames, until I lost him in the glare of the rising sun. And then I heard the cries of the newsboys, for the day’s first specials were out.
I hurried from the Embankment and back into the city. Though the sun was barely up the crowds were out, and I had to battle to get hold of a flimsy Daily Mirror, exorbitantly priced at a shilling:
And even as the newsboys made fresh fortunes, the government was stirring, the bill-posters slapping fresh proclamations onto the lampposts, the loudhailer vans cruising the blockaded streets to issue fresh orders to the populace:
This new directive was set out over a portrait of the King, who looked a bit bewildered in an elaborate military uniform, but a better choice to stir the soul than a picture of Marvin, I knew by now.
I saw that ‘all able-bodied men between sixteen and sixty, not already engaged in vital war work’ were ‘encouraged’ to grab a pick and a shovel (bring your own; equipment not supplied) and to make their way to the ‘King’s Line’, which was to be a defensive perimeter cutting across the country between the Martians and the city. A map was appended, showing the Martian Cordon where it swept closest to the city to the northwest, near Uxbridge. Our Line would be a bow-shape five to ten miles back, I saw, and following the lines of the trunk roads – though advanced a little ahead of those highways, perhaps for ease of communication. Thus the Line would run from Ashford, north-east up through Twickenham and Richmond, then roughly north through Brentford, Ealing and Wembley to Hendon, and then north-west to Edgware – its terminus coming alarmingly close to Stanmore, where my sister-in-law might have returned, I noted. Tractors and digging machines both civilian and military were already drawing up to the Line, I read, which was being surveyed by the Royal Engineers and marked out by scouts; there would be a complex of trenches, earthworks, pillboxes and redoubts, manned by troops hastily deployed from Aldershot, and with artillery batteries reinforced by Navy guns. Then the British forces would be joined, in a gesture of friendship, by German detachments already being rushed across the Channel from occupied France.