They spoke on of other practicalities. The stranded troops had some medical supplies, but there were injured among the civilian population too, and the stock of the pharmacies; what they had would have to be pooled and rationed. Electricity hadn’t yet reached many communities out here anyhow; the Manor had its own generators, but they would require fuel which would be irreplaceable. Water would always be an issue, but there were old wells in Abbotsdale that could be opened up with some muscle…
As the journey wore on, Frank felt himself weakening. He had after all missed two nights’ sleep. He fought not to shiver; he wrapped his arms around his chest. And he felt aches and pains that he hadn’t noticed before – a pull of one ankle, a wrenched shoulder.
Mildred watched him. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Reaction setting in. Nothing a stiff whisky won’t cure…’ He heard these words as from a distance. The world, the green country around him, seemed bright as ever, and yet he had a growing sense of unreality, as if all of this was a sham that might be ripped aside at any moment, to plunge him back into those midnight scenes of smashed bodies and broken minds.
To his horror, he found he was weeping. Mildred Tritton pulled up the cart. Verity scrambled up beside him, and held him.
Mildred snapped the reins, and the cart rolled on slowly. After a time, with Verity at his side, the weeping receded, and he fell into a half-doze.
21
AT ABBOTSDALE
They approached the village at last. Frank looked dully on a church no more than fifty years old, a new school, a scrap of common land that had been spared enclosure. This was no suburb, but the social and technological progress of the nineteenth century had wrought great changes on places like this.
The cart slowed at the gate of a handsome manor house, a much older building, set back from the road. Outside, weapons rifles and revolvers and even flare guns – had been heaped up and covered by a tarpaulin, hidden from Martian eyes, Frank supposed. As the MOs and VADs and nurses clambered out of the cart, the manor gates opened and two scouts emerged, riding safety bicycles. They rolled off in the direction of Amersham, wobbling as they went, to a chorus of catcalls from the MOs: ‘Put your back into it, lads!’
‘Missing your motorcycles?…’
Mildred clucked at the horses, and turned to Frank. ‘Well, here we are, for better or worse. Now look, don’t be alarmed when I take you into the house, the spaniels are perfectly harmless even if there are rather a lot of them…’
Frank joined Fairfield and other officers, gathered together by Lady Emily Bonneville over coffee in a grand but musty dining room. Fairfield detached himself to greet Frank, barely interrupting the earnest talk.
Fairfield eyed Frank with a kind of brutal honesty, as if he could see inside him – knew about Frank’s bout of weeping, of which he was now, foolishly, ashamed. ‘I always thought I was the strong one of the family,’ he would tell me, much later.
‘Now you know,’ Fairfield said to him softly. ‘Saw it all before on the Russian front – save it’s even worse here. I have every confidence in you, Captain Jenkins. Now – let’s get to work.’
As for the immediate situation, a priority was simply contacting all the surviving units in the Cordon, and finding them all shelter and provision. With that in mind the main topic was, not surprisingly, communications. A simple Marvin’s Megaphone wireless receiver would pick up the government’s broadcasts from the Marconi station near Chelmsford, as long as there was power, and already there had been broadcasts on the public wavelengths aimed at those trapped inside the Martian Cordon: ‘You are not alone.’ Frank was assured that later it would be possible to rig up ‘crystal sets’ which could detect wireless signals without any external power supply at all. Getting messages out was another issue, however; the small field wireless kits were limited in range, and there had been little success so far. But a lieutenant of the sappers spoke of tunnelling all the way under the Cordon perimeter itself and laying cables.
As the morning wore in, there was some news from outside. On this Tuesday, their first day on the earth, these new Martian invaders had already left their vast encampment. The cylinders having landed at midnight, the fighting-machines had moved out a mere six hours later, in the dawn. The first sightings had been by units within the Cordon, and according to reports from the exterior, once out of their perimeter the Martians had fanned out quickly in groups, evidently heading for specific targets. There were a lot of fighting-machines on the earth now, estimated at more than two hundred if the capacity of the fortyeight crewed cylinders was similar to the fleet of ’07; there were dozens of machines in these early attack groups.
And attack they had. They had struck at bases at Colchester and Aldershot, the very guts of the Army. They had gone too to Salisbury Plain where the military training ground had been used to amass reserve troops; the slaughter had been great. (After the War, Frank was astonished to be shown dramatic pictures run in the Mirror of a fighting-machine looming over Stonehenge; of course there were no newspapers in the Cordon.) The big Navy dockyards at Chatham and Portsmouth had been hammered too, though many of the capital ships had been able to put to sea – that was thanks to quick thinking by Churchill, who overrode the Admiralty to get it done. And throughout the country, wherever they roamed, the Martians routinely cut road and rail links and bridges, and telephone and telegraph wires, and blew up gasometers, and even fired coal resistance, and a couple of fighting-machines had been got by lucky shots from artillery pieces, but that was all; they were too fast, too destructive. This time the Martians had done their homework, Frank realised; they were hamstringing Britain. Among the over-excited, over-tired officers in that dining room there was much speculation about further regional targets: Liverpool Docks, perhaps, or the great fuel stores at Cardiff and Llanelli, or the manufacturing centres of the Midlands like Stafford, Burton, Leicester, Northampton.
And when, on the Wednesday morning, the Martians moved at last on London, of all of us – all of my scattered and broken family – it seems to have been Frank who was aware of it first.
22
HOW THE MARTIANS MOVED OUT OF THE CORDON
As the most senior of the medical officers who had made it to Abbotsdale, Frank had been offered a room in the manor house. But Frank is nothing if not a man of conscience, tedious company as that makes him at times. So he bedded down on a straw-filled mattress in the Abbotsdale village hall with his junior MOs and the nurses and the VADs, men and women separated for decency by a big old canvas curtain used in the annual pantomime – he told me it was crudely painted to look like a fairy castle, which after the unreality of the last few days struck him as somehow appropriate. For a while he was kept awake by the uneasy joshing of men as exhausted and disturbed as he was,. But he snuggled under a blanket and a heap of his clothes, and was soon out like a snuffed candle.
He was woken by a drone of aircraft engines.
He sat bolt upright, in pitch dark broken only by cracks of flickering orange light coming through imperfectly fixed curtains. Around him men were stirring, muttering. That deep thrumming gathered in intensity, coming from the north and east, he thought. Aircraft, undoubtedly; he recognised the humming of the big screws. With the wariness of the war veteran he had so suddenly become, Frank had kept his trousers and socks and shorts on, and he was glad of it now as he felt around in the dark for his jacket, boots and revolver.