At last somebody ripped aside a curtain, exposing a window facing north. The sky was full of drifting orange sparks: Very lights, flare shells, falling slowly. In the hall, all the faces turned that way, shining like orange coins.
‘My God,’ said one man. ‘Somebody’s put on a firework show.’
‘That’s Amersham way, I think,’ said another. ‘And – look at that! The big shadow, like a man on stilts! Martian on the move!’
There was a hand on Frank’s shoulder: Verity Bliss. She was fully dressed, with her steel hat fixed over her hair. ‘It’s all kicking off. Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield sent me to fetch you.’
He pulled on his boots. ‘Come on, then.’
They pushed their way out into smoke-tinged air. In the road, men and women stood around, excited, pointing. The orange glare of flares in the direction of the Martians’ central Amersham pits was strong. Frank saw there were villagers among the khaki-clad crowd of troops, boys and girls scared but excited, wide-eyed to be up before the sky was properly light.
And – yes, Frank could see it now – there were the fighting-machines, tall and stately, casting shadows in the flare light like scaffolding around church spires. The Martians formed up and began to stride away, to the east.
Verity said, ‘Maybe we should count the machines. One, two,three… The shadows make it impossible.’
‘Don’t worry,’ came a cultured voice. Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield joined them, dapper in his peaked cap and topcoat – although Frank noticed outsized carpet slippers on his feet. ‘We’ve got scouts out, and we’re trying to get signals to the commanders outside the Cordon.’
Frank pointed to brief explosions of Heat-Ray fire. ‘The chaps sending up the Very flares seem to be getting it.’
‘Yes. Brave men, volunteers all. But we thought we needed to get a good look at what was going on, whatever it cost us. For it’s not just our Martians that are on the move. They seem to be converging from around the Cordon – we’ve had sightings from as far south as West Drayton, north as far as Bushy and Hemel Hempstead. Flocks of the things on the march, and converging thataway, towards Uxbridge.’ He pointed east. ‘I’m afraid there’s not much doubt about their target this morning.’
‘London,’ Verity said breathlessly.
The aircraft noise rose to a deep grumbling roar, and they had to shout to make themselves heard.
Fairfield said, ‘And up there’s the other reason we’re lighting the Martians’ pits with our flares.’
Frank grinned, suddenly exhilarated. ‘To guide in the bombers!’
‘That’s it!’ Fairfield took off his hat and stared into the sky.
And there they were, Frank saw, coming in low from the north, illuminated from beneath by the orange gleam of the flares. Frank suspected they had flown out of Northolt, the base of the Royal Flying Corps. They were huge, heavy aircraft, beefy biplanes. These were not RFC craft – the British military had no such planes – these were German bombers, Gothas and Giants, craft crash-developed in the crucible of the Russian front, some of them immense with multiple engines fixed to their wings. It was a sight that could scarce have been dreamed of ten, twenty years before.
Now they began to drop their bombs, big heavy pellets that sailed down through the air. Slam! Slam! Even from Abbotsdale the detonations felt heavy, like physical blows, and Frank fancied he saw destruction in those distant Martian pits, fragments of smashed machinery wheeling in the air. He had seen for himself how a decent human weapon, a Navy gun, could down even a fighting-machine.
But the Martians fought back. Frank saw the pale gleam of the Heat-Ray lancing up from the ground, and the fighting-machines turned armoured heads, even as they marched on the Cordon perimeter. The German bombers were heavy craft and slow to turn; one by one they were caught by the Heat-Ray and erupted into flame, and some exploded spectacularly as their bomb loads detonated in the air.
‘Bats, flying into a flamethrower,’ Fairfield murmured.
‘Yet still they come,’ Verity said. ‘Still the Germans come! Trying to smash those Martians before they even climb out of their pits.’ She took a deep breath. ‘To think, if I hadn’t joined the VADs, I could have missed all this!’
Fairfield nodded. ‘Well, there’ll be plenty of work for you, given the way the Martians are chucking the Heat-Ray around. You’d better get organised, Captain Jenkins. And see if you have any German speakers to hand, in case we find any air crew.’ He glanced east, where the sky was brightening. ‘Nothing more we can do for London now.’
23
OUR FLIGHT FROM STANMORE
As the dawn gathered that Wednesday morning, the Martians took their time to form up. In the First War, in striking from Surrey towards central London, they had been observed making a crescent formation, advancing bow first: an arc of armour and firepower whose flanks it would be all but impossible to turn, military analysts had since concluded, and not unlike the Prussians’ advance towards Paris in the war of the 1870s.
Now again they formed a crescent as they came out of the Cordon, with its prow pushing along the Western Avenue over the ruins of Uxbridge, its arcs reaching back beyond West Drayton to the south and Bushey to the north. And this time there was no mere handful of machines; observers counted at least fifty during the course of the day, perhaps a fifth of the entire force that had been landed in the heart of England in this new armada of cylinders.
Thus they advanced. All across a swathe of the western suburbs of London the alarms started to sound, and Army units, men and materiel, scrambled to their positions.
And we, my sister-in-law and I, were in Stanmore, to the west of the great improvised barricade that had become known as the King’s Line. I could not see the action yet but I could picture it: to the west of us the Martians, to the east of us the British defence line, and we two between them – caught in a closing trap!
Alice had indeed returned from Buxton, where she would have been safe, for now, but her instinct was to come home. I had made what preparations I could for our evacuation. I was determined that we would use our bicycles first, so that we could flee as fast as possible – but that laid a constraint on how much we could carry. Since my arrival on the Tuesday, I had kept my rucksack packed, and with every means of persuasion short of physical force I had induced Alice to compress her essentials into a single suitcase – she would have used more space for family jewellery and photographs of George than for underwear, which tells you all you need to know of her priorities. And she would chatter on about her spa holiday –who had said what to whom. That had taken all evening, until it had been too late to leave on the Tuesday night, and I had watched with envy and a kind of shame as the neighbours had one by one slipped away, a few in motor-cars somehow not requisitioned by the government, the rest on foot.
And all that day, as best I could, I followed the news of the Martians’ attacks on targets around the country: fast, precise, evidently ruthlessly planned.
On the Wednesday, we woke from a restless sleep to the sound of church bells and sirens and police lorries with loudhailers urging those remaining to hide in cellars or to flee. I learned that the Martians were moving this day on London, I felt profound regret that I had not succeeded in getting us away earlier – and a deepening fear that whatever we did now would be too late.
Even so I had to shake my sister-in-law out of her bed. ‘George would not want us to run like rabbits,’ she said, as I argued with her over the necessity of brushing her hair.