As we walked, though we saw little evidence of fire, we passed tremendous craters in the ground – as if great bombs had fallen. The Heat-Ray will incinerate a human in a flash, and demolish a building – but such is the density of energy it delivers that the fires it sets, in urban situations anyhow, tend to blow themselves out. So London had been spared the great firestorm that many had predicted when the Martians brought the Heat-Ray back to the city.
But what the Martian assaults had done, by breaking the skin of modern London, had been to reveal the medieval bones and guts lying beneath. I was fascinated to learn that the Martians’ destruction of the Guildhall had revealed the remains of a Roman amphitheatre beneath, a structure long hypothesised but its existence never confirmed. Gray told me that even as the Martians still strutted over London in the present, archaeologists came to study what was exposed of the past. ‘Makes you proud, doesn’t it? That we still have such a perspective, even in this… Do the Martians seek abstract knowledge? If not, then that separates us from them.’
Now I saw that the men around me, on a murmur from their officers, were raising handkerchiefs and scarves to their faces, and Gray quietly advised me to do the same. He pointed to a churchyard, not far off the road. The church itself had been smashed, and the ground around churned up too.
‘The graveyards?’
‘In some of the older churches there are plague pits. Best to be cautious.’
We walked on.
You might ask where were the Londoners in this, those millions who still remained. Hiding– that’s the short answer. I learned that the surviving population had learned to stay back from the main thoroughfares, and inhabited the great warrens of back streets, especially in the East End rookeries – that was if they hadn’t found shelter underground, in the sewers or railway tunnels that were not yet flooded. Thus they avoided the Martians, with their Heat-Ray, and their harvesting.
And they did what they could to keep themselves alive, and not just on the rations the emergency government managed to provide; they foraged in the wrecks of stores, where tinned goods and so forth could still be found, and they grew vegetables, even kept chickens and a few pigs, in gardens and allotments and the smaller parks.
The government kept an eye on the population. A system of ration cards was one way of ensuring every man, woman and child was logged in a great register somewhere. The police still functioned, after a fashion, augmented by Special Constables; crime levels were lower than you might have expected – because, it was said, the rations doled out were more nutritious than the diet of many East End Londoners before the Martians came. And people were put to work, on one project or another: on salvage work, or maintaining the surviving sewers, for example, as I was to discover for myself.
Hidden the people were, but as we walked, occasionally children would peek out from an alley or the doorway of an abandoned shop, with grimy, rat-like faces, and big eyes. The soldiers threw them bits of chocolates , even a few cigarettes. ‘For your mum and dad!’ The children would grab the treasures and scuttle back into the shadows.
‘Poor little mites,’ Gray said neutrally. ‘After years of this they don’t know whether to fear us or the Martians.’
Ted Lane growled, ‘I had family living around here – came to London to make their fortunes, if you can believe it – all evacuated now. A summer’s day like this isn’t so bad, but the winter’s a misery. Nobody dares burn a fire, see, for fear of the Martians seeing the smoke. The sooner we put a stop to this business the better.’
‘No one will disagree with you there, Sergeant,’ said Ben Gray.
We reached Stratford, an area I did not know well. It seemed to me that the stroke of the Heat-Ray must have been heavy here. The streets were mere mounds of rubble in rows, with the names picked out by hand-painted wooden signs, if at all. In some places the damage was such that the very cobbles had been smashed and lifted. But life persisted, as it always does, and green sprouted in the lee of the broken walls. I remember particularly rose bay willow-herbs standing proud in the wreckage of parlours and kitchens.
We came to a manhole cover.
The file broke up from its rough marching formation, and the NCOs gave brisk orders to the men to disperse – to find cover in the safer of the surrounding buildings, to take a sip of water from their canteens and to have a fag. ‘If you’ve any tanks that need emptying, do it now. Then we’ll be going down the rat-hole one at a time, so get ready.’
It was the work of a moment for a couple of men, hastily volunteered, to brush the cover clear of debris, and to get it lifted. Beneath, I saw rusty rungs leading down into the dark.
I faced Lane and Gray, who were both grinning at me. ‘Is that -?’
‘A sewer,’ Gray said. ‘A marvel of Victorian engineering.’
Lane sniffed. ‘And a couple of winters’ rain will have sluiced it nice and clean.’
‘There is that.’
I glared at them. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
They glanced uneasily at each other.
‘Well,’ Lane said hesitantly, ‘I suppose we thought – if you’d known—’
‘What, I would have had a fit of vapours? Just as Major Eden decided I had to be tricked into my mission. Oh, for God’s sake—’ I pushed my way to the open manhole mouth, grabbed an electric torch from a startled corporal, and looked down into the pit. ‘Tell me where this goes.’
Lane explained, as best he understood it himself. This great drain was part of the Bazalgette system, devised and built in Victoria’s reign to clean up London. Once London’s drains, all along the course of the river, had flowed more or less direct into the Thames by the shortest route. It was when the filth and stench had driven even the Parliamentarians indoors – the water was foul well upstream of Westminster by then – that it had been determined something must be done.
‘So,’ Lane said, sketching maps in the dirt. ‘Bazalgette drove great transverse “intercept” sewers from west to east, running parallel to the river’s course and cutting across all the other big north-south conduits. The idea being, you see, that the flow of water should be diverted east, so that the big discharges into the river itself would come much further downstream – further than Westminster anyhow. One of these transverse channels runs from Chiswick eastward. But the big one, the high level sewer, runs from Hampstead to Hackney to Stratford – to here.’
I glanced at the unassuming manhole, and then westward. ‘So if you plod upstream, so to speak—’
‘You’ll get all the way to Hampstead, deep underground and out of sight of any snooping Martian. And from there it’s only a few miles to Uxbridge and the Cordon. And then – well, you’ll see when we get there. It’s a circuitous route we’ve followed, I know, to go east afore heading west again, but it’s the safest passage we have.’
‘Anyhow, that’s the good news,’ Gray said wryly. ‘The bad news is the day is too far advanced for us to make it all the way to the Trench today.’
‘The Trench?’
‘You’ll see.’
I glanced around at the ruins. ‘There’s barely an intact roof to cover us. Where will we spend the night?’
And Lane and Gray glanced at each other, and at the manhole at our feet.
Albert Cook would have approved, I thought grimly. Londoners running in their own sewers – just as he foresaw during the First War. And yet, despite my bravado before these overbearing men, I felt a deep dread at descending into the clammy dark – indeed, a dread that had gathered as I had worked my way, step by step, closer to the heart of the Martians’ dark empire on the earth.