Eden said, ‘Well, this foray is a little unorthodox. You understand that we’ve established a number of muster points around the Trench itself – in anti-clockwise order from here, St Albans to the north, then Aylesbury and Reading to the west, Windsor to the south.’
‘The Trench?’
He grinned. ‘You’ll see.’
After only a short journey further west, the troopers grew restless, pointing ahead. When I looked through the paintsmeared windows I saw a rise in the ground, spanning the horizon, like a ridge, or a line of sand dunes.
‘Eric. What is this place?’
‘Put all your preconceptions aside, Julie. Like nowhere else on the earth.’
15
IN THE TRENCH
Maps of the Martians’ territory in England, as they possessed it at that stage in the Second War, are now readily available and familiar – not then! So you can imagine it as seen from above, from a Zeppelin, or a falling Martian cylinder. It would have looked like a tremendous archery target, I suppose, or a dartboard. At the bull, you had the main group of Martian pits in the ruins of the Buckinghamshire town of Amersham, a complex now being busily extended which had come to be called the Redoubt. From that centre, draw a circle of radius ten miles or so, to encompass Uxbridge to the south-east, and panning anti-clockwise to Watford, Hemel Risborough, Marlow, Maidenhead and Hempstead, Princes Slough. Use a thick pencil, for that was the line of destruction wrought by the fall of the ‘dummy’ cylinders at midnight of March 29, 1920, and the perimeter of the zone we came to call the Cordon.
Within that circle, the earthly kingdom of the Martians. And outside the circle, two years later, had been constructed the most significant human response to the Martian incursion, called, laconically, the Trench. It was another great band around the perimeter of your dartboard: a band of people and machines and watch-towers and weapons. Of course it was not a perfect containment – Eric’s own encounter with the Martians of Dogger Bank was proof of that – but it was the best we could do. And it was to the Trench that I was brought now.
Off the buses, we were met by a couple of NCOs, who formed us up into a rough column. We walked in our file the last hundred yards or so to that great earthen rampart I had seen, and then we climbed. It had not been a dry winter and the ground, not yet bound by the new grass, was as muddy as you might expect, but there were paths to follow, of wooden duckboards pushed into the ground. Overhead there was a persistent buzz of aircraft, the hornet whines of aeroplanes or the deeper thrum of Zepp engines; the Cordon was continuously, if cautiously, patrolled from the air.
Eden walked beside me. ‘Don’t worry about the mud. You’ll get used to that. And now, as we top this ridge, prepare for a marvel…’
It opened out slowly.
The ridge flattened out into a parapet reinforced with more duckboards. I found I stood on the lip of a tremendous ditch, a furrow in the ground. The inner face of the ridge before us was very steep – it cut down from the perimeter at an angle a lot sharper than forty-five degrees – and it must have been fifty feet deep, a cut into the English ground. Netting and wire had been flung down this great dug-out face, to stabilise it in case of rain I imagined, and there were rope ladders and rope-and-pulley arrangements reaching down the artificial cliff. When I peered down into the trench to its very base, I saw people, all in khaki, making their way along a kind of narrow roadway, a path walled by sandbags and floored by duckboards. I would learn that the inhabitants called this deepest crease the ‘gully’. Beyond that tangled lane a wall of earth rose up on the far side, mirroring my own side by riddled with detail, with walkways and ladders and shelters. That far side of the ditch did not slope so steep as my side, and was broken up into terraces that spanned its length, to left and right as far as I could see, with shelves and steps everywhere. The vertical face had been dug into, to create rough caves, quite neat troglodytic apartments, faced by corrugated iron or wooden planks; the smartest even appeared to have glass windows. Here and there I saw the bright paint of red crosses. And at the upper rim of this great complex, facing into Martian country, there was a parapet of more sandbags and wooden spotting huts, with searchlights and what looked like Navy guns, and soldiers staring steadfastly away from us, to the west, into the Martian territory. Glancing to left and right, I could see that this remarkable structure, this huge inhabited ditch, went on to left and right, sweeping to the horizon roughly to north and south – we had come on it from the east – with the slightest of curves visible in the distance, suggesting a vast closed circle spanning the land ahead of me. It reminded me of some relic of prehistory, a Saxon dyke perhaps, on a tremendous scale. But no nation of the Stone Age or the Iron Age had made this; I saw marks like the scraping of huge claws where digging machines had been used to gouge it out. Men and women moved like maggots everywhere. A chorus of voices rose up, like the crowd in some strange amphitheatre.
‘There,’ Eden said to me, grinning. ‘Can you see the logic?’ He pointed forward. ‘That way, to the west, are the Martians, and that’s where they come from when they attack. So we built our cabins and stores into the east-facing walls, so there’s some shelter when the attacks come, and made the west-facing walls steep so it’s hard to clamber out, even for a fighting-machine. The Trench goes on in a great circle all around the Martian Cordon, an integrated system more than sixty miles long which is the distance from London to Hastings, say – actually the best part of two hundred miles of digging, for actually there are three such systems, one inside the other. We call them the “ditches.”’
‘Three.’
‘Connected by a series of tunnels – you’ll get used to tunnels here. This is actually the rear ditch, for supplies, training, medical support – you see the aid centres in the opposite wall. The middle ditch is for reserve troops, and the third, the innermost, is the front line. Anyhow that’s the thinking, a kind of amalgam of the sort of trench-working we learned about agin the Boers, and developed by the Germans during the Schlieffen War.’
Lane grinned. ‘And it works, does it? We can’t do much about their flying-machines. But a fighting-machine, now – even a hundred-foot giant might trip over a fifty-feet ditch.’
‘That’s the idea, Sergeant. Make ’em think at least, eh?’
I was still staring at the far wall, the swarming military humanity there – the detail of the workings, the shelters, the ladders and steps and galleries. ‘It’s like a cut-open termite nest.’
Ben Gray shook his head. ‘Reminds me of the Amalfi coast, the sheer cliffs down to the beautiful sea, a town cut into a cliff face… Have you ever been to Italy, Miss Elphinstone? A rather more attractive populace there than a bunch of muddy Army types, though! Well, we’d better get on with it, we’re holding up the line…’
Already I heard the NCOs calling to the newcomers: ‘All right, lads, that’s enough sight-seeing, and it’s down you go. Old ladies and officers take the pulley lifts. The rest of you use the rope ladders; they aren’t so bad, and the worst danger is getting your fingers stomped on by the lout coming down after you. But if you’re a sportsman you’ll take the slide.’
A woman’s voice called, ‘I’ll show you boys how it’s done!’ It was a QA, a Queen Alexandria’s nurse, I saw, in cape and skirt. She grabbed a bit of sacking, evidently left there for the purpose, sat down on it, slid on her backside over the crest – and then plummeted down the ditch face on a kind of slippery track, polished, I supposed, by the hundreds of backsides that had gone before hers. She whooped as she slithered, and finished with an undignified tumble at the bottom. But she got up laughing, and bowed to acknowledge the applause that broke out.