I tried to gather my impression of the place. ‘This whole great earthwork is like – what? Like one vast body, this Trench curled like Ourobouros around the Martian canker, and these soldiers toiled like antibodies in the bloodstream to keep the whole intact and healthy.’
Ted Lane pulled a face. ‘That’s a bit poetic for me, Miss. It’s the best we can do, that’s all. We have to try to contain the Martians. It’s that or let them rampage around the countryside as they choose.’
As I thought it over that night, I did wonder about the wisdom of the stratagem. If these Martians had come here to learn about us – to learn the craft of war against humans, in order to complete their failed conquest of the earth – then here we were providing them with a kind of idealised training ground, as we sat there and threw the best we had at them, and let them learn how to counter it. But then, what else were we to do? As Lane had said, we couldn’t simply wave them through.
I was to remember these reflections on the Martians’ potential adaptability the next morning.
On the way back to my tamboo I saw a man tending a row of pea plants, growing out of the earth under shoved-aside duckboards. This was a Tommy garden, as they called it. When your eye got attuned, you saw them all over the face of the Trench, splashes of homely green.
16
A TUNNEL UNDER THE TRENCH
I slept well enough; by this stage in my odyssey I was too exhausted not to. But I was woken once in the night, by the firing of a single gun somewhere on the earthwork, an artillery piece that coughed over and over, and then the whistle of the shells fading in the night, the crump of explosions. I had no idea what strategic purpose could be served by rounds from a lone gun. It seemed madness to me, and perhaps so it was.
I’d been told I would be roused by a bugle. In the event Ben Gray came in the dark and shook me awake. ‘Get dressed. I’ll get your pack.’
I stirred reluctantly. Beyond the curtains of the tamboo’s windows, I saw greyish daylight, and I could hear shouting, running footsteps. ‘What time is it?’
Gray was gathering my gear and stuffing it without ceremony into my rucksack. ‘Early. Not yet four a.m.’
I pushed my way out of my bunk. The young officers were already gone; a half-drunk bottle of whiskey and scattered playing cards stood on the table. ‘But we aren’t meant to be travelling until seven a.m.’
Gray looked me in the eye. ‘The Martians have decided not to follow our plan. Now get your boots on, empty your bladder, and meet me outside. That’s an order.’
‘Where’s Eric Eden?’
‘Fighting the Martians. Now come on.’
Outside the tamboo, boots and hat on, rucksack over my shoulders – I had lingered long enough to make sure Walter’s packet of sigil sketches was safe in there, for as far as Ted Land and Gray and others knew, to deliver the sketches to the Martians was still the plan – at first I stood astounded by the sight before me. In the grey dawn light, the great ditch swarmed with activity.
On the far wall, the steeper eastern face, I saw people clambering up or down the ladders, even scaling the stabilising netting, the main priority seeming to be to get off the face and to shelter. Lodes of materiel were suspended from the pulley cables, apparently abandoned. In the deep gully, and all across the terracing of my inhabited western face, people ran, some without their proper uniforms – some even barefoot – grabbing weapons and ammunition packs as they went, and dashing to their stations. Lanterns shone everywhere, and searchlights mounted on the parapets raked over this great linear hive of activity. There was a barrage of noise too, whistles, bugle calls, shouts, though the human sounds were dwarfed by the great scale of the ditch.
But now I heard the crack of an artillery gun, a huge pounding that shook the earth. All around me people stopped in their tracks, and looked up at the lightening sky. I twisted my head, and looked up too, up, up past the terraces and the rows of tamboos.
And I saw it loom over the parapet of the western face, coming out of the Cordon: a cowled hood, a flash of bronze, tentacular appendages clutching what might have been a heavy camera.
‘Down!’ That was my own cry, I think; next thing I knew I had shoved Gray down and lay half-across him with my hand on the back of his neck. That was the veteran in me. Yet even now the journalist in me longed for a Kodak, to capture the sight!
And the Heat-Ray spat. I saw the thread of it, the characteristic pale distortion of its guide-light in the air. It swept over the sheer eastern face, and where it touched, climbing men and women and bundles of materiel flashed to flame and vanished, human beings popping like pockets of flammable gas.
I was distracted by the sound of guns barking now, coming from behind our lines. Shells flew over our heads. In ’07 the Martians had come to an England where the most advanced weaponry on land was horse-drawn guns. Now we had motorised artillery, and were able to respond much more rapidly. But while some of the shells splashed against the face of the Trench itself, creating peculiar angled craters and adding to the din of noise, none reached the Martian itself. Then, like a man stepping cautiously into a stream, the Martian folded its great legs, and pivoted, and stepped down into the gully itself. Once all three feet were down, it swivelled its cowl this way and that. Now that ghastly beam raked the gully itself, and the inner face of the Trench. I saw structures detonate and collapse across the wall, and people running like ants from a kettle of water. It all came back to me; I had seen such scenes before, in ’07 and indeed in ’20. I wished with all my heart at that moment that having escaped the Martians twice I had not been so foolish as to return to give them a third go.
Gray grabbed my hand and pulled me away, heading for a ladder downward. ‘Miss Elphinstone – Julie – we go now.’
‘Where?’
‘Into the tunnels, of course!’
Our port of call was what looked like a manhole cover, set in the duckboards of the gully. Of course Ted Lane was waiting for me there, with a party of soldiers – only a handful of men, armed with pistols, rifles and shovels.
I inspected the cover. ‘That looks it came off a sewer, like the one we climbed down at Stratford.’
‘It probably did. Let’s get on with it.’
Lane and one of the soldiers hauled the cover aside, to reveal a shaft with iron handles set in the walls, just like Stratford. That was where the similarity ended, though, as I discovered as I followed Lane down, with Gray right behind me. The tunnel we entered was deeper even than the great sewer had been, and faced with sapper-applied concrete, not neat Victorian brick. Electric lights had been fixed to the walls, along with cables and wires and copper pipes. And where the sewer had been half-flooded, this tunnel was all but dry, with only a smear of damp mud at its lowest arc. All this, of course, had been constructed since the landing of the Martians.
At the bottom of the shaft, Lane grabbed a steel combat hat from a stack and crammed it on my head. Without further ado, we ran for it.
The tunnel was straight and true, as far as I could see it, heading dead west. It was awkward work to run in there, for the rough-finished roof was too low for comfort standing up, even for shorter folk than me.
At least we seemed comparatively safe in here, out of reach of the Heat-Ray, and the clamour of the guns was muffled. But we were burrowing underground at the feet of the Martians, like big rats, just as Bert Cook had predicted. Indeed, as we scurried through that tunnel I thought the soldiers ahead of me had a pale, rat-like air. I felt an intensification of the deep dread that had not left me since I began this journey – for I was like a plague rat myself, scurrying off some ship into a crowded medieval port, my blood foul with disease.