As we ran up, many of the machines had already started their engines, and we were surrounded by a growl of mechanical noise, and plumes of exhaust, and engineers ran everywhere, servicing these behemoths even as they made ready to move off. It was as if we were waiting for the off at a race at Brooklands, and from the laughter and backslapping I saw among some of the crew and engineers, perhaps there was some of the competitive camaraderie of men who engage in such events.
A cold part of me wondered if the Martians would be impressed.
Eric, being Eric, observed our reactions even as we approached our ironclad. ‘Quite something, isn’t she? She’s faster on the road, of course, though she chews up the tarmac. But she makes good speed across country too, and given her size she’ll tolerate few obstacles.’
Verity, who had a practical eye, grunted sceptically. ‘Why a tricycle? I had a trike when I was a little girl. I never imagined seeing it scaled up to this monster size!’
Eric grinned. ‘The one rear wheel makes her easy to steer. Simple as that.’
‘She looks impressive,’ I gasped as we hurried to the monster. ‘But what’s to save her when the Martians offer a dose of the Heat-Ray?’
‘Ah.’ We had reached the machine now. With a gloved fist he rapped hard on the painted metal. ‘Under a shell of aluminium, we’ve got one of our most precious resources of alclass="underline" Martian cylinder hull-metal. We’ve never managed to manufacture the stuff, so this is all stripped from the Martians’ own cylinders, as landed in Surrey fifteen years ago. Designed to protect a cylinder’s occupants as it comes hurtling into an atmosphere at interplanetary speeds, you see – not even the Heat-Ray can cut it, and teams in the universities and on the military ranges have spent years establishing that. Indeed the armour has already been tested in battle.’
I noted he did not say where; even now Britain’s involvement in the Russian front was a secret. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.
We came to an open port, round-cornered like a watertight door on a ship, with a short stepladder reaching to the ground. It seemed to be the only breach in the hull, save for slit windows and weapons platforms contained in sponsons, great bulges on the flank of the hull large enough to host a gunner or two. But I saw periscopes jutting out of the hull – the ‘ship’ was like a submarine in some ways, then. Eric hastily waved us aboard.
We clambered up the ladder, each of us with undone shoelaces and leather helmets not yet on our heads. Clambered up and into the belly of the machine. It was a space we were to share with the engines, I immediately discovered, which dominated that compartment, two huge, gleaming monsters that I would learn were Sunbeams, diesel engines designed for submarines. Gigantic differentials and cross-shafts spanned the rest of the interior, delivering the motive force to the tremendous wheels we had seen. Every wall and floor surface had been painted white, and the whole was brilliantly lit with electrics – I could not see a scrap of daylight. It was a complex interior of compartments and bulkheads, and gangways and ladders to the gun turrets and the bridge tower – a cramped and cluttered space, but geometric and orderly: even the rivets were white-painted. I felt like a mouse under the bonnet of a car.
And it was extraordinarily cluttered too, like a mobile ammunition store, with every wall fixed with racks that held shells for the big guns and bullets for the small arms. In underfloor lockers there were lodes of various specialised tools, as well as access to the vehicle’s mechanisms. In the few spaces remaining were heaps of other useful items, such as towing cables, water flasks, grease guns, protective clothing, hard hats, gas masks and goggles.
Then the engines started up, the noise a howl in that confined space, and the whole shook and shuddered.
‘No room for the crew!’ Verity protested, yelling over the noise.
‘We find a way,’ Eric shouted back. ‘Look, don’t worry, you’re in the best possible hands; our drivers are Stern and Hetherington themselves, and it’s all their fault!’
I could barely hear either of them. Later I would observe the crew communicating in a kind of improvised sign language, and even by slamming spanners into the pipes.
Eden yelled, ‘Now, look, you two, make yourself useful. Julie, we’re one crew member light, so get up into this sponson – there’s a door in the hull just there, see? You can be a spotter even if you can’t work the gun; we have telephone links throughout. I’ll be up on the bridge. And, Verity –’ He moved a heap of spare clothing to reveal a first aid box, painted with a red cross on white; it was alarmingly small, I thought. ‘You’re a nurse, aren’t you?’
‘Just a VAD.’
‘Better than what we had before, which was nobody. But when the action starts, just keep out of the way! Oh, and stay away from the engine. Every surface in there gets hot enough to fry bacon…’
So I clambered up into my sponson, which was a blister barely big enough for a kind of reclining chair into which I wedged myself, with the controls of a tremendous gun in front of me. With my legs up, my head bent forward on my neck, and barely able to move around the weapon, I was soon stiff and sore and increasingly uncomfortable.
Then the landship moved forward, with a crude jerk that I imagined was something to do with the gigantic gearing, and a ferocious rattling thanks to the lack of any kind of suspension.
We were underway! The crew cheered, and I clung on for dear life.
8
INTO ACTION
Our pilots, Stern and Hetherington, were, I learned later, significant figures in the short history of landship development – I suppose we were lucky to have them aboard.
Captain Albert Stern was a civilian given a volunteer commission, and Commander Tommy Hetherington of the 18th Hussars a dashing cavalryman with a vivid imagination. The vessel we rode, it seemed, had started life as a sketch on a napkin made by Hetherington, at a dinner with Churchill at a London club. Only Churchill, one might think, could push such mad visions to actuality. But at the time our greatest war machines had still been ocean-bound, and little use against the Martians. Churchill could see, as few others did, that this was a way of bringing that great technology to land combat.
The great engineering concerns of the north of Britain had been involved, under the emergency government’s orders, in the development and construction of these beasts, from Metropolitan Cammell of Birmingham to Mirrless Watson of Glasgow. Churchill had taken a key interest in the project throughout, and had inspected training exercises on a military range in the Highlands, although many trials had taken place on the continent, I learned – and some of the smaller models had even been tried out in battle, in the bloody secrecy of the Germans’ Russian front.
As we got underway I explored ways to see out of my lumbering metal prison. The simplest were my sighting slits, gaps in the hull from which I could draw back rather stiff metal covers. These gave a view out to the sides, and a limited view ahead. I had a small periscope, too, through which I got a narrow view, front and back and to the sides.
Through these means I could see the countryside across which we rolled, and the vehicles that followed us, a fleet with ourselves at the crest: landships small and large, though none so large as us, proceeding in billows of exhaust smoke and with the soil of English fields being thrown up around their tracks, so that we left an ugly brown scar that stretched back the way we had come. The clumsy vessels reminded me of lungfish, creatures of the water crawling painfully over the land. Smaller vehicles, cars and motorcycles, darted around us, and aircraft flew overhead, bright little toys in the morning sunlight, whose noise was quite drowned out by the engine roar of the advancing land armada.