But we made progress slowly. Our own top speed off the road was only four or five miles an hour, and there were a lot of breakdowns and other delays. The cars and ’cycles could make much greater speed.
As the journey wore on I took breaks from my small prison. Every so often I needed to bend my spine back into something resembling a natural posture. And, so that she need not leave her station, I brought Verity cups of water from a spigot that ran increasingly hot as the journey wore on.
Hot – the whole of our living space was hot, noisy, oily, cramped and crowded, and we were jarred with every rabbit hole we crossed. The crew, wearing face masks and goggles, laboured at their engines, continually tending the clattering pistons and hissing valves. At least the air we breathed seemed fresh enough; I imagined there must be some circulation system to stop the build-up of exhaust gases. But I thought we might all melt in the rising temperatures, as that long morning wore on.
The crew of the landship, however, despite the heat and clamour, worked steadily. They were technical, highly trained, competent, efficient young men. Despite their khaki fatigues they had the air more of Naval officers than soldiers – indeed, they called their commander ‘Captain’. They might have been tending some tremendous power generator, perhaps, as opposed to a weapon of war. I wondered if this was a vision of the war of the future, of calm young people working their precise controls and dispensing remote death. Perhaps we were becoming like the Martians after all, I thought, who made war with a similar lack of passion.
The lavatory was a hole in the floor covered by a metal hatch. I used it once; there was no partition, but in the circumstances modesty was hardly an issue. We were dehydrated, I think, and I could not remember when we had last eaten a decent meal.
And while we lumbered through the mud, I would learn later, the Martians were devastating Los Angeles, and had landed in Melbourne, Australia.
It was with some relief that I realised we were approaching the Cordon at last. It had taken us hours to get to the perimeter – we reached it after two in the afternoon, I think.
The support vehicles fell away now, leaving only the landships, the vehicles of serious intent. I could hear a dull booming, like thunder, coming from directly ahead of us. This, I learned, was an artillery barrage; guns many miles away were targeting Martian emplacements close to the site where we were aiming to breach the Cordon perimeter, softening up the invaders before we fell on them. We were rolling into gunfire, then, and the battle had already begun, with ourselves still far from the front.
And the landscape changed. Where before we had rolled through a leafy countryside which, if untended, if lacking the sheep and cattle in the fields, was pretty much indistinguishable from how it might have been on any day in mid-May in any of the last dozen years, now the land was bare, the buildings ruined, fences knocked down, even trees smashed or burned. The ground itself was churned up by the passing of wheels, and pocked by shell craters. Here and there, too, I saw other signs of combat – a smashed gun emplacement, the metal of the guns melted like toffee – and, a gruesome sight, the white of bone, a skeletal hand protruding from the dried ground. I had not seen this hinterland of war before, as I had travelled to the Cordon through the underground passages. But in truth the Heat-Ray left few relics.
Still that shouting of shells ahead continued, a barrage that seemed to shake the earth. And through the telephone in my sponson I listened to the calm voices of Eden and his crew. Now there was none of the joshing that had characterised the camp at Thornborough; there was only the calm reading of instruments, and routine reports from the engine room, and Eden’s quiet voice counting off the distance remaining: ‘Half a mile to the wire, boys, not long now…’ I knew that men going to war would pull back into themselves, and think of their homes, of their wives and children or their own mothers. They had to be dragged back to the reality by their officers, like Eden. ‘A quarter-mile more – keep it steady – two hundred yards – I can see the sappers pulling back the barbed wire for us, and I’m tempted to chuck out a bottle of whisky for their pains, but I won’t… Here comes the trench. Now, Mr Stern, if you please, give me all she’s got!’
The engine roared, and we lurched forward – and the prow of the landship dipped as if we had fallen into an immense well!
I would have seen it better if I had been an observer outside the hull of the great ship. Of course, such an observer could not have lasted long.
To penetrate the Martian Cordon, we had first to get through the Trench, a triple ditch system deep enough to trip a fighting-machine. It was into the first such ditch that our ironclad of the land now flung herself. The trench was perhaps fifty feet deep and as many wide – but the Boadicea was a hundred feet long, and had been designed for just such purposes. She simply hurled herself over that great gash, and before she could tip into the depths her huge forward wheels engaged the far side wall. With engines screaming, with huge clods of earth being dug out by the treads – and with everybody aboard yelling encouragement – the wheels did their job, the prow rose, and she scrambled across the trench and smashed through the last barricades.
We were the spearpoint. Behind us the sappers made the breach permanent, with pontoons and bridge sections hastily flung across the trench. The lesser vehicles behind us poured across and up the ramp we had created, and closed up behind us as we advanced.
And the Martians came to meet us.
I only glimpsed them as I peered timidly through my periscope: the great tall legs, the bronze cowls, the projectors of the Heat-Ray being brought to bear. We drove straight at them, into that forest of legs, and even over the engine’s roar I heard exultant yells from the crew. But the Heat-Ray splashed on us from all angles. I seemed to feel it like a physical blow, each great jolt of heat, and men screamed with each punch. The great Martian hull-plates would resist the heat, but they had been fitted into the landship’s frame by imperfect human engineering and there were gaps and seams, so that where the beam hit, sprays of molten aluminium showered the interior of the craft, slicing into the clothing and the flesh of the crew. Verity was kept busy.
But despite the casualties, despite deep scoring wounds to the structure of our craft itself, still we advanced, into the teeth of the fire. Now we approached that barrier of supple, metallic legs. I abandoned my periscope and huddled over on myself – We hit with a tremendous clang. There was a scraping over our roof, and a crash and smash and a kind of explosion behind us.
A glance through my periscope, when I dared uncurl, showed me what had happened. We had scythed through the legs of not one but two fighting-machines; both had tumbled over, and the cowl of one, it seemed, had detonated on impact with the ground. Other machines quickly clustered around the fallen, as was the way of the Martians. And now I saw that armada of lesser vehicles coming up behind to engage the Martian group. Many of their crews would die today, I knew – die in the next few minutes, in fact – but they would take Martians with them.
In the midst of such a battle it may seem odd that Eric Eden yanking open the door of my compartment should make me jump, but it did. His face was blackened by smoke and soot, save for his eyes, where he had removed his goggles. And he was grinning, his teeth white. ‘That was quite a stunt, wasn’t it?’
‘Two fighting-machines at once – I’ll say.’
‘If you tried that on a soccer field you’d be penalised for taking out your man. Well. The battle is closing behind us, but we, and a few more vehicles, are pushing on. The primary purpose of the expedition is to try to disrupt the Martians’ command and control, and so we’re making straight for the central Redoubt at Amersham. But you, madam, get out here.’