Once outside the city proper, he first had to produce his packet of papers when he got to the rear trenches of the Russian line.
He was stopped by a sentry, then taken to a corporal, and then another lieutenant, who read a covering letter with apparent amusement. He looked Smirnov over. ‘Sooner you than me carrying this, on such a fine morning. I’ll assign a couple of men to cover you – and, corporal, find him a bloody big stick to wave his flag on, will you?’
So Smirnov found himself disarmed, and sent out through a string of communications trenches to the front line. Then it was up a short ladder and out of the trenches – after the muddy enclosure, out in the sunlight so suddenly, it felt like being born – and he was led out by scouts through a gap in the wire.
After that he was on his own, marching through churned-up mud, waving a flag that seemed ever more pathetically small the further out he got. He had been to the front before but had not been beyond the trenches.
‘Halt.’
The word was in Russian, coarsely accented. A man stood before him, in grey field uniform, mud-splashed as Smirnov’s was. Smirnov did not know German insignias well enough to be able to read his rank. His heart hammered. But he said cordially, ‘Good morning.’
The man laughed. ‘And to you.’
‘You speak Russian?’
The German sighed. ‘I studied it at university. And my reward is this, a conversation with an idiot, in a position where I am likely to get my head blown in by one of your snipers at any moment.’
‘As I by yours.’
‘That’s true. But you started it. What do you want?’
‘Nothing. I come with a gift.’ Smirnov held out his pack of papers, now slightly mud-splashed. ‘This is for your commanding officer.’
‘Ah. A message from the famous General Brusilov, no doubt.’
‘As a matter of fact, yes.’
‘Who are you, his boyfriend?’
‘Just a messenger.’
The German took the papers, and eyed him shrewdly. ‘I think we both know what this is about. And what do you think Brusilov has to say, private?’
Oddly,Smirnov hadn’t thought that through. ‘If I were the General, I would suggest that you Germans lower your arms and join us in a fight against a common foe.’
The German nodded. ‘Just so. Because it will take them mere minutes to burn their way through your peasant army. Together at least we may slow them a little longer – is that the calculation?’
‘I’m just the messenger.’
The German considered the papers. ‘If it were up to me,’ he said, ‘I would join you, for two reasons. One is our common humanity. And second—’
‘Yes?’
‘We have heard – it is only rumour, here on the line – that the cylinders have fallen close to Berlin, too.’
‘Ah.’
‘Germans and Russians, two mighty hosts. If joined together, perhaps even the Martians would find us formidable opponents. Do you think?’
‘Maybe.’
The German looked over Smirnov’s shoulder. ‘Russia is unimpressive. It is only – what, sixty years? – since serfdom was abolished in your land. Sixty years! Your Tsar still rules—’
‘He answers to the Duma now. The convention of 1917—’
‘Is that the one where they locked up all the Bolsheviks?’ Smirnov’s grasp of politics was poor. ‘Who?’
‘Never mind. And as for your army, you have millions of men in arms, but they are poorly trained, poorly equipped…’
‘So poor are we that our city is not yet named “Wilhelmsburg”, as your Kaiser boasted it would be years ago.’
The German laughed. ‘I give you that. Even if we fight together, the Martians may defeat us. Then what?’
Smirnov grinned. ‘Then we retreat, as before Napoleon. No conqueror in history has taken the whole of Russia. It is impossible. As the Martians too will find.’
‘Hah! Well, I must take your letter to my commander, who will give it to his commander, and then to the generals, who are probably speaking by field telephone to Brusilov already… I look forward to marching down the Nevsky Prospekt side by side with you, my friend.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Voigt. Hans Voigt.’
‘I am Andrei Smirnov. Farewell, Hans Voigt.’
‘Farewell, Andrei.’
They saluted each other, each in their styles, turned on their heels, and parted.
19
THE ADVANCE FROM THE ELBE
By the time of Smirnov’s meeting, the Martians had indeed fallen on Berlin, or close to it.
Walter Jenkins, huddled in his nest of communications gear and charts, maps and calculations, took some time to establish that the Martians had come down on the north bank of the Elbe, near the town of Dessau, some forty miles south-west of the city itself. Walter did not drive – he had always felt, he said, that his nerves were not up to it – but, having been a refugee once, he travelled with a motorist’s pocket atlas of local roads tucked into his overcoat pocket. A glance at this was sufficient to show that the Martians’ obvious line of attack on central Berlin would be a straight advance to the north-east – which would bring them close to Dahlem, or even through it, and other suburbs at this south-western corner of the conurbation.
Therefore Walter had to flee.
He did not leave in a panic, as he might once have done; he always said he remembered the lessons of his time with Albert Cook fifteen years earlier, when the two of them had sought to cross a Martian-infested Surrey. Having tidied away his notes in a stout fireproof box, he donned his coat and cloth cap and heavy walking boots, and he filled his pockets with bread and cheese, and matches, an electric torch, a pocket knife – and a pack of cigarettes with which to win friends. He had his pocket atlas, and a German phrase book to back up his own faulty grasp of the language. And he had a notebook and pencils; he never travelled without a means of recording his adventures, or more specifically his inner musings.
He washed his face, splashing cold water to try to induce wakefulness. Part of him regretted now his lack of sleep for so long. He scribbled a quick note to the villa’s owners and left it on the kitchen table, weighed down by an empty coffee mug. Then he glanced around once more with some regret at his maps and calculations and logs.
An outside observer would have thought him leisurely over these preparations. It will always be a puzzle to me how conscious Walter was or not of his own decision-making at such times – for, of course, every hour wasted brought peril closer to his door.
It was seven a.m. by the time he emerged from the house, under a clear, brightening sky. He locked the door carefully behind him, pocketing one key and hiding a spare on a lintel. Then he dug his bicycle out of its shelter at the side of the villa, near the potting sheds. This was a Raleigh, a solid English make which he had had imported at considerable expense; only two days before he had oiled the chain and checked the tyres.
Here was Walter Jenkins, caught for the second time in his life between an advancing Martian force and a vulnerable human city.
It was already an hour since, to the south-east – if they had kept to the timetable that they had used around the world – the Martians had left their pit, and they must already have been on the move; already humans must be dying as they flung themselves in the face of that advance. If he were rational, he knew, he would get out of the way altogether – head west or east, to Wustermark or Schonefeld perhaps. But if Freud and his disciples had taught Walter one thing about himself, it was that whatever drove him at times like this was deeper than the rational. Once he had walked straight into a London he believed the Martians still occupied. Fifteen years later, so it must be again.