The Massacre of Mankind Read online

  Eden looked faintly embarrassed. ‘The Plaza.’

  Harry laughed out loud.

  ‘I myself would have been content with more modest accommodation, but Bert -’

  I said, ‘No need to apologise. But -’ I looked Eden in the eyes, and I recognised something of myself in there – something I could never share with Harry, good-hearted though he was. The look of the war veteran. ‘Why would he call? Could it be they are coming back? And why now? The timing’s all wrong, isn’t it?’

  Eden only shrugged, but he knew what I meant.

  I was never an astronomer, but since the Martian War we had all picked up a little about the dance of the planets. Mars and the earth chase each other around the sun like racing cars at Brooklands. The earth, on the inside track, moves faster, and periodically overtakes Mars – the Red Planet is lapped once every couple of years or so, in fact. And it is at these moments of overtaking, called oppositions (because at such instances sun and Mars are at opposite poles as seen in the earth’s sky), that Mars and the earth come closest to each other. But Mars’s orbit is elliptical, and so is the earth’s to a lesser degree – that is, they are not perfect circles. And so this closest approach varies in distance from encounter to encounter, from some sixty million miles or more to less than forty million – the closest is called a perihelic opposition. Again there is a cycle, with the minimal perihelic approaches coming by once every fifteen years or so: in 1894, and then in 1909, and again in 1924 . . .

  I recited from memory, ‘The next perihelic opposition is still four years away. The 1907 assault came two years before the last perihelic. Surely they won’t come, if they come at all, for another couple of years, then. But if they were to break the pattern and come this year, they may be already on their way. This year the opposition date is April 21 -’

  ‘And as every paper trumpeted,’ Harry put in, ‘including our own, that would work back to a launch date of February 27.’

  More grim, memorised logic. In 1907 the opposition’s date of closest approach of the worlds had been on July 6. The landings had begun precisely three weeks and a day before that, and the firings of the great guns on Mars had begun four weeks and four days before that.

  But we all knew that if the astronomers had seen anything untoward on Mars, none of us would have heard about it. Since the Martian War the astronomers’ work had been hidden, even internationally, under a blanket of secrecy by the governments. Supposedly this was to stop the panics that had been witnessed during the oppositions of 1909 and 1911 and 1914, witless alarms that had caused damage to business confidence and so forth, even some loss of life, without a single Martian peeping out of his cylinder – but it had led, in Britain at least, to the possession of an unlicensed astronomical telescope being a criminal offence. I could see the logic, but in my eyes such secrecy only induced more fear and uncertainty.

  So, even now the cylinders might be suspended in space – on their way! Why else would Walter summon us all so? But Walter was Walter, never a man to get to the point; I knew that I faced hours, days of uncertainty before this sudden tension was resolved, one way or another.

  Eden spread his hands. ‘I know no more than I’ve told you.’

  ‘Well, let’s take the call,’ I said, as bravely as I could. I linked his arm; Harry took my other arm, so we walked, as three, out of the lobby. ‘I think I can stand an hour or two of luxury in the Plaza.’

  ‘And I,’ Harry said, ‘look forward to meeting this Cook guy. Quite a character, if half of what he says is true!’

  Eden, who seemed loyal to fellow veterans to a fault, looked embarrassed. I gave Harry a sly dig in the ribs with my elbow, and we swept out of the doors into the grey March day.

  3

  AN ARTILLERYMAN IN NEW YORK

  We took a cab to the hotel, which is on 58th and 5th. The main entrance, if you don’t know it, faces Grand Army Plaza, which used to commemorate feats of the Union Army in the Civil War. Since ’22 this has of course been supplemented by memorials to a different conflict. But it was a grand sight to see, in those times.

  Eden’s suite contained the pampered luxury I expected, with overstuffed furniture and a magnificent view of the Plaza outside. A bottle of champagne stood on a low glass table, uncorked. The air was filled with the tinny tones of a ragtime band, emanating from a wireless set – not the compact government-issue People’s Receivers you would have found in every British home in those days, and known universally as Marvin’s Megaphones, but a big chunk of American hardware in a walnut cabinet.

  And in this setting Albert Cook, in a housecoat, lounged on a sofa, idly glancing through a colour supplement. In my own first experiences with American hotels I had been all but overwhelmed by such luxuries as a private bathroom, a telephone in the room, and cereals for breakfast. But Cook evidently took to it all like a duck to water.

  Cook was a little older than Eden, aged perhaps forty; he had neatly cut black hair peppered with grey, and a livid scar on his lower face (though I later heard gossip that he would touch this up for effect). And while there was no sign in the room of Eden’s work save a single, rather battered reading copy of his book on a side cabinet, the room was dominated by a poster on a stand, a photograph of Cook in ragged uniform and wielding a kind of club, and emblazoned:

  MEMOIRS OF AN ARTILLERYMAN

  Eden briskly introduced us. Cook did not stand. He grunted at Harry, and eyed me up and down, evidently disappointed to see a woman decently covered up in a trouser suit. For myself, I hope the look I gave him was withering. Since the First War my choice had been to reject any clothing in which I could not comfortably cycle – and not the prettied-up fashionable versions either, but the sturdy suits worn by the munitionettes and others – and Cook could like it or not.

  He turned back to his magazine. ‘So a ’alf-hour until this blessed telephone call, Eric?’

  Eden lifted the champagne bottle from its bucket; it was no more than a third full. He glanced apologetically at me. ‘If you’d like me to order some more -’

  Harry and I both demurred.

  ‘Please, sit down, let me take your coats . . .’

  ‘And don’t let me embarrass yer,’ Cook said lazily. ‘I’ll get out of the way when the Prof calls from his foreign nut-’atch. I’ve nothing to say to ’im. I’ve had nothing to say to ’im since Putney, when ’e drank my booze, beat me at chess, and ran out afore the work was barely started.’

  Harry laughed. ‘We’ve all read the book, man. What work? You’d barely started whatever grand scheme of tunnelling and sabotage you dreamed of -’

  ‘That’s as how ’e tells it. Pompous over-educated toff. I shoulda sued ’im.’

  ‘Just as you’ll be suing Charlie Chaplin, I suppose.’

  Cook scowled, for this was a well-known sore point for him. Chaplin had built much of his cinematic fame on the success of one character, the ‘Little Sojer’, a comical, good-hearted gunner in ill-fitting uniform, who forever dreamt of being a general while his guns exploded in clouds of sooty smoke. You would have to be a lot thicker-skinned than Albert Cook not to have seen the source of that.

  But it was an irony that Walter’s portrayal of Cook in his Narrative had rather damaged Walter’s own reputation, with Cook’s vision of a utopia of human rats coming across as a bleak, if comic, caricature of the lofty arguments for spiritual unity that Walter himself had tried to make in the wake of the War. Cartoons in the likes of Punch had often paired them, two inadequate dreamers, much to Walter’s chagrin – not that I would have expected Bert to grasp such subtleties.

  Seeking to cover over Harry’s lack of tact, I interposed quickly, ‘I’m not sure any of us came out of Walter’s book very well. I’ve never quite lived down the way he introduced me to the world.’ The words Walter had used, as he described how his brother had helped my sister-in-law and myself fight off robbers during our own flight from the Martians, were burned into my very soul. ‘“For the second time that day this girl pr
oved her quality.” Girl! And so on. I could have been drummed out of the suffragettes, before they were banned.’

  Bert Cook was not listening, a trait I was to learn was typical of the man. ‘Should ha’ sued ’im, no matter what the lawyers said.’

  Eden shook his head. ‘Don’t be a fool. He made you a hero! Inadvertently, granted. I’ve seen you talking in public – you know how folk respond to the detail – how, when the mob fled from the Martians, you alone ran towards them, calculating that was where the food would be . . .’

  I remembered the passage, of course. ‘“Like a sparrow goes for man.”’

  ‘That’s me.’ Bert looked at me now, as if seeking to impress. ‘Though I ain’t no sparrow. I thought it through, see. As then, so now. And today, out the blue, ’e wants a nice chit-chat with you, does ’e? And what is it ’e wants to discuss? How ’e feels about getting a daily enema from Sigmund Freud, because ’e’s ’ad the wind up ’im since 1907?’ He looked more intent. ‘Or is it about Mars? Another opposition coming up, everybody knows that. What is it – does ’e know something? He’s in a position to find out I suppose.’

  I faced Cook. ‘You despise him for his learning and erudition, and his weakness as you see it, yet you want the information he possesses?’

  ‘If it is the Martians ’aving another go, ’aven’t I, of all people, the right to know? Of all people? Eh? Oh, I’ve ’ad enough of this.’ He got to his feet, a little unsteadily, grasped the champagne bottle by the neck and lumbered to a door. ‘Show time is – what is it, Eden?’

  ‘Six o’clock. A bookstore on Broadway which -’

  Cook belched loudly. ‘Time for a kip, a crap and a wash, not necessarily in that order.’ He winked at me, lasciviously. ‘And then we’ll see what’s what after the show – eh? Plenty of ’ealthy young American women drawn to a proven survivor like me – survival of the fittest, eh? “Like a sparrow goes for man.” Hah!’

  I think we were all relieved when he closed the door behind him.

  There followed an awkward interval for us all, as we waited for Walter’s call. We allowed Eden to order coffee for us, which came with a heap of sugary cakes on a tray.

  ‘So, Miss Elphinstone – Julie.’

  ‘Yes, Major, that’s my name.’

  ‘Short for Julia? Juliet?’

  Harry snorted.

  ‘Short for nothing. I was christened Julie. I was born in ’88, and in that year Strindberg had his “Miss Julie” in the theatres, and my mother was taken by it.’

  He nodded. ‘Then you were nineteen in ’07, when the Martians came.’

  I shrugged. ‘I was an adult.’

  ‘I was but twenty-five myself. Many of my men were older than I. In the Army they follow their sergeants, not their officers. Just as well! But there were much younger recruits in the Schlieffen War, you know, called up by the Russians and indeed the Germans as the fighting dragged on.’

  I wondered how he could know that. There had always been rumours of British ‘advisors’ at the side of the Germans in the great killing fields in the east, exploring new weapons – some, it was darkly hinted, based Martian technology.

  Eden went on, ‘We did well to stay out of that – a quick knock-out defeat for the French.’ He actually mimed a one-two punch combination. ‘I was a fair boxer at school. Never kept it up, of course . . .’

  Harry burst out laughing, then apologised quickly.

  But our conversation rather dried up. Evidently Harrow, Oxford, and officer training in the British Army (for such had been Eden’s career), and indeed a thrilling adventure aboard a Martian space-cylinder, do not necessarily inculcate a talent for small-talk.

  At last, to our mutual relief, the telephone rang.

  Harry and I let Eden speak to the chain of operators, from the hotel’s own switchboard through to the new transoceanic exchanges, and finally the handlers in Vienna with their ‘strong German accents but beautiful articulation,’ according to Eric. At last he passed the handset to me.

  I was surprised to hear, not Walter, but another English voice,strong, cultivated. ‘Mrs Jenkins?’

  ‘Actually I prefer Miss Elphinstone.’

  ‘Ah . . . Yes, I see the detail from the note in your brother-inlaw’s file. My apologies, then. A heroically long connection to make such an error!’

  ‘To whom am I speaking? Where is Walter?’

  ‘I apologise again. My name is Charles Samuel Myers. I am one of the specialists who have been treating Mr Jenkins for his neurasthenia for the last several years.’

  I frowned. ‘Neurasthenia?’

  Eric Eden pulled a face. ‘The privates who faced the Martians – they called it heat stroke. Or the hots, Bert says. Or, the sweats . . .’

  Once again Harry twirled a finger by his temple. ‘Julie, you’re talking to a bump-feeler!’

  4

  AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

  Heat stroke. The hots. The sweats. Ghastly soldiers’ slang for a ghastlier condition.

  Later I would learn that my brother-in-law had encountered such terms when he had been referred for his first consultation with Dr Myers at a military hospital at a house called Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh. This was in the autumn of 1916, already nine years after the War.

  In a dusty office that might once have been a smoking room, Myers had had a series of books with him, like exhibits, Walter had thought: all of them memoirs of the Martian War, including Walter’s own, and the first of Bert Cook’s self-glorifying pageturners. But the desk was heaped too with records from another conflict, mostly in German: despatches from the eastern front of the still-current Schlieffen War.

  ‘ Heat stroke,’ Myers said. ‘A word coined in those brief days of our Martian War – days long enough to inflict grievous psychic shocks on those who fought in it. But the condition had in fact been tentatively identified before; British Army surgeons reported the after-effects of shellfire on the men during the Second Boer War, and even before that it was noted during the War Between the States. And of course since ’14 the Germans in the east, and their Russian foes, have been coming up with their own labels - Kanonenschrecken. I myself have been phenomenon in a peer-reviewed publication, the Lancet.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Walter, uneasy. At that time he was fifty years old, and by his own admission had not felt strong, robust, since the War. Indeed, he still suffered from his burn scars, especially to his hands. Now he was already feeling trapped, he would tell me later. ‘I don’t see what this has to do with me.’

  ‘But I’ve told you,’ Myers said patiently. ‘I believe that the Germans’ Kanonenschrecken is a similar phenomenon, psychologically, to Cook’s sweats. And what it has to do with you, sir, is the contents of your memoir.’

  Walter bridled. ‘I have suffered much criticism for my “unreliability”, as Parrinder has called it. I meant the book as an honest account of my own experience of the War, and my reflections since, for I believed I was in a unique -’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Myers said, cutting him off, ‘but what’s actually unique about it, man, is that unlike some accounts of the War that you read – Churchill’s stiff-upper-lip boys’-story heroics, or else the self-aggrandising of the likes of Cook - what you have delivered is a desperately honest account of your own psychological affliction. Can you not see? An affliction from which to some extent you already suffered, even before the experiences of the War. Even after the fighting you have clearly had problems: the fracturing of your relationship with your wife-’

  ‘I admit that my experience of the War troubled me. No one of intelligence or sensitivity could fail to bear such scars, surely. But – some psychological disjoint before? I cannot accept that, Doctor.’

  ‘But it’s all here, man. In your own words. Book I, Chapter 7. “Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods.” Yes! Exceptional indeed. You describe a sense of detachment from the world, even from yourself, as if you are an outside observer . . . You spent your life before the War dreaming of utopias, did
you not? The perfectibility of a world looked at as if from outside, and of a mankind to which, even then, you felt only a peripheral attachment.

  ‘But when the Martians came – look at your own account of your response to the War, from the beginning. You say you fled from that first Martian pit, at Horsell, in panic, only to snap back to equilibrium in a trice.’ He clicked fingers and thumb. ‘In a trice! You showed a peculiar mix of curiosity and dread; you were consumed by fear, and yet could not keep away from the spectacle, the mystery – the newness. At one point you describe yourself actually circling a Martian site, at a constant distance – ha! A circle, a locus imposed by two forces, perfectly matched, warring in you. As for your detachment from humanity, you could be ruthless, could you not? To save your wife you took the dogcart of, of -’

  ‘A local publican.’

  ‘Yes! Leaving the man, who knew less than you about the situation at that point, to die. And later you killed directly, did you not? The clergyman you called a curate – did you ever trouble to learn his name, his position? He was called Nathaniel—’

  ‘There is no value in my knowing it! And I believe that, in the course of a dark night of the soul, even at the height of the War, I came to terms over that – action.’

  ‘Came to terms with who? God? Yourself? The curate? Even that “dark night” line is a quote from a mediaeval mystic. The truth is you called on God, whose existence you once spent a whole book demolishing!’

  ‘So I did,’ said Walter, increasingly uneasy. ‘And yet I was brought up within the great carcass of that antique religion. I was even forced to accept confirmation to take up my first post, a teaching position. And when faced with the unimaginable, that which lies beyond familiar categories, perhaps the mind reaches for the trappings of familiar myth -’

  ‘Was murder unimaginable to you, afore you did it? I suppose you’d say the Martians drove you to it?’

  ‘Drove me to it, yes, that’s it. For it was not pre-meditated.’

  ‘Was it not? Are you sure? You are a man of detachment of mind, remember. And a man of detachment of consciousness altogether, at times.’