The Massacre of Mankind Read online

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I refer to the later passages of your own book. You describe the great existential shock of the Martians and their weaponry, imposed on the English countryside: “a sense of dethronement”, I think was your term. Very well. But at the end of the War – when, as you admit, you were not the first to discover the Martians’ extinguishing through the plagues – you had a threeday blank, man! Classic fugue. And even later – you wrote this book in ’13, six years after the War was done – you describe visions, memories still intruding even then. You saw living people as ghosts of the past – “phantasms in a dead city”. And so on and so forth.’ He looked at Walter with more sympathy. ‘Your relationship with your wife broke down, Jenkins. Why do you suppose that is?’

  This cut Walter to the core. ‘But I spent much of the War seeking her out.’

  ‘That’s what you say.’ He tapped the memoir. ‘That’s what you say in here. But – look what you did! You went to Weybridge and London, never to Leatherhead where your wife was sheltering: north to the Martians, not south to your family. That’s what you did. And are you aware that you don’t refer to your wife by name in this book, not once?’

  ‘Nor do I name myself. Nor, for that matter, my brother. Or Cook the artilleryman. It was a literary affectation which -’

  ‘A literary affectation? You name the Astronomer Royal, man. You name the Lord Chief Justice! And you don’t name your own wife? How do you imagine she would feel about that? And didn’t your hair turn grey? In a matter of days, during the War.’

  ‘But – but . . .’

  ‘There could hardly be more striking a sign of physical as well as mental affliction.’ Myers sat back. ‘I put it to you, sir – and I have already penned a paper for the Lancet on the case – that you are suffering a form of neurasthenia: the sweats, heatstroke, gun-dread. Symptoms of this include tics, mutism, paralysis, nightmares, tremors, sensitivity to noise, fugue, hallucinations. Do these sound familiar? The difference with you, compared to the common soldier of the eastern front, is your articulacy, your intelligence, your self-awareness – even your greater age. Which makes you a fascinating reference point. Sir, our own government, in particular the military authorities -’

  ‘Ha! What’s the distinction, under our blessed Prime Minister Marvin?’

  ‘- have encouraged me to refer you for treatment. At this hospital, and others in Germany where gun-dread is being studied. Are you willing to partake in my study? The treatment should be beneficial for you, and may lead to a greater good: the more effective handling of traumatised soldiers of all nationalities.’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  ‘But that,’ Walter told me, his voice a whisper punctuated by pops and crackles from the long, tenuous wires that connected us, ‘was the one question he would not answer. Could not, I suppose, for Myers thought himself an ethical man. Of course I had no choice.’

  I rolled my eyes at Harry, who was listening in with Eric Eden, their heads together over the room’s second handset. Despite Myers’s attempt to prepare us, the call, when we were finally put through to Walter, was disorienting. It was hard to know what to say.

  I essayed, ‘Walter, I wouldn’t take that guff about Carolyne too seriously. Why, I broke up with Frank, remember, and he didn’t even write a book!’

  ‘Ah, but I think I my brother has too much of me in him for his own good. A sense of purpose that takes him away from his humanity sometimes, even from his nearest family . . .’

  ‘And the treatment? How was that?’

  ‘I wouldn’t recommend it over a spa cure,’ he said dryly.

  In 1916, in the midst of their European war of conquest, the Germans were necessarily the pioneers in the treatment of this ailment, the ‘Kanonenschrecken’ as they called it – but their attitude was shaped by their own culture. To be brought down by fear was dishonourable, shameful. And therefore their treatment programme, called the ‘Kauffmann regime’, was a question of psychological pressure and – unbelievable to me – the inflicting of pain.

  ‘I was referred to a doctor called Yealland, British, a follower of Kauffmann, who used a technique he called faradisation. The use of electricity to combat symptoms directly. If you were mute, for example, your tongue and larynx would be prodded with a charge, and the room locked to keep you in, and you were strapped down in a chair, until you did speak.’

  ‘Dear God. And does it work?’

  ‘Yes! There’s a recovery rate they call “miraculous”. What they don’t report is a rather high rate of relapse.’

  ‘And in your case -’

  ‘Yealland tried to “treat” the unwelcome memories. You will recall I was badly burned in the course of the War, especially about the hands. And sometimes, when I have nightmares of imprisonment or flight, or when I see the ghosts of the past in the London streets of today, my old wounds ache, as if in sympathy. By provoking pain deliberately in that injured skin, Yealland sought to break the link between the memories and the phantom physical pain, as he saw it, thereby lessening the impact of the former on me.’

  ‘And the outcome -’

  He said only, ‘After a couple of sessions I chose to terminate the treatment.’

  Eden said with feeling, ‘Good for you, old man.’

  After that Walter had been taken back by Myers and a colleague called William Rivers, who, sceptical of ‘faradisation’ and similar techniques, had become followers of Freud and his school.

  ‘Now I am in the rather more pleasant environs of Vienna, and instead of volts it is verbiage, from Freud and his followers. We talk and talk, you see, as the doctors try to discover how a trauma deep in a wounded mind connects to the surface behaviour. I can see there is something in it – but I am sceptical of Freud’s claim, as are the British doctors in fact, that every human impulse is at root sexual in nature. For you have the Martians as your counter-example! The Martians, as we know, are entirely without sex – we have physical proof that to reproduce they bud asexually – and so what use Freudian analysis to a Martian? And yet they are conscious beings, they evidently have motivation . . .’

  I rolled my eyes at my companions. ‘Never mind about the Martians just now, Walter. How is your new treatment regime going?’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t hurt as much.’

  Harry laughed out loud at that.

  I said, ‘Walter, I’m sorry to hear of your troubles. I do sympathise. You probably know I left Britain after the ’11 election, when Marvin and his strutting bully-boys came to power – soldiers in khaki marching behind King George’s coronation coach . . . I would not wish to be in their hands, as you have been . . . But you have called for a reason.’

  ‘I have become desperate to get in touch. Not just with you, but with Frank, Carolyne . . . I could think of no other way but through you, Julie. I could not trace you in New York, so I asked Major Eden to bring a personal message. I hope you will help me, Julie. I hope you will see the sense of it. You have always been -’

  ‘A girl of “quality”, as you said in your memoir?’

  ‘Sorry about that. Look – my suggestion is that you go back to England. There is still time. Take a steamer – I have the resources to pay. Gather the family, and I will make another call. Perhaps near Woking – the house I shared with Carolyne is long sold, but -’

  ‘What is it, Walter? Tell me something.’So began for me an extraordinary journey, one which took me from the lobby of the world’s tallest building in New York to the foot of a Martian fighting-machine in London – and beyond!

  For he would say only: ‘I have grave news from the sky.’

  5

  MY RETURN TO ENGLAND

  When I looked for a steamer, I found the Lusitania happened to be readying for a passage. It didn’t take long to arrange tickets for myself, and for Eric Eden and Albert Cook, both of whom decided to cut short their American tour, with apologies to Professor Schiaparelli, after hearing Walter’s dark hints. Their whole lives ha
d been shaped by the Martian War; of course they would come.

  Not that I was keen to make the journey at the time. And my brave hero Harry Kane was even less so. ‘England ain’t a place to be an American these days,’ he told me. ‘Brad Green,’ who was a long-standing and hard-drinking European correspondent at the Post, ‘says that when you open your mouth and let out a Yankee drawl, you’re as likely as not to be hauled over by some cop. And meanwhile they got German troopers on guard outside Buckingham Palace. Now where’s the sense in that?’

  ‘That’s politics for you.’

  He grunted. ‘I blame the Martians. You know, I think for a lot of us on this side of the pond your Martian War was a kind of a big splash at the time, and there were false alarms and panics and such here – but when it was all over, well, it was like some remote natural disaster, a volcano blowing its top in Yorkshire or someplace.’

  ‘Do you even know where Yorkshire is?’

  ‘You were crowded off the front page next time there was a jumper off the Brooklyn Bridge. And it didn’t stop the Kaiser marching his tin soldiers all over the map of Europe, did it? But for you Brits – sometimes it feels like you never got over it.’

  I had to nod. ‘Surprisingly perceptive. So you’re not going to let my brother-in-law buy you a week on a cruise ship?’

  ‘Some other time, sweet cheeks.’

  We said a perfunctory farewell – but as it turned out it would be a very long time indeed before I saw Harry Kane again.

  Two days after Walter’s call it was time to go. It didn’t take long for me to pack. I have travelled light since that dreadful early morn in June of ’07, when I was staying with my brother George and his wife Alice in their house at Stanmore, and he, a surgeon, came home from a call-out to Pinner full of news of the Martian advance. He bundled us onto the chaise, promising to meet us at Edgware station after he had roused the neighbours. It was quite an adventure for us, and recorded at second-hand passably accurately by Walter in his Narrative – for we ran into his brother, my future husband Frank, and as a result we were brought under the scrutiny of the wider world. But it is typical of Walter’s carelessness with detail that he did not trouble to complete that part of his narrative with a report of the loss of George Elphinstone, my brother, who we never saw again.

  I joined Cook and Eden at the wharf. The RMS Lusitania was a floating hotel, with electric elevators, and a telephone in every cabin. The ‘Greyhound of the Sea’ would fair whip us across the ocean; we should land in less than six days. Of course at that time there was no faster way to do it; the great Zeppelins no longer flew the transatlantic routes, and it was only a year since Alcock and Brown had fluttered across the Atlantic, the first to do so in a fuel-laden variant of the war aeroplanes that had evolved so quickly on the eastern front of the Schlieffen War.

  I was irked at the beginning of the show for we had to stay an extra day in dock while the harbour managers arranged the formation of a convoy, twenty or so ships with ourselves as the largest passenger boat, a number of merchantmen, and a brace of US Navy destroyers equipped with sounding gear and depth charges to see off any threat from the ‘U-Boats’. Since the early weeks of the Schlieffen War in 1914, no American ship had been so much as scratched by a German torpedo, but it says a lot for the tensions between the precautions were deemed convenience for us; the convoy would make for Southampton rather than the Lusitania’s usual port of Liverpool, and would deliver us closer to London.

  During the crossing I spent much of my time in the onboard library, while Eric Eden habituated the gymnasium and Cook the First Class Lounge, with its stained glass windows and marble pillars and delicate, fluttering women. There was much black humour among the passengers. We were lucky, it was said, that our convoy didn’t include the White Star’s Titanic, thought by many to be a cursed ship since she was almost wrecked by an iceberg on her maiden voyage – saved only by hull armour of high-quality Martian-grade aluminium.

  As soon as we landed at Southampton, squads of the Border Control Police in their black uniforms came on board, accompanied by a handful of regular soldiers in khaki. We three British citizens, with our papers in order and checked while still on board the Lusitania, were allowed off briskly, while – just as Harry would have expected - Americans and other foreigners were kept back for closer scrutiny. Once off the ship, the bulky luggage of my two gentleman fellow-travellers was sent on ahead to our hotel in London.

  Then, outside the passenger terminal, we three were met by Philip Parris. Philip was Walter Jenkins’s cousin. Then in his fifties, he was a bulky, jowly individual, his grey-black hair plastered to his scalp by pomade, habitually dressed in a heavy suit that generally featured sombre black tie and waistcoat adorned with thick watch-chain. He looked every inch the man of business, the man of substance – and the competent kind to whom a man like Walter Jenkins would entrust the welfare of three transatlantic waifs such as ourselves, just as he had once entrusted his wife’s safety during the chaos of the Martian War, while he followed the Martians around the English countryside as a fly follows a horse. I remember in his memoir Walter dismissing Philip as a brave enough man but not one to respond quickly to danger. Ha! Sooner at my side a man like Parris than one like Jenkins.

  Philip led us briskly to the car park, and told us his plan. He would take us to London for the convenience of the hotels, then drive us back out to Woking later, for Walter’s family meeting in a couple of days’ time. ‘I trust you had no troubles with the busy-bodies of the Border Control.’

  Eric Eden shook his head. ‘Just doing their jobs, I suppose. But when they came crowding aboard - I haven’t seen so many uniforms in one place since I left Inkerman Barracks.’

  Philip snorted. ‘Wait until you see London. I blame Marvin – much too pally with the Kaiser, if you ask me.’

  We came to his car, which was one of the new Bentleys; its chassis, mostly of aluminium, gleamed in the watery March sunlight.

  Cook, whistling, ran a finger along the smooth lines of the bonnet. ‘What a beauty.’

  Philip grinned back. ‘She is, isn’t she? English aluminium, or rather Martian, and Ottoman petroleum in the tank, and the best leather from the cut-price French markets. And not entirely an indulgence. Aluminium’s my game these days, and I need to advertise the wares. I’m going to swing east and pick up the Portsmouth Road to London. Keep your papers handy. We’ll pass through the Surrey Corridor, I thought you’d like to see that, but they can be a bit twitchy at the security gates . . .’

  The Surrey Corridor? Security gates? I had been away a long time, but I remembered a time when you hadn’t needed papers or passports even to cross international borders, let alone to move around England.

  He bundled us into the car, whose interior smelled of polished leather.

  Near Portsmouth, at Cook’s request, Philip turned off the main road and halted at an elevation from which we had a view of the city and the harbour beyond. Portsmouth has always been the main port of the Royal Navy, and that day we could see the English Channel crowded with ships, like grey ghosts in the March mist. Black smoke streaked from their funnels in the breeze.

  Cook and Eden, military men both, were fascinated by the sight. ‘Something is afoot,’ murmured Cook. ‘Lot of traffic down there.’

  Philip said, ‘Wish I’d brought my bird-watching glasses . . . Are either of you Army men ship-spotters? Not all those vessels out there are ours. Some are German – and some indeed are French, impounded after the Schlieffen War.’ He glanced back, almost conspiratorially. ‘There are tensions with the Americans. The rumour going round my club – well, it’s this. That the Kaiser, straddling the whole of Europe, is feeling restless again. Just as they launched the European war in the west to knock out France and have a free hand to hit Russia before she mobilised – that was the whole point of the Schlieffen Plan - now the German planners are thinking of taking on America before she becomes too big to handle. America, you know, has a decent navy but a
very small standing army, and problems with her neighbour, Mexico. If the Germans can get their fleet across the Atlantic, and if the Mexicans can be encouraged to cross the border . . .’

  ‘Madness,’ murmured Eden. ‘Too many damn war rumours. Keeps everyone on edge.’

  But Cook said, ‘But you’ve got to ’and it to the Kaiser. He’s winning ’is war on one continent, through being bold. Maybe ’he can do it again. Why not?’

  I had watched all this martial drama from afar. In a sense it had all followed on from the Martian War. The British Navy, the best in the world, had turned out to be all but useless against forces that fell on us from the sky. Frank and I ourselves, in our flight to the sea, had seen the Channel Fleet standing useless across the Thames estuary while the Martians rampaged. So, after the War, there had been a drastic rebalancing, with funding for the home Army boosted, and the Navy drastically cut, amid much hand-wringing about the loss of tradition, and bitter inter-service rivalry. Part of the strategy had been, by 1912, our agreeing a rather shabby non-aggression pact with the Kaiser to avoid any naval arms race – and, indeed, to reduce the risk of war with Germany, whose generals were alarmed at the potential of our new, heavily expanded land army for waging a war in Europe. After that we cooperated with the Germans when it came to the oil-rich Ottomans, and we had no fear of German aggression against India - so long as we turned a blind eye to their wider plans.

  At home, Marvin was cunning in how he reinforced his new position. Neutrality was popular with the financial markets, and after the shock of the Martian invasion, the general militaristic timbre of Marvin’s regime struck a chord with the populace. It was even good for business, if you were quick-footed enough: clothiers produced uniforms and other military apparel, leathermakers turned out Sam Browne belts and holsters, boots and harnesses, and our munitions factories produced arms and ammunitions to be poured down the great gullet of wars to come . . .