“I wish you wouldn’t go.”
He knew why she was saying that. “Despite any present infirmities, I’m still nimble enough to dodge the occasional bomb,” he replied. “And it might be a good idea to make sure that one hasn’t dropped right through the roof of our place on St. James’s Court.”
“The neighbors would have alerted us.”
“What if it had landed on the neighbors?”
“Don’t even joke about such things.”
The war made Jane surly; Wells was accustomed to that. It was one of the many idiocies, as unforgivable as it was destructive, that Jane felt men, with their ungovernable urge to aggression, inflicted on the rest of the human race. Wells, a man who had long championed in his essays a socialist and utopian future, had no cause to argue with that; in fact, he quite agreed. But once the war had begun, he’d felt in his bosom an undeniable patriotic stirring. So many of his books—The War of the Worlds, The War in the Air, even The Time Machine—had focused on the violence that men do, and the ingenious ways in which they do it (why, he’d even predicted the invention of armored tanks and the scourge of poison gas), but once the Germans had invaded Belgium and France, once the reports of their atrocities had started to filter home, his mind had begun to change. And once their airships had crossed the Channel to drop their bombs and incendiary devices on the civilian populations of England, he had reverted to this more traditional stance. Now was not the moment for the pacifism he had once preached; now was the time to repel the barbarians at the gates, and in so doing, perhaps put a stop to this monstrous behavior once and for all. This cataclysm, already dubbed the Great War, with its dreadful death tolls and no immediate end in sight, might prove to be the one to end all wars forever. He had put that very sentiment in writing, and if it turned out to be true, then this war was well worth fighting.
Maybe that was why, when he heard the bugle call off in the distance, he thought for a moment that he had imagined it. The look on Jane’s face told him otherwise. She ran to the window, and yanked the curtains back with both hands; across a sloping lawn lay a country road, and beyond that, on the other side, were cornfields lying fallow in the moonlight. The bugle was coming closer, and as Wells watched over her shoulder, he saw the Boy Scout on his bicycle pedaling past, blowing his lungs out, heading toward the village.
“Here?” Jane murmured. They were forty-five miles from London, in the middle of nowhere, a stretch of nothing but fields and farms and ancient forest.
Wells scanned the sky, but he could see only a sliver from this vantage point. “Come on!” he said, racing toward the door, his slippers scuffing on the carpet. At the bottom of the stairs, he kicked them off his feet, pulled on a pair of rubber boots, and with his overcoat thrown over his robe and pajamas, darted out onto the lawn.
The moon—bright silver, dotted with its familiar craters, and as usual quite stationary—had a rival in the sky that night, a moving rival. Pewter-colored, shaped like a cucumber, and drifting just below the clouds . . . a zeppelin—called a “baby-killer” by the British public because of its indiscriminate attacks on the innocent civilians of London—whose engines could be heard thrumming.
“What could they want to target here?” Jane said, coming to his side, clutching the collar of her own coat against the cold night wind.
“It’s probably been blown off course.”
There was something both malignant and magnificent about the great lumbering beast in the sky, a machine measuring as much as six hundred feet long, kept aloft by hydrogen gasbags, and carrying a crew of perhaps a dozen or more, along with a load of thermite bombs bound with tar. Although it appeared from below to be moving at a glacial pace, Wells knew that it was actually cruising at perhaps fifty miles per hour, and was well defended by gunners in glass gondolas at both ends.
“Will it just move on?”
One could only hope so, Wells thought, although there was something that gave him pause. Why was it flying so low? The great advantage to the German airships was that they could travel at altitudes high enough to be out of range of anti-aircraft fire from the ground, as well as attacks from British fighter planes. This one was descending even lower, its nose tilting down, and it was only then that Wells spotted a lick of flame from its rear.
“I think it’s been hit,” he said.
“By what?”
That he could not know. But some damage had been done, and now it was even more evident—the fire was spreading its livid fingers across the duralumin fuselage, like a tracery of red veins, and the thrumming of its engines became louder and more high-pitched, the cry of a wounded animal.
“My God,” Jane said, her breath fogging the air, “it’s going to crash!”
Though its propellers were still whirring, its rounded ribs were already showing in the spots where the outer fabric skin had been burnt away. Something fell—jumped?—from the burning shell, and was lost once it dropped below the treetops. Wells started running.
“What are you doing?” Jane cried. “You must come back inside!”
But he was already across the road.
“H. G.!”
As best he could judge, the zeppelin would crash in the open meadows surrounding Lady Warwick’s extensive property. Maybe the pilot, in one last desperate attempt to save himself and his crew, had even been trying to land there. With his open coattails flapping around his pajama bottoms, Wells picked his way across the barren earth matted with corn husks. He tried to keep one eye on the ground to keep from tripping, and the other on the airship, its metal struts popping loose as the flames coursed toward its bow. He was dimly aware of other people, here and there, racing along in the same direction, pointing at the sky and shouting to each other.
Breaking through a copse of trees and scrambling over a low stone wall, he saw the zeppelin turn on one side and then the other, as if writhing in pain, before its nose nudged the ground . . . gently at first, but then crumpling as the rest of its massive frame plowed deeper into the earth with a great grinding noise. There was a series of explosions, like fireworks going off, and a shudder went through the entire craft; its front gun turret was squashed against the ground and the propellers threw up a last massive gout of soil, a geyser of dirt and dead grass, before stopping dead. The carcass settled on the ground, crackling with orange flames from one long end to the other.
He heard villagers’ voices—“It’s down!” and “We got it!” and “Fetch the fire brigade before the sparks catch the trees!”—and then he was close enough that he could feel the heat. He slowed down, his breath labored by the run, and plodded toward the blaze. Impregnable as it had looked in the sky, it was now just an immense pile of twisted wreckage, reeking of chemicals and canvas and oil . . . and burning flesh. When Wells saw several of his neighbors getting too close, he warned them to stay back: “There might yet be a hydrogen pocket, or a bomb, that hasn’t exploded yet.”
Slattery, who ran the town livery service, used a pitchfork he was carrying to draw a line in the dirt and warned a couple of children not to cross it. Mrs. Willoughby, who helped Jane with the household chores, was wringing her hands and muttering something to the tobacconist, Mr. Spool. The Boy Scout was sitting astride his bicycle, his duty done, bugle dangling from one hand.