The Best of John Wyndham 1932-1949 by John Wyndham

Author:John Wyndham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1972-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

The Trojan Beam

1939

Sees a British secret agent used as a go-between with the warring states of China and Japan and sees the Trojan Beam used to alter the balance of power.

The officer dropped his hand. His crew could not see his face, for he stood on the observation platform with his head in a steel turret. But the hand was enough. The twin engines roared, the great tank lurched like a huge monster just awakened and began to trundle forward.

The officer, looking left and right, had the curious vision of thickets slowly moving across the country. It was strange, he thought, that with war developed as a science so many of the old tricks remained in use.

How many times in the long tale of history had an army advanced under cover of bushes and branches? It was no more than a moment’s speculation before he turned his attention to keeping his machine to its place in the formation.

The weather was filthy. Sleet made it difficult to see anything much smaller than a house at 200 yards, and the wind which cut in through the observation louvres felt like a knife sawing at his face. No doubt excellent conditions for an advance, in the tactical consideration of the authorities, but not so good for the men who had to do the work. However, there was some consolation in being a tank man and not one of the infantry who would be following.

He peered ahead and swore mildly. The sleet seemed to be getting thicker. Nature was improving her screen for their attack.

In the old days, when a soldier was a warrior rather than a mechanic, generals had preferred to lose their men from wounds rather than from pneumonia. The great general, Julius Caesar, had reasonably remarked that ‘in winter all wars cease’ and until quite recently the Chinese had very sensibly gone home in preference to fighting in the rain. He wished they still did, damn them.

But that custom, along with many others, had changed now. Somewhere beyond the shroud of sleet there were thousands of Chinese sitting in trenches, pillboxes and redoubts, ready to blow his and all the other Japanese tanks to bits if they could, despite any inclemencies of weather.

The officer frowned. He was a loyal servant of his Emperor, of course; he would be willing to shoot anyone who suggested that he was not, but, all the same, there were moments when he privately and secretly wondered if the expense in men and money was worth the object.

His father had been in the expedition to Manchukuo and that was a definite success, but his father had also been in the 1937 campaign which had looked like being a success in the beginning, but had drawn to such an undignified end for Japan in 1940. And now here was another generation fighting over the same ground twenty-four years later. And what if they won? Markets, they said, but could you really force the Chinese to buy things they

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