Disclaimer - I don't own the Time Machine.
Please let me know what you think.
World War 1.
He was going slowly through time, keeping an eye on the chronometric dials laid out in front of him. The dials were adapted steam gauges marked with the passage of days, and they worked by measuring the temporal tension in a quartz bar doped with the chemical/mineral given to him a while back from a meteor crash. The same mineral powered his Machine and allowed it to travel into the future.
The Time Machine had almost arrived in 1912, and despite his long term goal in mind, the Time Traveller was almost bouncing in his seat in anticipation of the visit there. Ever since his run-in with the Morlocks, and the disbelief of all but one of his friends, the Time Traveller had decided to travel back into the future slowly so he could learn more about the future as it unfolded; his original trip had involved him shoving the lever into the future so fast that he had barely any time to really look around him. It was his own fault, really; he had been so desperate to travel forwards into time and see the far future, he had not bothered to see the intervening years.
Looking back over his previous adventure and the mess with the Morlocks during that seemingly never-ending struggle to get down into the underworld of the strange creatures to recover his Time Machine after they'd taken it, the Time Traveller could recognise how he hadn't bothered taking things slowly. Oh well, it was happening now. If he was going to become a full-time explorer of history, he was going to take it slowly and he would visit different moments carefully instead of just rushing into the future. He had taken a short amount of time since the whole mess with Weena to realise that he did not need to rush into the future to rescue her and besides he was a time traveller. He had so much time to return to her, and he would, but only after he had gained more experience.
The chronometric dials showed him the year was the 14th of April, 1912, and as the Time Machine arrived in the year 1912 the Time Traveller ignored the thick cobwebs around him in the darkened boarded up laboratory. He had already come to the realisation that, after a few years of him leaving, his house would become a boarded-up refuge for spiders and lord knew what else. The Time Traveller reached out and slowly drew the lever into the stopping position, and with a jerk, the Time Machine returned to the mainstream time and space continuum. He had been travelling and stopping in 2-year leapfrogs into the future so he could see for himself the changes in Britain in 2-year intervals. If there was one thing he wanted so much to observe as he travelled was the differences around him in a -relatively speaking - small amount of time.
The Time Traveller switched off the Time Machine and he took out the levers from the machine, and he walked out of the laboratory, and through the house. As he slipped outside, he took a deep breath. And he started coughing. It was more polluted than back in his own time, and there was a strange chemical scent mixed in with the familiar sooty smell.
He was crossing a road in the hope to see what was different in the town, and he spotted a newspaper stand on the other side, but he could not see nor make out what the headline was saying - only to jump out of his skin when he did not see something hurtling towards him at incredible speed, with some kind of horn going off. The Time Traveller only just managed to jump back before it even reached him.
"HEY!" The Time Traveller yelled after the strange vehicle, but it was speeding away so fast he doubted whoever was driving it even registered what happened. When he recovered his wits, the Time Traveller crossed the road, this time taking care to look both ways as he crossed and reached the other side to where the newspaper stand was.
The man had seen the whole thing. "Damn contraptions," he grunted while the Time Traveller looked at one of the newspapers, dimly registering what he had said. He was more focused on the newspapers. All of them showed the grainy black and white image of a ship of a design that the Time Traveller had never seen before.
TITANIC SINKS.
The Time Traveller frowned and he picked up the edition and he quickly skimmed through the article. A few days ago a luxury liner bound from Southampton sank en route to New York when it struck an iceberg. As he perused the article, he quickly saw why the sinking was so terrible. The Titanic was apparently the most advanced non-military ship afloat at the time, and it came with some kind of bulkhead arrangement so if it took on water, some of the water would be sluiced into these bulkheads while the rest kept the ship afloat.
Unsinkable they called it, and the fools who had claimed it was, they had staked their reputations on it and then they had collided with the iceberg and a few hours later, the sink started to sink into the cold Atlantic ocean.
The Time Traveller frowned as he thought about the lives lost, and thanks to his scientific and mechanical expertise he could see the hubris of the design plan of the liner. Yes, he could in a way see where the builders were coming from, but at the expense of so many lives… right now, there was an enquiry going on about the nature of the sinking, but as he read through the article, small things jumped out at him.
Few lifeboats.
The only ship being hours away, and by the time the distress call had been received it was far too late, and many frozen corpses were floating on the ocean.
As he took that in, he could see where the enquiry would go and what could result in it. Personally, he felt the best thing to do was to have a number of dedicated ships or boats on the sea patrolling the coastline and monitoring the ocean temperatures for any sign of free-floating icebergs while marking down their locations on charts and sending that information to ships like the Titanic. At the same time, ships carrying more lifeboats would make sure they did not put all of their eggs into one basket.
"Excuse me, are you planning on buying that?"
The Time Traveller turned to the man at the newspaper stand. "No, I was just skimming. It's tragic," he went on, showing the man the article headline.
The newspaperman glanced at it and nodded grimly. "Yeah, it is. All those people, but what makes it worse was it could've been avoided. Technology is good, but common sense is better."
The scientist in the Time Traveller took a little offence to the implications of that, but he understood where the newspaperman was coming from. Indeed from what he could see after a brief skim, it sounded like the Titanic ship sank because the iceberg had damaged the hull too far from the bulkheads so they wouldn't be able to make any kind of difference anyway.
"You're right," the Time Traveller agreed before he put the newspaper away and he was about to ask the man new questions when a woman and a young man selected a couple of newspapers and distracted him. The Time Traveller rubbed his forehead and he walked away to continue his explorations of the town.
Aside from a few new buildings, some new shops, and of course the automobiles he had seen over the last few visits. There seemed to be more of them on the streets, as he had discovered, and there were a few exterior differences to the previous models, but there was nothing more than that. As he walked about the town, visiting one or two shops, the Time Traveller wondered if there was any kind of logic to jumping through time by two years. Yes, two years was a nice even number, but was it enough?
What if he leapt forwards in time, say 10 or 20 years ahead? Yes, that was a possibility, but at the same time, the Time Traveller wanted to know what was going on without popping forwards into futurity and not having a clue about the slang, or the events in between. He might have seen the future and witnessed the grim and gruesome future for humanity, but at the same time he had to admit it would be good to see how it had come about, and he could only do that by travelling through time and materialising back into the real world in short jumps, although it did not really matter in the long run.
He would learn what had happened to humanity which drove a wedge of difference between both the Eloi and the Morlocks. After he had checked the local clocks - his own watch, which travelled in the Time Machine with him, was set on a completely different temporal plane to the clocks of the real-time so it wasn't practical for telling the time when he stopped the Machine - the Time Traveller saw he had been walking around the town for the last two hours.
He was disappointed when he realised not a lot had changed after all. Richmond was still being rapidly built up and despite one or two differences, the place hadn't really changed that much. The Time Traveller walked slowly back to the Time Machine, and he was quite exhausted when he returned to his house.
As he walked through the passageways of his house, he finally came to the laboratory. The Time Machine was still standing there, waiting for him. Slipping the levers out of his pockets, the Time Traveller slid into the saddle - he really needed to find a better seat but the common bicycle saddle had been the only one he could find, but he made up his mind to try to find something that was a little more practical than something that caused a bit of pain and discomfort later. Once the levers were back inside the control console, the Time Traveller rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he considered his next move.
One of his aims was to return to the future and save Weena and perhaps the rest of the Eloi, but at the same time, the Time Traveller had come to realise that he didn't really need to rush back into the future. In any case, there was plenty of time for him to do what he wanted; he did own a Time Machine and he could spend the next thirty years time travelling on his own before he made his return. He wanted to see the future unfolding and perhaps gain a better understanding of what was to come before it all spiralled until the Morlocks dwelled in their underworld.
He looked down at the controls of the Time Machine thoughtfully for a moment as a new idea came to mind. It had been dawning in his brain ever since he had arrived in 1912 and he had come to slowly recognise the downsides of leapfrogging forwards in time every two years.
He decided to travel to 1914, spend a year or so watching and witnessing the unfolding of history, reading newspapers depicting the changes going on around him, much as he had in the days before the Time Machine was built.
The Time Traveller pushed the lever forwards….
X
When he had studied the Battle of Waterloo, the Time Traveller had gained a view of war, a view that the events of the Boer war even if the entire thing had been a massive botch up even before the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade.
But this war had changed his mind.
When he had signed up for the war, mostly due to peer pressure with the alternative being given the white flowers signifying a coward, but also because of the frustration he had felt when his attempts to find the right technologies and components for the repair and maintenance of the Time Machine had failed.
Foolishly, the Time Traveller had signed himself up, and by the time he realised his mistake, it was too late. He had been trained after a few weeks in a camp, and then he found himself in Europe. Like everyone else he had foolishly believed that the war would end in a brief amount of time, believing the rightness of the war.
How wrong he had been, and now as he breathed in and out of the claustrophobic gas mask which filtered out the harmful gases from the artillery shells fired on the British trenches, he stumbled through the trench.
Trenches...
None of his previous studies of warfare had ever prepared him for this. The wars of the past utilised horses robed in gaudy cloth depicting a brave knight or a valorous side of the battle. But in this war… in this unholy mess of a war where the Germans and the British and their allies were forced to fight in trenches which had been holding them back for years until it seemed time itself had slowed to a crawl as if it was the witness of the miserable conflict, every kind of unholy weapon was used.
In the sea, submersible warships were used by the Germans to sink allied ships to starve Britain into submission. In the trenches, built to make it virtually harder for another opposing side to pose much of a threat, men were forced to cower away in…sewers while hails of machine-gun bullets kept them low even as the two sides made use of gas shells which expelled poisonous gases which had already killed hundreds of men over the last few years.
But what was worse about the Great War (how some could call it that, the Time Traveller genuinely did not know), was how disease and sickness was a weapon. The Time Traveller as a scientist was more than familiar with how germs could be a killer, and the trenches were far from the most hygienic place to wage a war.
As for people's previous views about war being waged on horseback; any chances of having that kind of warfare would see the Germans effortlessly shooting them down from their blocky machine-gun posts. They were prepared for this war, the British weren't. He was running through the trenches, listening to the sounds of the German machine guns intermingling with the thunderous booms of their cannons, but he stumbled through the permanently muddy trenches, cursing as he stumbled and tripped a few times.
He ignored the cold feel as the mud-soaked his already dirty uniform - after so long on the battlefield, fighting on the Western front, he had long since dismissed the feeling of wet clothes.
Picking himself up, the Time Traveller ran through the trench, only to fall in shock when an explosion crashed near him, the shock throwing him to the ground. But there was something else there in the trench with him. The Time Traveller gently prodded it with his fingers and he realised he was touching a leg. When there was the flash of another bombshell, the Time Traveller recoiled when his eyes caught enough light to see the body lying in the muddy puddle. And he leapt back in shock and horror
It was the face and the body of a British Tommy, but his body looked like it had been doused in extremely powerful acid. There were rats nearby, but as with the human victim lying in the mud of the trench, they too looked half-melted…
The Time Traveller shot upright, his face and body covered by sweat. For a moment he was too disorientated by the darkness of wherever he was sleeping in and the horror of what he had just witnessed in the trenches to… Suddenly he calmed down when he recognised the candlelight holder on the rickety bedside table next to him and the full-length mirror standing in a corner of the simple bedroom thanks to the ambient light of the room of the French inn he was currently barracked in.
"Thank god for that, it was a nightmare," the Time Traveller rubbed his eyes, shifting himself under the blankets and he drew his knees up to his chest and, ignoring the aches in his body, rested his knees against his chin.
While he was horrified by his mind for coming up with such a horrifying dream, the Time Traveller wasn't surprised; he had seen enough death and destruction, these last four years to know by its end there would likely be nightmarish images clustered in his mind for the rest of his natural life, whereas before the only horrific things he had seen had been the Morlocks and the things he had seen further into time.
But not anymore.
No, I won't think about it anymore, the Time Traveller thought to himself as he rubbed his eyes as if his eyes themselves contained all of the horrifying things he had seen during the last four years. It will be over soon…
When the Time Traveller had time travelled into the future from 1912, he had jumped 2 years ahead. He had arrived in the final days of 1913, and thanks to some of the items he had left in his home which the Filby's and a few of his friends had managed to preserve, he had sold them to get enough money to live off until he had discovered a better plan for a couple of years.
It had been a turbulent time with war being likely on the horizon, but even as he had followed the events taking place in 1914, the Time Traveller had already resolved not to get involved; if there was one thing he had learnt over his time travels, it was that the conflicts would only last a short time. In any case, he had been busying himself with learning more about this increasingly different world, and seeing what he could use from it to add to his Time Machine to improve on the original design.
But of course, in a changing world where there were differences between the one he had known and the one he had found himself in, the Time Traveller had found some moments to be frustrating.
He had found himself stumped by some of the new technologies and he'd needed time to work out how to use the new electronic devices.
One of his biggest headaches, which had led to him go into the army on the outbreak of the war in the hopes of it distracting him from the conflict, had been the difficulties in getting his hands on enough of the technology, and information to go with how it worked. The Time Traveller didn't want to be dependent on his own time period for the maintenance of his Machine, despite the logic behind it; not only did he have the necessary contacts and connections for the mills where the parts of his chariot, but he was more familiar with the technology there. But there was also logic in finding new contacts in various time periods, so if his Time Machine broke down all he would need to do would be to contact them, and he would receive a new part for the Machine.
But after the failure of this experiment, the Time Traveller was in two minds about what to do about a solution. Right now he was too tired to care. He was suffering from a number of nightmares, but the good news was he wouldn't be in continental Europe for much longer, especially after he had witnessed the new form of warfare that would take everyone by surprise. He had needed to wait for a bit before he received his discharge papers, although truthfully he would have likely left even without them; after seeing some of the incompetence of the generals and majors in command of the war, and the effects of trench foot and the terrible cold of the trenches while they were repeatedly shelled by mustard gas even as they fought at the Somme and Paschendale, but he received them which meant he could legally leave the army.
He was free to return home, and thanks to the sale of some of the souvenirs he had picked up over the last four years, he had purchased a ticket all the way back home.
He hated this point in history and all the Time Traveller wanted to do was to leave it. What he could not work out was whether it was because of how close it was to his own home time or contempt born out of familiarity. He had seen enough of this point of the 20th century and he had collected enough knowledge of it to more than satisfy him.
The only thing that worried the Time Traveller was what he would find when he returned to dear old Blighty; he could be sure the Filby's had kept the place locked up and he had spent hours dismantling the Time Machine and scattering the components underground, but that didn't mean the house could not have been demolished if the family decided it was too much of a hassle holding onto a property where the owner, who was an old family friend, had never returned. He had only stayed in the old place during his time in 1914 because he had nowhere else for him to go, and he had been away from the Time Machine for too long. He was angry with himself for not thinking straight beforehand, but there was nothing he could do until he returned to Richmond.
Author's Note - I always wondered how the Time Traveller would feel in the World Wars. I know it's short, but a brisk summary was a good idea although there will be other references to his time there further down the line.