Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
The First World War
The Nemesis statue passed over the Earth in 1913, heralding the First World War.
[1289]
The immortal Captain Jack served in the First World War.
[1290]
The sarcophagus carrying the second Hornet Swarm materialised at the Cromer Palace of Curios at 2 am on 14th April, 1914. This triggered a fire, and the Swarm perished as the Palace burned down.
[1291]
John Watson passed by Buckingham Palace on 4th August, 1914, and was inadvertently swept up in a crowd celebrating His Majesty’s Government declaring war on Germany and its allies. Just two days beforehand, Sherlock Holmes and Watson had defeated Von Bork, an agent of the Kaiser who tried to steal documents related to Britain’s defence plans. Watson accepted a Colonelcy from his old regiment, and was preparing to leave for France when Mycroft Holmes and Bernice Summerfield asked for his help. Together, they solved a mystery pertaining to a malfunctioning piece of Time Lord circuitry.
[1292]
1914 (April) - Human Nature (NA)
[1293]
Wanting to learn more about human emotions, the seventh Doctor acquired nanites that transformed his Time Lord body into that of a human, and stored his biodata and memories in a small pod. He mentally became “John Smith” - a persona crafted by the TARDIS - and worked as the house master at Hulton Academy for Boys in the village of Farringham in Norfolk. Benny posed as Smith’s niece. Smith and a teacher, Joan Redfern, soon fell in love.
The shapechanging Aubertides pursued the TARDIS to Farringham - consuming the Doctor’s biodata would greatly extend their lifespans and enable them to produce enough offspring to overwhelm Gallifrey, then countless worlds. Most of the Aubertides were killed in a pitched battle; Smith saved Joan by exchanging his mind with that of the Doctor, and then died while inhabiting the body of the Aubertide leader, August. The sole surviving Aubertide, Greeneye, escaped by turning himself into a cow - but met his fate in a slaughterhouse.
The Doctor and Joan parted ways, but not before she gifted him with her cat, Wolsey, as a memento.
During World War I, the first conflict between England and Germany occurred at the Battle of Mons. The English Captain Dudgeon luckily survived when his platoon was wiped out, and he later claimed to have seen one of the Angels of Mons: guardians from on high who sought to protect the British troops.
[1294]
Jack Harkness was vaguely acquainted with author/mystic Arthur Machen.
[1295]
(=) The carnage of the Battle of Mons awoke the Dark Matrix. The British Expeditionary Force saw the form of Jack the Ripper over the battlefield.
[1296]
Douglas Caldwell
, formerly a draughtsman in the Royal Engineers,
joined Torchwood Cardiff
during World War I.
[1297]
1914 (14th October) - Project: Twilight
[1298]
The Forge, a secret project to improve the stock of soldiers, experimented on prisoners to create a race of “twilight vampires”. One of the subjects, Amelia, a.k.a. Twilight Seven, became vampiric on 12th September, 1914. On 14th October, the vampires overpowered their creator, Dr Abberton, and fled. Abberton took the vampire formula to survive his wounds, and became known as Nimrod.
The Doctor was in Folkstone during the German bombardment of Antwerp in October 1914, and met a young woman named Jessica Borthwick. Under fire, she shuttled Belgian refugees across the channel in her yacht.
[1299]
In 1914, Manuel Gamio discovered a part of the Great Temple of the Aztecs.
[1300]
1914 (Christmas Day) - “The Forgotten”
[1301]
The ninth Doctor and Rose found themselves in the trenches of the 11th Battalion Bedfordshire Regiment, and the Doctor celebrated the holiday by organising a football match between the two sides. The man in charge of this section of the trench, Captain Harkness, had been shot in the head and taken to hospital - he survived without a scratch.
Charles Arthur Cromwell of Torchwood was born on 6th March, 1915.
[1302]
The sixth Doctor had mint-condition gas masks from the Second Battle of Ypres, 1915.
[1303]
(=) The Already Dead kidnapped Corporal Francis Morgan of the Welsh Fusiliers to serve as the living core component of a temporal fusion device.
A Vortex Dweller retroactively prevented Morgan’s abduction, and he died instead.
[1304]
1915 (7th May) - The Sirens of Time
[1305]
The fifth Doctor was on a merchant ship that was torpedoed by a U-boat. He was captured and posed as a German secret agent. He escaped shortly before the U-boat torpedoed the RMS
Lusitania
. The Doctor failed to save the
Lusitania
, but in doing so prevented the future murder of Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. Without it, the world would have suffered from plagues and fallen prey to the Second Velyshaan Empire.
1915 (August) - White Darkness
[1306]
The seventh Doctor, Benny and Ace arrived in Haiti as a civil rebellion against President Sam started. Lemaitre, an ancient man working on behalf of the Great Old Ones, was raising an army of zombies. They planned to open a gateway from their realm to Earth, and to conquer Europe. The Doctor destroyed Lemaitre and his base with a bomb.
In 1915, Mr Sun was imprisoned for killing a professor of economics, who was later revealled as an Austrian spy.
[1307]
Arthur Kendrick distinguished himself by second-guessing the U-boat commanders on the Atlantic convoys. He would serve as an Admiral in World War II.
[1308]
Professor Travers began his search for the Yeti.
[1309]
1915 (12th-13th September) - “The First”
[1310]
Tall crystalline beings, the Skith, were explorers of the Four Galaxies. They coveted knowledge to such an extent, they would acquire samples from planets, then eradicate their inhabitants or infect them with Skith crystals and turn them into Skithself. The Skith drove the Viskili, Mammox and pig-like Byndalk to extinction.
The tenth Doctor and Martha found that the Skith were interfering with Ernest Shackleton’s trans-Antarctic expedition aboard the
Endurance
. A whale was transformed into a Skith octopoid, and zoologist Robert Clark progressively turned into Skithself. Together with Shackleton and the legendary adventurer/photographer James Francis Hurley, the travellers opened a rift and sent the Skith and their spaceship - Oppressor One - into the sun. Clark returned to normal, and Shackleton’s expedition failed as history recorded.
The Skith leader survived, wounded, on Earth. It retained some knowledge of time travel that had been copied from the Doctor’s mind when he was briefly turned into Skithself.
[1311]
1915 (18th November) - Players
[1312]
The second Doctor arrived in No Man’s Land using a time ring. He saved Winston Churchill from an ambush engineered by two Players, the Count and the Countess. The next day, he saved Churchill again, this time with the help of Jeremy Carstairs and Jennifer Buckingham. Carstairs joined Churchill’s staff. The Doctor escaped a German firing squad by using the time ring.
The scientist Nikita Kuznetzov saw the devastation at Tunguska.
[1313]
Harry Randall and his twin brother Herbert - both of whom became trapped in the Toymaker’s domain - performed as comic funambulists. The two of them, or possibly just Harry, topped the bill at the Empire Theatre in Penge.
[1314]
The Somme
The Battle of the Somme took place on 14th July, 1916. Richard Hadleman survived, treated by Timothy Dean, a former student of Dr John Smith of Aberdeen.
[1315]
Tim Latimer saved himself and his schoolmate Hutchinson on a First World War battlefield, thanks to a premonition he’d had some years earlier.
[1316]
Lance Corporal Weeks, later the chief steward aboard the
R-101,
fought at the Somme.
[1317]
Roger Gleave, a future police inspector, witnessed the devastation.
[1318]
On one of their missions, the crew of the
Teselecta
converted their ship to look like Rasputin - but made the mistake of rendering him as green.
[1319]
w - Two days before Rasputin’s death, Faction Paradox took him away to the Eleven-Day Empire, where he became Father Dyavol, an advisor to Cousin Anastasia. In his place, the Faction supplied a duplicate Rasputin generated in a remembrance tank. The Great Houses sensed something amiss with Rasputin’s history and attempted to rewrite the duplicate’s biodata, even as the Celestis put their mark of indenture on him. The faux Rasputin effectively became three zombies in one, and the prolonged manner of his death embarrassed all concerned.
[1320]
1916 (December) - The Wages of Sin
[1321]
The third Doctor, Jo Grant and Liz Shaw arrived in St. Petersburg as members of the city’s elite, concerned about Father Grigori Rasputin’s growing influence over Empress Czarina Alexandra, conspired to murder him. Jo befriended Rasputin and saved him from death by poisoning, but the conspirators repeatedly shot and beat Rasputin, still failing to kill him. The conspirators finally had Rasputin thrown into a frozen river. The Doctor refrained from action as Rasputin drowned, fulfilling history. Six weeks later, the Russian Revolution overthrew Tsar Nicholas II.
1917 - The Roof of the World
[1322]
Lord Davey discovered an alien pyramid in the Himalayas when his expedition was wiped out in a storm. He was killed and replaced with a doppelganger. The fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem arrived in Darjeeling, where Erimem met Davey and was possessed by the same force. A black cloud descended, killing dozens of people... including Erimem. The Doctor deduced this was an attempt on the part of the Great Old Ones to take control of the world, and that Erimem was still alive. Peri froze the cloud with liquid nitrogen. The pyramid was buried beneath an avalanche.
On 16th April, 1917, the Doctor and Lenin played tiddlywinks on the train journey that returned Lenin from Switzerland to Russia. After that, the Doctor met Empress Alexandra.
[1323]
The Doctor was present in Russia during the October Revolution, met Lenin and became a Hero of the Revolution.
[1324]
The Doctor regarded Lenin as a “disagreeable man with terrible breath”.
[1325]
1917 - No Man’s Land
[1326]
An agent of the Forge, posing as “Lieutenant-Colonel Brook” of the British army, undertook experiments to refine his soldiers’ killing instinct. The Forge also wanted to know if psychological trauma could endow people with time sensitivity or precognition. Soldiers at Charnage Hospital near Arras in France were subjected to psychological refinement in the “hate room”, and made to “kill” dummies of German troopers. Brook sent a squad to No Man’s Land when a wounded trooper, Private Taylor, informed him of an old church on an excellent vantage point there. Due to Brook’s conditioning, the British soldiers slaughtered one another.
The seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex destroyed Brook’s research, and Brook was killed by his own callous men. The Doctor postulated that perhaps the unhinged Private Taylor had indeed demonstrated precognition.
The first Doctor and Susan were caught in a Zeppelin raid at some point during the war.
[1327]
A First World War battlefield near Ypres was kidnapped by the War Lords.
[1328]
The Doctor claimed to have been wounded at the Battle of Gallipoli.
[1329]
Burton, later a camp leader at Shangri-La in 1959, fought in the War using his sabre in hand-to-hand combat.
[1330]
The Toymaker kidnapped two British soldiers from Ypres.
[1331]
Turkish soldiers during the First World War claimed to have seen The Ark of Ages on Mount Ararat.
[1332]
The Doctor saw the Battle of Passchendale.
[1333]
The Doctor met the noted sailor Felix von Luckner.
[1334]