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+Title: The War of the Worlds
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+The War of the Worlds
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+
+
+
+   ‘But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited?
+    . . . Are we or they Lords of the World? . . . And
+    how are all things made for man?’
+                    KEPLER (quoted in _The Anatomy of Melancholy_)
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+ BOOK ONE.—THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS
+
+ I. THE EVE OF THE WAR.
+ II. THE FALLING STAR.
+ III. ON HORSELL COMMON.
+ IV. THE CYLINDER OPENS.
+ V. THE HEAT-RAY.
+ VI. THE HEAT-RAY IN THE CHOBHAM ROAD.
+ VII. HOW I REACHED HOME.
+ VIII. FRIDAY NIGHT.
+ IX. THE FIGHTING BEGINS.
+ X. IN THE STORM.
+ XI. AT THE WINDOW.
+ XII. WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON.
+ XIII. HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CURATE.
+ XIV. IN LONDON.
+ XV. WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY.
+ XVI. THE EXODUS FROM LONDON.
+ XVII. THE “THUNDER CHILD”.
+
+ BOOK TWO.—THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS
+
+ I. UNDER FOOT.
+ II. WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE.
+ III. THE DAYS OF IMPRISONMENT.
+ IV. THE DEATH OF THE CURATE.
+ V. THE STILLNESS.
+ VI. THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS.
+ VII. THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL.
+ VIII. DEAD LONDON.
+ IX. WRECKAGE.
+ X. THE EPILOGUE.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK ONE
+THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS
+
+
+
+
+I.
+THE EVE OF THE WAR.
+
+
+No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century
+that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences
+greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied
+themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and
+studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might
+scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of
+water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe
+about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire
+over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do
+the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources
+of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life
+upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of
+the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men
+fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to
+themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the
+gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the
+beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,
+regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their
+plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great
+disillusionment.
+
+The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the
+sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it
+receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It
+must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world;
+and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface
+must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of
+the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the
+temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all
+that is necessary for the support of animated existence.
+
+Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to
+the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that
+intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all,
+beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since
+Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the
+superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that
+it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.
+
+The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already
+gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still
+largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region
+the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter.
+Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until
+they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change
+huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically
+inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to
+us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the
+inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened
+their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And
+looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we
+have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only
+35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own
+warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy
+atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting
+cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow,
+navy-crowded seas.
+
+And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at
+least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The
+intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant
+struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief
+of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this
+world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they
+regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their
+only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation,
+creeps upon them.
+
+And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless
+and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon
+animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior
+races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely
+swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European
+immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy
+as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
+
+The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing
+subtlety—their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of
+ours—and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh
+perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen
+the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like
+Schiaparelli watched the red planet—it is odd, by-the-bye, that for
+countless centuries Mars has been the star of war—but failed to
+interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so
+well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.
+
+During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated
+part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of
+Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in
+the issue of _Nature_ dated August 2. I am inclined to think that this
+blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk
+into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar
+markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak
+during the next two oppositions.
+
+The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached
+opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange
+palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of
+incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight of
+the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted,
+indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an
+enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had become
+invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal
+puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, “as
+flaming gases rushed out of a gun.”
+
+A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was
+nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the _Daily
+Telegraph_, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest
+dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard of
+the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at
+Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of
+his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a
+scrutiny of the red planet.
+
+In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that vigil
+very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern
+throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking
+of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an
+oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved
+about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a
+circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field.
+It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly
+marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect
+round. But so little it was, so silvery warm—a pin’s head of light! It
+was as if it quivered, but really this was the telescope vibrating with
+the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.
+
+As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to
+advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty
+millions of miles it was from us—more than forty millions of miles of
+void. Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of
+the material universe swims.
+
+Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light,
+three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the
+unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that blackness looks
+on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far profounder.
+And invisible to me because it was so remote and small, flying swiftly
+and steadily towards me across that incredible distance, drawing nearer
+every minute by so many thousands of miles, came the Thing they were
+sending us, the Thing that was to bring so much struggle and calamity
+and death to the earth. I never dreamed of it then as I watched; no one
+on earth dreamed of that unerring missile.
+
+That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from the distant
+planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, the slightest projection
+of the outline just as the chronometer struck midnight; and at that I
+told Ogilvy and he took my place. The night was warm and I was thirsty,
+and I went stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the
+darkness, to the little table where the siphon stood, while Ogilvy
+exclaimed at the streamer of gas that came out towards us.
+
+That night another invisible missile started on its way to the earth
+from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four hours after the first
+one. I remember how I sat on the table there in the blackness, with
+patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes. I wished I had a
+light to smoke by, little suspecting the meaning of the minute gleam I
+had seen and all that it would presently bring me. Ogilvy watched till
+one, and then gave it up; and we lit the lantern and walked over to his
+house. Down below in the darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all
+their hundreds of people, sleeping in peace.
+
+He was full of speculation that night about the condition of Mars, and
+scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who were
+signalling us. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy
+shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was in
+progress. He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic
+evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets.
+
+“The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one,” he
+said.
+
+Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after
+about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a
+flame each night. Why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on earth
+has attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the firing caused the
+Martians inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through
+a powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating patches,
+spread through the clearness of the planet’s atmosphere and obscured
+its more familiar features.
+
+Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last, and popular
+notes appeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the volcanoes
+upon Mars. The seriocomic periodical _Punch_, I remember, made a happy
+use of it in the political cartoon. And, all unsuspected, those
+missiles the Martians had fired at us drew earthward, rushing now at a
+pace of many miles a second through the empty gulf of space, hour by
+hour and day by day, nearer and nearer. It seems to me now almost
+incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men
+could go about their petty concerns as they did. I remember how
+jubilant Markham was at securing a new photograph of the planet for the
+illustrated paper he edited in those days. People in these latter times
+scarcely realise the abundance and enterprise of our nineteenth-century
+papers. For my own part, I was much occupied in learning to ride the
+bicycle, and busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable
+developments of moral ideas as civilisation progressed.
+
+One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been 10,000,000
+miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I
+explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a
+bright dot of light creeping zenithward, towards which so many
+telescopes were pointed. It was a warm night. Coming home, a party of
+excursionists from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing
+music. There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as the
+people went to bed. From the railway station in the distance came the
+sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into
+melody by the distance. My wife pointed out to me the brightness of the
+red, green, and yellow signal lights hanging in a framework against the
+sky. It seemed so safe and tranquil.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+THE FALLING STAR.
+
+
+Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in the
+morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the
+atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary
+falling star. Albin described it as leaving a greenish streak behind it
+that glowed for some seconds. Denning, our greatest authority on
+meteorites, stated that the height of its first appearance was about
+ninety or one hundred miles. It seemed to him that it fell to earth
+about one hundred miles east of him.
+
+I was at home at that hour and writing in my study; and although my
+French windows face towards Ottershaw and the blind was up (for I loved
+in those days to look up at the night sky), I saw nothing of it. Yet
+this strangest of all things that ever came to earth from outer space
+must have fallen while I was sitting there, visible to me had I only
+looked up as it passed. Some of those who saw its flight say it
+travelled with a hissing sound. I myself heard nothing of that. Many
+people in Berkshire, Surrey, and Middlesex must have seen the fall of
+it, and, at most, have thought that another meteorite had descended. No
+one seems to have troubled to look for the fallen mass that night.
+
+But very early in the morning poor Ogilvy, who had seen the shooting
+star and who was persuaded that a meteorite lay somewhere on the common
+between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, rose early with the idea of
+finding it. Find it he did, soon after dawn, and not far from the
+sand-pits. An enormous hole had been made by the impact of the
+projectile, and the sand and gravel had been flung violently in every
+direction over the heath, forming heaps visible a mile and a half away.
+The heather was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke rose against
+the dawn.
+
+The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand, amidst the
+scattered splinters of a fir tree it had shivered to fragments in its
+descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder,
+caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured
+incrustation. It had a diameter of about thirty yards. He approached
+the mass, surprised at the size and more so at the shape, since most
+meteorites are rounded more or less completely. It was, however, still
+so hot from its flight through the air as to forbid his near approach.
+A stirring noise within its cylinder he ascribed to the unequal cooling
+of its surface; for at that time it had not occurred to him that it
+might be hollow.
+
+He remained standing at the edge of the pit that the Thing had made for
+itself, staring at its strange appearance, astonished chiefly at its
+unusual shape and colour, and dimly perceiving even then some evidence
+of design in its arrival. The early morning was wonderfully still, and
+the sun, just clearing the pine trees towards Weybridge, was already
+warm. He did not remember hearing any birds that morning, there was
+certainly no breeze stirring, and the only sounds were the faint
+movements from within the cindery cylinder. He was all alone on the
+common.
+
+Then suddenly he noticed with a start that some of the grey clinker,
+the ashy incrustation that covered the meteorite, was falling off the
+circular edge of the end. It was dropping off in flakes and raining
+down upon the sand. A large piece suddenly came off and fell with a
+sharp noise that brought his heart into his mouth.
+
+For a minute he scarcely realised what this meant, and, although the
+heat was excessive, he clambered down into the pit close to the bulk to
+see the Thing more clearly. He fancied even then that the cooling of
+the body might account for this, but what disturbed that idea was the
+fact that the ash was falling only from the end of the cylinder.
+
+And then he perceived that, very slowly, the circular top of the
+cylinder was rotating on its body. It was such a gradual movement that
+he discovered it only through noticing that a black mark that had been
+near him five minutes ago was now at the other side of the
+circumference. Even then he scarcely understood what this indicated,
+until he heard a muffled grating sound and saw the black mark jerk
+forward an inch or so. Then the thing came upon him in a flash. The
+cylinder was artificial—hollow—with an end that screwed out! Something
+within the cylinder was unscrewing the top!
+
+“Good heavens!” said Ogilvy. “There’s a man in it—men in it! Half
+roasted to death! Trying to escape!”
+
+At once, with a quick mental leap, he linked the Thing with the flash
+upon Mars.
+
+The thought of the confined creature was so dreadful to him that he
+forgot the heat and went forward to the cylinder to help turn. But
+luckily the dull radiation arrested him before he could burn his hands
+on the still-glowing metal. At that he stood irresolute for a moment,
+then turned, scrambled out of the pit, and set off running wildly into
+Woking. The time then must have been somewhere about six o’clock. He
+met a waggoner and tried to make him understand, but the tale he told
+and his appearance were so wild—his hat had fallen off in the pit—that
+the man simply drove on. He was equally unsuccessful with the potman
+who was just unlocking the doors of the public-house by Horsell Bridge.
+The fellow thought he was a lunatic at large and made an unsuccessful
+attempt to shut him into the taproom. That sobered him a little; and
+when he saw Henderson, the London journalist, in his garden, he called
+over the palings and made himself understood.
+
+“Henderson,” he called, “you saw that shooting star last night?”
+
+“Well?” said Henderson.
+
+“It’s out on Horsell Common now.”
+
+“Good Lord!” said Henderson. “Fallen meteorite! That’s good.”
+
+“But it’s something more than a meteorite. It’s a cylinder—an
+artificial cylinder, man! And there’s something inside.”
+
+Henderson stood up with his spade in his hand.
+
+“What’s that?” he said. He was deaf in one ear.
+
+Ogilvy told him all that he had seen. Henderson was a minute or so
+taking it in. Then he dropped his spade, snatched up his jacket, and
+came out into the road. The two men hurried back at once to the common,
+and found the cylinder still lying in the same position. But now the
+sounds inside had ceased, and a thin circle of bright metal showed
+between the top and the body of the cylinder. Air was either entering
+or escaping at the rim with a thin, sizzling sound.
+
+They listened, rapped on the scaly burnt metal with a stick, and,
+meeting with no response, they both concluded the man or men inside
+must be insensible or dead.
+
+Of course the two were quite unable to do anything. They shouted
+consolation and promises, and went off back to the town again to get
+help. One can imagine them, covered with sand, excited and disordered,
+running up the little street in the bright sunlight just as the shop
+folks were taking down their shutters and people were opening their
+bedroom windows. Henderson went into the railway station at once, in
+order to telegraph the news to London. The newspaper articles had
+prepared men’s minds for the reception of the idea.
+
+By eight o’clock a number of boys and unemployed men had already
+started for the common to see the “dead men from Mars.” That was the
+form the story took. I heard of it first from my newspaper boy about a
+quarter to nine when I went out to get my _Daily Chronicle_. I was
+naturally startled, and lost no time in going out and across the
+Ottershaw bridge to the sand-pits.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+ON HORSELL COMMON.
+
+
+I found a little crowd of perhaps twenty people surrounding the huge
+hole in which the cylinder lay. I have already described the appearance
+of that colossal bulk, embedded in the ground. The turf and gravel
+about it seemed charred as if by a sudden explosion. No doubt its
+impact had caused a flash of fire. Henderson and Ogilvy were not there.
+I think they perceived that nothing was to be done for the present, and
+had gone away to breakfast at Henderson’s house.
+
+There were four or five boys sitting on the edge of the Pit, with their
+feet dangling, and amusing themselves—until I stopped them—by throwing
+stones at the giant mass. After I had spoken to them about it, they
+began playing at “touch” in and out of the group of bystanders.
+
+Among these were a couple of cyclists, a jobbing gardener I employed
+sometimes, a girl carrying a baby, Gregg the butcher and his little
+boy, and two or three loafers and golf caddies who were accustomed to
+hang about the railway station. There was very little talking. Few of
+the common people in England had anything but the vaguest astronomical
+ideas in those days. Most of them were staring quietly at the big table
+like end of the cylinder, which was still as Ogilvy and Henderson had
+left it. I fancy the popular expectation of a heap of charred corpses
+was disappointed at this inanimate bulk. Some went away while I was
+there, and other people came. I clambered into the pit and fancied I
+heard a faint movement under my feet. The top had certainly ceased to
+rotate.
+
+It was only when I got thus close to it that the strangeness of this
+object was at all evident to me. At the first glance it was really no
+more exciting than an overturned carriage or a tree blown across the
+road. Not so much so, indeed. It looked like a rusty gas float. It
+required a certain amount of scientific education to perceive that the
+grey scale of the Thing was no common oxide, that the yellowish-white
+metal that gleamed in the crack between the lid and the cylinder had an
+unfamiliar hue. “Extra-terrestrial” had no meaning for most of the
+onlookers.
+
+At that time it was quite clear in my own mind that the Thing had come
+from the planet Mars, but I judged it improbable that it contained any
+living creature. I thought the unscrewing might be automatic. In spite
+of Ogilvy, I still believed that there were men in Mars. My mind ran
+fancifully on the possibilities of its containing manuscript, on the
+difficulties in translation that might arise, whether we should find
+coins and models in it, and so forth. Yet it was a little too large for
+assurance on this idea. I felt an impatience to see it opened. About
+eleven, as nothing seemed happening, I walked back, full of such
+thought, to my home in Maybury. But I found it difficult to get to work
+upon my abstract investigations.
+
+In the afternoon the appearance of the common had altered very much.
+The early editions of the evening papers had startled London with
+enormous headlines:
+
+“A MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM MARS.”
+
+
+“REMARKABLE STORY FROM WOKING,”
+
+
+and so forth. In addition, Ogilvy’s wire to the Astronomical Exchange
+had roused every observatory in the three kingdoms.
+
+There were half a dozen flys or more from the Woking station standing
+in the road by the sand-pits, a basket-chaise from Chobham, and a
+rather lordly carriage. Besides that, there was quite a heap of
+bicycles. In addition, a large number of people must have walked, in
+spite of the heat of the day, from Woking and Chertsey, so that there
+was altogether quite a considerable crowd—one or two gaily dressed
+ladies among the others.
+
+It was glaringly hot, not a cloud in the sky nor a breath of wind, and
+the only shadow was that of the few scattered pine trees. The burning
+heather had been extinguished, but the level ground towards Ottershaw
+was blackened as far as one could see, and still giving off vertical
+streamers of smoke. An enterprising sweet-stuff dealer in the Chobham
+Road had sent up his son with a barrow-load of green apples and ginger
+beer.
+
+Going to the edge of the pit, I found it occupied by a group of about
+half a dozen men—Henderson, Ogilvy, and a tall, fair-haired man that I
+afterwards learned was Stent, the Astronomer Royal, with several
+workmen wielding spades and pickaxes. Stent was giving directions in a
+clear, high-pitched voice. He was standing on the cylinder, which was
+now evidently much cooler; his face was crimson and streaming with
+perspiration, and something seemed to have irritated him.
+
+A large portion of the cylinder had been uncovered, though its lower
+end was still embedded. As soon as Ogilvy saw me among the staring
+crowd on the edge of the pit he called to me to come down, and asked me
+if I would mind going over to see Lord Hilton, the lord of the manor.
+
+The growing crowd, he said, was becoming a serious impediment to their
+excavations, especially the boys. They wanted a light railing put up,
+and help to keep the people back. He told me that a faint stirring was
+occasionally still audible within the case, but that the workmen had
+failed to unscrew the top, as it afforded no grip to them. The case
+appeared to be enormously thick, and it was possible that the faint
+sounds we heard represented a noisy tumult in the interior.
+
+I was very glad to do as he asked, and so become one of the privileged
+spectators within the contemplated enclosure. I failed to find Lord
+Hilton at his house, but I was told he was expected from London by the
+six o’clock train from Waterloo; and as it was then about a quarter
+past five, I went home, had some tea, and walked up to the station to
+waylay him.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+THE CYLINDER OPENS.
+
+
+When I returned to the common the sun was setting. Scattered groups
+were hurrying from the direction of Woking, and one or two persons were
+returning. The crowd about the pit had increased, and stood out black
+against the lemon yellow of the sky—a couple of hundred people,
+perhaps. There were raised voices, and some sort of struggle appeared
+to be going on about the pit. Strange imaginings passed through my
+mind. As I drew nearer I heard Stent’s voice:
+
+“Keep back! Keep back!”
+
+A boy came running towards me.
+
+“It’s a-movin’,” he said to me as he passed; “a-screwin’ and a-screwin’
+out. I don’t like it. I’m a-goin’ ’ome, I am.”
+
+I went on to the crowd. There were really, I should think, two or three
+hundred people elbowing and jostling one another, the one or two ladies
+there being by no means the least active.
+
+“He’s fallen in the pit!” cried some one.
+
+“Keep back!” said several.
+
+The crowd swayed a little, and I elbowed my way through. Every one
+seemed greatly excited. I heard a peculiar humming sound from the pit.
+
+“I say!” said Ogilvy; “help keep these idiots back. We don’t know
+what’s in the confounded thing, you know!”
+
+I saw a young man, a shop assistant in Woking I believe he was,
+standing on the cylinder and trying to scramble out of the hole again.
+The crowd had pushed him in.
+
+The end of the cylinder was being screwed out from within. Nearly two
+feet of shining screw projected. Somebody blundered against me, and I
+narrowly missed being pitched onto the top of the screw. I turned, and
+as I did so the screw must have come out, for the lid of the cylinder
+fell upon the gravel with a ringing concussion. I stuck my elbow into
+the person behind me, and turned my head towards the Thing again. For a
+moment that circular cavity seemed perfectly black. I had the sunset in
+my eyes.
+
+I think everyone expected to see a man emerge—possibly something a
+little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man. I know I
+did. But, looking, I presently saw something stirring within the
+shadow: greyish billowy movements, one above another, and then two
+luminous disks—like eyes. Then something resembling a little grey
+snake, about the thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the
+writhing middle, and wriggled in the air towards me—and then another.
+
+A sudden chill came over me. There was a loud shriek from a woman
+behind. I half turned, keeping my eyes fixed upon the cylinder still,
+from which other tentacles were now projecting, and began pushing my
+way back from the edge of the pit. I saw astonishment giving place to
+horror on the faces of the people about me. I heard inarticulate
+exclamations on all sides. There was a general movement backwards. I
+saw the shopman struggling still on the edge of the pit. I found myself
+alone, and saw the people on the other side of the pit running off,
+Stent among them. I looked again at the cylinder, and ungovernable
+terror gripped me. I stood petrified and staring.
+
+A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising
+slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught
+the light, it glistened like wet leather.
+
+Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass
+that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one
+might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim
+of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature
+heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped
+the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.
+
+Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the
+strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its
+pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin
+beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth,
+the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs
+in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of
+movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above
+all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once
+vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something
+fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of
+the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter,
+this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.
+
+Suddenly the monster vanished. It had toppled over the brim of the
+cylinder and fallen into the pit, with a thud like the fall of a great
+mass of leather. I heard it give a peculiar thick cry, and forthwith
+another of these creatures appeared darkly in the deep shadow of the
+aperture.
+
+I turned and, running madly, made for the first group of trees, perhaps
+a hundred yards away; but I ran slantingly and stumbling, for I could
+not avert my face from these things.
+
+There, among some young pine trees and furze bushes, I stopped,
+panting, and waited further developments. The common round the
+sand-pits was dotted with people, standing like myself in a
+half-fascinated terror, staring at these creatures, or rather at the
+heaped gravel at the edge of the pit in which they lay. And then, with
+a renewed horror, I saw a round, black object bobbing up and down on
+the edge of the pit. It was the head of the shopman who had fallen in,
+but showing as a little black object against the hot western sun. Now
+he got his shoulder and knee up, and again he seemed to slip back until
+only his head was visible. Suddenly he vanished, and I could have
+fancied a faint shriek had reached me. I had a momentary impulse to go
+back and help him that my fears overruled.
+
+Everything was then quite invisible, hidden by the deep pit and the
+heap of sand that the fall of the cylinder had made. Anyone coming
+along the road from Chobham or Woking would have been amazed at the
+sight—a dwindling multitude of perhaps a hundred people or more
+standing in a great irregular circle, in ditches, behind bushes, behind
+gates and hedges, saying little to one another and that in short,
+excited shouts, and staring, staring hard at a few heaps of sand. The
+barrow of ginger beer stood, a queer derelict, black against the
+burning sky, and in the sand-pits was a row of deserted vehicles with
+their horses feeding out of nosebags or pawing the ground.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+THE HEAT-RAY.
+
+
+After the glimpse I had had of the Martians emerging from the cylinder
+in which they had come to the earth from their planet, a kind of
+fascination paralysed my actions. I remained standing knee-deep in the
+heather, staring at the mound that hid them. I was a battleground of
+fear and curiosity.
+
+I did not dare to go back towards the pit, but I felt a passionate
+longing to peer into it. I began walking, therefore, in a big curve,
+seeking some point of vantage and continually looking at the sand-heaps
+that hid these new-comers to our earth. Once a leash of thin black
+whips, like the arms of an octopus, flashed across the sunset and was
+immediately withdrawn, and afterwards a thin rod rose up, joint by
+joint, bearing at its apex a circular disk that spun with a wobbling
+motion. What could be going on there?
+
+Most of the spectators had gathered in one or two groups—one a little
+crowd towards Woking, the other a knot of people in the direction of
+Chobham. Evidently they shared my mental conflict. There were few near
+me. One man I approached—he was, I perceived, a neighbour of mine,
+though I did not know his name—and accosted. But it was scarcely a time
+for articulate conversation.
+
+“What ugly _brutes_!” he said. “Good God! What ugly brutes!” He
+repeated this over and over again.
+
+“Did you see a man in the pit?” I said; but he made no answer to that.
+We became silent, and stood watching for a time side by side, deriving,
+I fancy, a certain comfort in one another’s company. Then I shifted my
+position to a little knoll that gave me the advantage of a yard or more
+of elevation and when I looked for him presently he was walking towards
+Woking.
+
+The sunset faded to twilight before anything further happened. The
+crowd far away on the left, towards Woking, seemed to grow, and I heard
+now a faint murmur from it. The little knot of people towards Chobham
+dispersed. There was scarcely an intimation of movement from the pit.
+
+It was this, as much as anything, that gave people courage, and I
+suppose the new arrivals from Woking also helped to restore confidence.
+At any rate, as the dusk came on a slow, intermittent movement upon the
+sand-pits began, a movement that seemed to gather force as the
+stillness of the evening about the cylinder remained unbroken. Vertical
+black figures in twos and threes would advance, stop, watch, and
+advance again, spreading out as they did so in a thin irregular
+crescent that promised to enclose the pit in its attenuated horns. I,
+too, on my side began to move towards the pit.
+
+Then I saw some cabmen and others had walked boldly into the sand-pits,
+and heard the clatter of hoofs and the gride of wheels. I saw a lad
+trundling off the barrow of apples. And then, within thirty yards of
+the pit, advancing from the direction of Horsell, I noted a little
+black knot of men, the foremost of whom was waving a white flag.
+
+This was the Deputation. There had been a hasty consultation, and since
+the Martians were evidently, in spite of their repulsive forms,
+intelligent creatures, it had been resolved to show them, by
+approaching them with signals, that we too were intelligent.
+
+Flutter, flutter, went the flag, first to the right, then to the left.
+It was too far for me to recognise anyone there, but afterwards I
+learned that Ogilvy, Stent, and Henderson were with others in this
+attempt at communication. This little group had in its advance dragged
+inward, so to speak, the circumference of the now almost complete
+circle of people, and a number of dim black figures followed it at
+discreet distances.
+
+Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a quantity of luminous
+greenish smoke came out of the pit in three distinct puffs, which drove
+up, one after the other, straight into the still air.
+
+This smoke (or flame, perhaps, would be the better word for it) was so
+bright that the deep blue sky overhead and the hazy stretches of brown
+common towards Chertsey, set with black pine trees, seemed to darken
+abruptly as these puffs arose, and to remain the darker after their
+dispersal. At the same time a faint hissing sound became audible.
+
+Beyond the pit stood the little wedge of people with the white flag at
+its apex, arrested by these phenomena, a little knot of small vertical
+black shapes upon the black ground. As the green smoke arose, their
+faces flashed out pallid green, and faded again as it vanished. Then
+slowly the hissing passed into a humming, into a long, loud, droning
+noise. Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a
+beam of light seemed to flicker out from it.
+
+Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to
+another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some
+invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was
+as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire.
+
+Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and
+falling, and their supporters turning to run.
+
+I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from
+man to man in that little distant crowd. All I felt was that it was
+something very strange. An almost noiseless and blinding flash of
+light, and a man fell headlong and lay still; and as the unseen shaft
+of heat passed over them, pine trees burst into fire, and every dry
+furze bush became with one dull thud a mass of flames. And far away
+towards Knaphill I saw the flashes of trees and hedges and wooden
+buildings suddenly set alight.
+
+It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this
+invisible, inevitable sword of heat. I perceived it coming towards me
+by the flashing bushes it touched, and was too astounded and stupefied
+to stir. I heard the crackle of fire in the sand-pits and the sudden
+squeal of a horse that was as suddenly stilled. Then it was as if an
+invisible yet intensely heated finger were drawn through the heather
+between me and the Martians, and all along a curving line beyond the
+sand-pits the dark ground smoked and crackled. Something fell with a
+crash far away to the left where the road from Woking station opens out
+on the common. Forth-with the hissing and humming ceased, and the
+black, dome-like object sank slowly out of sight into the pit.
+
+All this had happened with such swiftness that I had stood motionless,
+dumbfounded and dazzled by the flashes of light. Had that death swept
+through a full circle, it must inevitably have slain me in my surprise.
+But it passed and spared me, and left the night about me suddenly dark
+and unfamiliar.
+
+The undulating common seemed now dark almost to blackness, except where
+its roadways lay grey and pale under the deep blue sky of the early
+night. It was dark, and suddenly void of men. Overhead the stars were
+mustering, and in the west the sky was still a pale, bright, almost
+greenish blue. The tops of the pine trees and the roofs of Horsell came
+out sharp and black against the western afterglow. The Martians and
+their appliances were altogether invisible, save for that thin mast
+upon which their restless mirror wobbled. Patches of bush and isolated
+trees here and there smoked and glowed still, and the houses towards
+Woking station were sending up spires of flame into the stillness of
+the evening air.
+
+Nothing was changed save for that and a terrible astonishment. The
+little group of black specks with the flag of white had been swept out
+of existence, and the stillness of the evening, so it seemed to me, had
+scarcely been broken.
+
+It came to me that I was upon this dark common, helpless, unprotected,
+and alone. Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without,
+came—fear.
+
+With an effort I turned and began a stumbling run through the heather.
+
+The fear I felt was no rational fear, but a panic terror not only of
+the Martians, but of the dusk and stillness all about me. Such an
+extraordinary effect in unmanning me it had that I ran weeping silently
+as a child might do. Once I had turned, I did not dare to look back.
+
+I remember I felt an extraordinary persuasion that I was being played
+with, that presently, when I was upon the very verge of safety, this
+mysterious death—as swift as the passage of light—would leap after me
+from the pit about the cylinder, and strike me down.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+THE HEAT-RAY IN THE CHOBHAM ROAD.
+
+
+It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so
+swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are able to
+generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute
+non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam
+against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror
+of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse
+projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely proved these
+details. However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the
+essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light.
+Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like
+water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon
+water, incontinently that explodes into steam.
+
+That night nearly forty people lay under the starlight about the pit,
+charred and distorted beyond recognition, and all night long the common
+from Horsell to Maybury was deserted and brightly ablaze.
+
+The news of the massacre probably reached Chobham, Woking, and
+Ottershaw about the same time. In Woking the shops had closed when the
+tragedy happened, and a number of people, shop people and so forth,
+attracted by the stories they had heard, were walking over the Horsell
+Bridge and along the road between the hedges that runs out at last upon
+the common. You may imagine the young people brushed up after the
+labours of the day, and making this novelty, as they would make any
+novelty, the excuse for walking together and enjoying a trivial
+flirtation. You may figure to yourself the hum of voices along the road
+in the gloaming. . . .
+
+As yet, of course, few people in Woking even knew that the cylinder had
+opened, though poor Henderson had sent a messenger on a bicycle to the
+post office with a special wire to an evening paper.
+
+As these folks came out by twos and threes upon the open, they found
+little knots of people talking excitedly and peering at the spinning
+mirror over the sand-pits, and the newcomers were, no doubt, soon
+infected by the excitement of the occasion.
+
+By half past eight, when the Deputation was destroyed, there may have
+been a crowd of three hundred people or more at this place, besides
+those who had left the road to approach the Martians nearer. There were
+three policemen too, one of whom was mounted, doing their best, under
+instructions from Stent, to keep the people back and deter them from
+approaching the cylinder. There was some booing from those more
+thoughtless and excitable souls to whom a crowd is always an occasion
+for noise and horse-play.
+
+Stent and Ogilvy, anticipating some possibilities of a collision, had
+telegraphed from Horsell to the barracks as soon as the Martians
+emerged, for the help of a company of soldiers to protect these strange
+creatures from violence. After that they returned to lead that
+ill-fated advance. The description of their death, as it was seen by
+the crowd, tallies very closely with my own impressions: the three
+puffs of green smoke, the deep humming note, and the flashes of flame.
+
+But that crowd of people had a far narrower escape than mine. Only the
+fact that a hummock of heathery sand intercepted the lower part of the
+Heat-Ray saved them. Had the elevation of the parabolic mirror been a
+few yards higher, none could have lived to tell the tale. They saw the
+flashes and the men falling and an invisible hand, as it were, lit the
+bushes as it hurried towards them through the twilight. Then, with a
+whistling note that rose above the droning of the pit, the beam swung
+close over their heads, lighting the tops of the beech trees that line
+the road, and splitting the bricks, smashing the windows, firing the
+window frames, and bringing down in crumbling ruin a portion of the
+gable of the house nearest the corner.
+
+In the sudden thud, hiss, and glare of the igniting trees, the
+panic-stricken crowd seems to have swayed hesitatingly for some
+moments. Sparks and burning twigs began to fall into the road, and
+single leaves like puffs of flame. Hats and dresses caught fire. Then
+came a crying from the common. There were shrieks and shouts, and
+suddenly a mounted policeman came galloping through the confusion with
+his hands clasped over his head, screaming.
+
+“They’re coming!” a woman shrieked, and incontinently everyone was
+turning and pushing at those behind, in order to clear their way to
+Woking again. They must have bolted as blindly as a flock of sheep.
+Where the road grows narrow and black between the high banks the crowd
+jammed, and a desperate struggle occurred. All that crowd did not
+escape; three persons at least, two women and a little boy, were
+crushed and trampled there, and left to die amid the terror and the
+darkness.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+HOW I REACHED HOME.
+
+
+For my own part, I remember nothing of my flight except the stress of
+blundering against trees and stumbling through the heather. All about
+me gathered the invisible terrors of the Martians; that pitiless sword
+of heat seemed whirling to and fro, flourishing overhead before it
+descended and smote me out of life. I came into the road between the
+crossroads and Horsell, and ran along this to the crossroads.
+
+At last I could go no further; I was exhausted with the violence of my
+emotion and of my flight, and I staggered and fell by the wayside. That
+was near the bridge that crosses the canal by the gasworks. I fell and
+lay still.
+
+I must have remained there some time.
+
+I sat up, strangely perplexed. For a moment, perhaps, I could not
+clearly understand how I came there. My terror had fallen from me like
+a garment. My hat had gone, and my collar had burst away from its
+fastener. A few minutes before, there had only been three real things
+before me—the immensity of the night and space and nature, my own
+feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death. Now it was as
+if something turned over, and the point of view altered abruptly. There
+was no sensible transition from one state of mind to the other. I was
+immediately the self of every day again—a decent, ordinary citizen. The
+silent common, the impulse of my flight, the starting flames, were as
+if they had been in a dream. I asked myself had these latter things
+indeed happened? I could not credit it.
+
+I rose and walked unsteadily up the steep incline of the bridge. My
+mind was blank wonder. My muscles and nerves seemed drained of their
+strength. I dare say I staggered drunkenly. A head rose over the arch,
+and the figure of a workman carrying a basket appeared. Beside him ran
+a little boy. He passed me, wishing me good night. I was minded to
+speak to him, but did not. I answered his greeting with a meaningless
+mumble and went on over the bridge.
+
+Over the Maybury arch a train, a billowing tumult of white, firelit
+smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted windows, went flying
+south—clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone. A dim group of
+people talked in the gate of one of the houses in the pretty little row
+of gables that was called Oriental Terrace. It was all so real and so
+familiar. And that behind me! It was frantic, fantastic! Such things, I
+told myself, could not be.
+
+Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my
+experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of
+detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all
+from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out
+of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was
+very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.
+
+But the trouble was the blank incongruity of this serenity and the
+swift death flying yonder, not two miles away. There was a noise of
+business from the gasworks, and the electric lamps were all alight. I
+stopped at the group of people.
+
+“What news from the common?” said I.
+
+There were two men and a woman at the gate.
+
+“Eh?” said one of the men, turning.
+
+“What news from the common?” I said.
+
+“Ain’t yer just _been_ there?” asked the men.
+
+“People seem fair silly about the common,” said the woman over the
+gate. “What’s it all abart?”
+
+“Haven’t you heard of the men from Mars?” said I; “the creatures from
+Mars?”
+
+“Quite enough,” said the woman over the gate. “Thenks”; and all three
+of them laughed.
+
+I felt foolish and angry. I tried and found I could not tell them what
+I had seen. They laughed again at my broken sentences.
+
+“You’ll hear more yet,” I said, and went on to my home.
+
+I startled my wife at the doorway, so haggard was I. I went into the
+dining room, sat down, drank some wine, and so soon as I could collect
+myself sufficiently I told her the things I had seen. The dinner, which
+was a cold one, had already been served, and remained neglected on the
+table while I told my story.
+
+“There is one thing,” I said, to allay the fears I had aroused; “they
+are the most sluggish things I ever saw crawl. They may keep the pit
+and kill people who come near them, but they cannot get out of it. . .
+. But the horror of them!”
+
+“Don’t, dear!” said my wife, knitting her brows and putting her hand on
+mine.
+
+“Poor Ogilvy!” I said. “To think he may be lying dead there!”
+
+My wife at least did not find my experience incredible. When I saw how
+deadly white her face was, I ceased abruptly.
+
+“They may come here,” she said again and again.
+
+I pressed her to take wine, and tried to reassure her.
+
+“They can scarcely move,” I said.
+
+I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that Ogilvy had told
+me of the impossibility of the Martians establishing themselves on the
+earth. In particular I laid stress on the gravitational difficulty. On
+the surface of the earth the force of gravity is three times what it is
+on the surface of Mars. A Martian, therefore, would weigh three times
+more than on Mars, albeit his muscular strength would be the same. His
+own body would be a cope of lead to him, therefore. That, indeed, was
+the general opinion. Both _The Times_ and the _Daily Telegraph_, for
+instance, insisted on it the next morning, and both overlooked, just as
+I did, two obvious modifying influences.
+
+The atmosphere of the earth, we now know, contains far more oxygen or
+far less argon (whichever way one likes to put it) than does Mars’. The
+invigorating influences of this excess of oxygen upon the Martians
+indisputably did much to counterbalance the increased weight of their
+bodies. And, in the second place, we all overlooked the fact that such
+mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed was quite able to
+dispense with muscular exertion at a pinch.
+
+But I did not consider these points at the time, and so my reasoning
+was dead against the chances of the invaders. With wine and food, the
+confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I
+grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.
+
+“They have done a foolish thing,” said I, fingering my wineglass. “They
+are dangerous because, no doubt, they are mad with terror. Perhaps they
+expected to find no living things—certainly no intelligent living
+things.”
+
+“A shell in the pit,” said I, “if the worst comes to the worst, will
+kill them all.”
+
+The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive
+powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with
+extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife’s sweet anxious face
+peering at me from under the pink lamp shade, the white cloth with its
+silver and glass table furniture—for in those days even philosophical
+writers had many little luxuries—the crimson-purple wine in my glass,
+are photographically distinct. At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts
+with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy’s rashness, and denouncing the
+short-sighted timidity of the Martians.
+
+So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his
+nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in
+want of animal food. “We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.”
+
+I did not know it, but that was the last civilised dinner I was to eat
+for very many strange and terrible days.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+FRIDAY NIGHT.
+
+
+The most extraordinary thing to my mind, of all the strange and
+wonderful things that happened upon that Friday, was the dovetailing of
+the commonplace habits of our social order with the first beginnings of
+the series of events that was to topple that social order headlong. If
+on Friday night you had taken a pair of compasses and drawn a circle
+with a radius of five miles round the Woking sand-pits, I doubt if you
+would have had one human being outside it, unless it were some relation
+of Stent or of the three or four cyclists or London people lying dead
+on the common, whose emotions or habits were at all affected by the
+new-comers. Many people had heard of the cylinder, of course, and
+talked about it in their leisure, but it certainly did not make the
+sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have done.
+
+In London that night poor Henderson’s telegram describing the gradual
+unscrewing of the shot was judged to be a canard, and his evening
+paper, after wiring for authentication from him and receiving no
+reply—the man was killed—decided not to print a special edition.
+
+Even within the five-mile circle the great majority of people were
+inert. I have already described the behaviour of the men and women to
+whom I spoke. All over the district people were dining and supping;
+working men were gardening after the labours of the day, children were
+being put to bed, young people were wandering through the lanes
+love-making, students sat over their books.
+
+Maybe there was a murmur in the village streets, a novel and dominant
+topic in the public-houses, and here and there a messenger, or even an
+eye-witness of the later occurrences, caused a whirl of excitement, a
+shouting, and a running to and fro; but for the most part the daily
+routine of working, eating, drinking, sleeping, went on as it had done
+for countless years—as though no planet Mars existed in the sky. Even
+at Woking station and Horsell and Chobham that was the case.
+
+In Woking junction, until a late hour, trains were stopping and going
+on, others were shunting on the sidings, passengers were alighting and
+waiting, and everything was proceeding in the most ordinary way. A boy
+from the town, trenching on Smith’s monopoly, was selling papers with
+the afternoon’s news. The ringing impact of trucks, the sharp whistle
+of the engines from the junction, mingled with their shouts of “Men
+from Mars!” Excited men came into the station about nine o’clock with
+incredible tidings, and caused no more disturbance than drunkards might
+have done. People rattling Londonwards peered into the darkness outside
+the carriage windows, and saw only a rare, flickering, vanishing spark
+dance up from the direction of Horsell, a red glow and a thin veil of
+smoke driving across the stars, and thought that nothing more serious
+than a heath fire was happening. It was only round the edge of the
+common that any disturbance was perceptible. There were half a dozen
+villas burning on the Woking border. There were lights in all the
+houses on the common side of the three villages, and the people there
+kept awake till dawn.
+
+A curious crowd lingered restlessly, people coming and going but the
+crowd remaining, both on the Chobham and Horsell bridges. One or two
+adventurous souls, it was afterwards found, went into the darkness and
+crawled quite near the Martians; but they never returned, for now and
+again a light-ray, like the beam of a warship’s searchlight swept the
+common, and the Heat-Ray was ready to follow. Save for such, that big
+area of common was silent and desolate, and the charred bodies lay
+about on it all night under the stars, and all the next day. A noise of
+hammering from the pit was heard by many people.
+
+So you have the state of things on Friday night. In the centre,
+sticking into the skin of our old planet Earth like a poisoned dart,
+was this cylinder. But the poison was scarcely working yet. Around it
+was a patch of silent common, smouldering in places, and with a few
+dark, dimly seen objects lying in contorted attitudes here and there.
+Here and there was a burning bush or tree. Beyond was a fringe of
+excitement, and farther than that fringe the inflammation had not crept
+as yet. In the rest of the world the stream of life still flowed as it
+had flowed for immemorial years. The fever of war that would presently
+clog vein and artery, deaden nerve and destroy brain, had still to
+develop.
+
+All night long the Martians were hammering and stirring, sleepless,
+indefatigable, at work upon the machines they were making ready, and
+ever and again a puff of greenish-white smoke whirled up to the starlit
+sky.
+
+About eleven a company of soldiers came through Horsell, and deployed
+along the edge of the common to form a cordon. Later a second company
+marched through Chobham to deploy on the north side of the common.
+Several officers from the Inkerman barracks had been on the common
+earlier in the day, and one, Major Eden, was reported to be missing.
+The colonel of the regiment came to the Chobham bridge and was busy
+questioning the crowd at midnight. The military authorities were
+certainly alive to the seriousness of the business. About eleven, the
+next morning’s papers were able to say, a squadron of hussars, two
+Maxims, and about four hundred men of the Cardigan regiment started
+from Aldershot.
+
+A few seconds after midnight the crowd in the Chertsey road, Woking,
+saw a star fall from heaven into the pine woods to the northwest. It
+had a greenish colour, and caused a silent brightness like summer
+lightning. This was the second cylinder.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+THE FIGHTING BEGINS.
+
+
+Saturday lives in my memory as a day of suspense. It was a day of
+lassitude too, hot and close, with, I am told, a rapidly fluctuating
+barometer. I had slept but little, though my wife had succeeded in
+sleeping, and I rose early. I went into my garden before breakfast and
+stood listening, but towards the common there was nothing stirring but
+a lark.
+
+The milkman came as usual. I heard the rattle of his chariot and I went
+round to the side gate to ask the latest news. He told me that during
+the night the Martians had been surrounded by troops, and that guns
+were expected. Then—a familiar, reassuring note—I heard a train running
+towards Woking.
+
+“They aren’t to be killed,” said the milkman, “if that can possibly be
+avoided.”
+
+I saw my neighbour gardening, chatted with him for a time, and then
+strolled in to breakfast. It was a most unexceptional morning. My
+neighbour was of opinion that the troops would be able to capture or to
+destroy the Martians during the day.
+
+“It’s a pity they make themselves so unapproachable,” he said. “It
+would be curious to know how they live on another planet; we might
+learn a thing or two.”
+
+He came up to the fence and extended a handful of strawberries, for his
+gardening was as generous as it was enthusiastic. At the same time he
+told me of the burning of the pine woods about the Byfleet Golf Links.
+
+“They say,” said he, “that there’s another of those blessed things
+fallen there—number two. But one’s enough, surely. This lot’ll cost the
+insurance people a pretty penny before everything’s settled.” He
+laughed with an air of the greatest good humour as he said this. The
+woods, he said, were still burning, and pointed out a haze of smoke to
+me. “They will be hot under foot for days, on account of the thick soil
+of pine needles and turf,” he said, and then grew serious over “poor
+Ogilvy.”
+
+After breakfast, instead of working, I decided to walk down towards the
+common. Under the railway bridge I found a group of soldiers—sappers, I
+think, men in small round caps, dirty red jackets unbuttoned, and
+showing their blue shirts, dark trousers, and boots coming to the calf.
+They told me no one was allowed over the canal, and, looking along the
+road towards the bridge, I saw one of the Cardigan men standing
+sentinel there. I talked with these soldiers for a time; I told them of
+my sight of the Martians on the previous evening. None of them had seen
+the Martians, and they had but the vaguest ideas of them, so that they
+plied me with questions. They said that they did not know who had
+authorised the movements of the troops; their idea was that a dispute
+had arisen at the Horse Guards. The ordinary sapper is a great deal
+better educated than the common soldier, and they discussed the
+peculiar conditions of the possible fight with some acuteness. I
+described the Heat-Ray to them, and they began to argue among
+themselves.
+
+“Crawl up under cover and rush ’em, say I,” said one.
+
+“Get aht!” said another. “What’s cover against this ’ere ’eat? Sticks
+to cook yer! What we got to do is to go as near as the ground’ll let
+us, and then drive a trench.”
+
+“Blow yer trenches! You always want trenches; you ought to ha’ been
+born a rabbit Snippy.”
+
+“Ain’t they got any necks, then?” said a third, abruptly—a little,
+contemplative, dark man, smoking a pipe.
+
+I repeated my description.
+
+“Octopuses,” said he, “that’s what I calls ’em. Talk about fishers of
+men—fighters of fish it is this time!”
+
+“It ain’t no murder killing beasts like that,” said the first speaker.
+
+“Why not shell the darned things strite off and finish ’em?” said the
+little dark man. “You carn tell what they might do.”
+
+“Where’s your shells?” said the first speaker. “There ain’t no time. Do
+it in a rush, that’s my tip, and do it at once.”
+
+So they discussed it. After a while I left them, and went on to the
+railway station to get as many morning papers as I could.
+
+But I will not weary the reader with a description of that long morning
+and of the longer afternoon. I did not succeed in getting a glimpse of
+the common, for even Horsell and Chobham church towers were in the
+hands of the military authorities. The soldiers I addressed didn’t know
+anything; the officers were mysterious as well as busy. I found people
+in the town quite secure again in the presence of the military, and I
+heard for the first time from Marshall, the tobacconist, that his son
+was among the dead on the common. The soldiers had made the people on
+the outskirts of Horsell lock up and leave their houses.
+
+I got back to lunch about two, very tired for, as I have said, the day
+was extremely hot and dull; and in order to refresh myself I took a
+cold bath in the afternoon. About half past four I went up to the
+railway station to get an evening paper, for the morning papers had
+contained only a very inaccurate description of the killing of Stent,
+Henderson, Ogilvy, and the others. But there was little I didn’t know.
+The Martians did not show an inch of themselves. They seemed busy in
+their pit, and there was a sound of hammering and an almost continuous
+streamer of smoke. Apparently they were busy getting ready for a
+struggle. “Fresh attempts have been made to signal, but without
+success,” was the stereotyped formula of the papers. A sapper told me
+it was done by a man in a ditch with a flag on a long pole. The
+Martians took as much notice of such advances as we should of the
+lowing of a cow.
+
+I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this preparation,
+greatly excited me. My imagination became belligerent, and defeated the
+invaders in a dozen striking ways; something of my schoolboy dreams of
+battle and heroism came back. It hardly seemed a fair fight to me at
+that time. They seemed very helpless in that pit of theirs.
+
+About three o’clock there began the thud of a gun at measured intervals
+from Chertsey or Addlestone. I learned that the smouldering pine wood
+into which the second cylinder had fallen was being shelled, in the
+hope of destroying that object before it opened. It was only about
+five, however, that a field gun reached Chobham for use against the
+first body of Martians.
+
+About six in the evening, as I sat at tea with my wife in the
+summerhouse talking vigorously about the battle that was lowering upon
+us, I heard a muffled detonation from the common, and immediately after
+a gust of firing. Close on the heels of that came a violent rattling
+crash, quite close to us, that shook the ground; and, starting out upon
+the lawn, I saw the tops of the trees about the Oriental College burst
+into smoky red flame, and the tower of the little church beside it
+slide down into ruin. The pinnacle of the mosque had vanished, and the
+roof line of the college itself looked as if a hundred-ton gun had been
+at work upon it. One of our chimneys cracked as if a shot had hit it,
+flew, and a piece of it came clattering down the tiles and made a heap
+of broken red fragments upon the flower bed by my study window.
+
+I and my wife stood amazed. Then I realised that the crest of Maybury
+Hill must be within range of the Martians’ Heat-Ray now that the
+college was cleared out of the way.
+
+At that I gripped my wife’s arm, and without ceremony ran her out into
+the road. Then I fetched out the servant, telling her I would go
+upstairs myself for the box she was clamouring for.
+
+“We can’t possibly stay here,” I said; and as I spoke the firing
+reopened for a moment upon the common.
+
+“But where are we to go?” said my wife in terror.
+
+I thought perplexed. Then I remembered her cousins at Leatherhead.
+
+“Leatherhead!” I shouted above the sudden noise.
+
+She looked away from me downhill. The people were coming out of their
+houses, astonished.
+
+“How are we to get to Leatherhead?” she said.
+
+Down the hill I saw a bevy of hussars ride under the railway bridge;
+three galloped through the open gates of the Oriental College; two
+others dismounted, and began running from house to house. The sun,
+shining through the smoke that drove up from the tops of the trees,
+seemed blood red, and threw an unfamiliar lurid light upon everything.
+
+“Stop here,” said I; “you are safe here”; and I started off at once for
+the Spotted Dog, for I knew the landlord had a horse and dog cart. I
+ran, for I perceived that in a moment everyone upon this side of the
+hill would be moving. I found him in his bar, quite unaware of what was
+going on behind his house. A man stood with his back to me, talking to
+him.
+
+“I must have a pound,” said the landlord, “and I’ve no one to drive
+it.”
+
+“I’ll give you two,” said I, over the stranger’s shoulder.
+
+“What for?”
+
+“And I’ll bring it back by midnight,” I said.
+
+“Lord!” said the landlord; “what’s the hurry? I’m selling my bit of a
+pig. Two pounds, and you bring it back? What’s going on now?”
+
+I explained hastily that I had to leave my home, and so secured the dog
+cart. At the time it did not seem to me nearly so urgent that the
+landlord should leave his. I took care to have the cart there and then,
+drove it off down the road, and, leaving it in charge of my wife and
+servant, rushed into my house and packed a few valuables, such plate as
+we had, and so forth. The beech trees below the house were burning
+while I did this, and the palings up the road glowed red. While I was
+occupied in this way, one of the dismounted hussars came running up. He
+was going from house to house, warning people to leave. He was going on
+as I came out of my front door, lugging my treasures, done up in a
+tablecloth. I shouted after him:
+
+“What news?”
+
+He turned, stared, bawled something about “crawling out in a thing like
+a dish cover,” and ran on to the gate of the house at the crest. A
+sudden whirl of black smoke driving across the road hid him for a
+moment. I ran to my neighbour’s door and rapped to satisfy myself of
+what I already knew, that his wife had gone to London with him and had
+locked up their house. I went in again, according to my promise, to get
+my servant’s box, lugged it out, clapped it beside her on the tail of
+the dog cart, and then caught the reins and jumped up into the driver’s
+seat beside my wife. In another moment we were clear of the smoke and
+noise, and spanking down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill towards Old
+Woking.
+
+In front was a quiet sunny landscape, a wheat field ahead on either
+side of the road, and the Maybury Inn with its swinging sign. I saw the
+doctor’s cart ahead of me. At the bottom of the hill I turned my head
+to look at the hillside I was leaving. Thick streamers of black smoke
+shot with threads of red fire were driving up into the still air, and
+throwing dark shadows upon the green treetops eastward. The smoke
+already extended far away to the east and west—to the Byfleet pine
+woods eastward, and to Woking on the west. The road was dotted with
+people running towards us. And very faint now, but very distinct
+through the hot, quiet air, one heard the whirr of a machine-gun that
+was presently stilled, and an intermittent cracking of rifles.
+Apparently the Martians were setting fire to everything within range of
+their Heat-Ray.
+
+I am not an expert driver, and I had immediately to turn my attention
+to the horse. When I looked back again the second hill had hidden the
+black smoke. I slashed the horse with the whip, and gave him a loose
+rein until Woking and Send lay between us and that quivering tumult. I
+overtook and passed the doctor between Woking and Send.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+IN THE STORM.
+
+
+Leatherhead is about twelve miles from Maybury Hill. The scent of hay
+was in the air through the lush meadows beyond Pyrford, and the hedges
+on either side were sweet and gay with multitudes of dog-roses. The
+heavy firing that had broken out while we were driving down Maybury
+Hill ceased as abruptly as it began, leaving the evening very peaceful
+and still. We got to Leatherhead without misadventure about nine
+o’clock, and the horse had an hour’s rest while I took supper with my
+cousins and commended my wife to their care.
+
+My wife was curiously silent throughout the drive, and seemed oppressed
+with forebodings of evil. I talked to her reassuringly, pointing out
+that the Martians were tied to the pit by sheer heaviness, and at the
+utmost could but crawl a little out of it; but she answered only in
+monosyllables. Had it not been for my promise to the innkeeper, she
+would, I think, have urged me to stay in Leatherhead that night. Would
+that I had! Her face, I remember, was very white as we parted.
+
+For my own part, I had been feverishly excited all day. Something very
+like the war fever that occasionally runs through a civilised community
+had got into my blood, and in my heart I was not so very sorry that I
+had to return to Maybury that night. I was even afraid that that last
+fusillade I had heard might mean the extermination of our invaders from
+Mars. I can best express my state of mind by saying that I wanted to be
+in at the death.
+
+It was nearly eleven when I started to return. The night was
+unexpectedly dark; to me, walking out of the lighted passage of my
+cousins’ house, it seemed indeed black, and it was as hot and close as
+the day. Overhead the clouds were driving fast, albeit not a breath
+stirred the shrubs about us. My cousins’ man lit both lamps. Happily, I
+knew the road intimately. My wife stood in the light of the doorway,
+and watched me until I jumped up into the dog cart. Then abruptly she
+turned and went in, leaving my cousins side by side wishing me good
+hap.
+
+I was a little depressed at first with the contagion of my wife’s
+fears, but very soon my thoughts reverted to the Martians. At that time
+I was absolutely in the dark as to the course of the evening’s
+fighting. I did not know even the circumstances that had precipitated
+the conflict. As I came through Ockham (for that was the way I
+returned, and not through Send and Old Woking) I saw along the western
+horizon a blood-red glow, which as I drew nearer, crept slowly up the
+sky. The driving clouds of the gathering thunderstorm mingled there
+with masses of black and red smoke.
+
+Ripley Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window or so the
+village showed not a sign of life; but I narrowly escaped an accident
+at the corner of the road to Pyrford, where a knot of people stood with
+their backs to me. They said nothing to me as I passed. I do not know
+what they knew of the things happening beyond the hill, nor do I know
+if the silent houses I passed on my way were sleeping securely, or
+deserted and empty, or harassed and watching against the terror of the
+night.
+
+From Ripley until I came through Pyrford I was in the valley of the
+Wey, and the red glare was hidden from me. As I ascended the little
+hill beyond Pyrford Church the glare came into view again, and the
+trees about me shivered with the first intimation of the storm that was
+upon me. Then I heard midnight pealing out from Pyrford Church behind
+me, and then came the silhouette of Maybury Hill, with its tree-tops
+and roofs black and sharp against the red.
+
+Even as I beheld this a lurid green glare lit the road about me and
+showed the distant woods towards Addlestone. I felt a tug at the reins.
+I saw that the driving clouds had been pierced as it were by a thread
+of green fire, suddenly lighting their confusion and falling into the
+field to my left. It was the third falling star!
+
+Close on its apparition, and blindingly violet by contrast, danced out
+the first lightning of the gathering storm, and the thunder burst like
+a rocket overhead. The horse took the bit between his teeth and bolted.
+
+A moderate incline runs towards the foot of Maybury Hill, and down this
+we clattered. Once the lightning had begun, it went on in as rapid a
+succession of flashes as I have ever seen. The thunderclaps, treading
+one on the heels of another and with a strange crackling accompaniment,
+sounded more like the working of a gigantic electric machine than the
+usual detonating reverberations. The flickering light was blinding and
+confusing, and a thin hail smote gustily at my face as I drove down the
+slope.
+
+At first I regarded little but the road before me, and then abruptly my
+attention was arrested by something that was moving rapidly down the
+opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At first I took it for the wet roof of
+a house, but one flash following another showed it to be in swift
+rolling movement. It was an elusive vision—a moment of bewildering
+darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the
+Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of the pine trees,
+and this problematical object came out clear and sharp and bright.
+
+And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher
+than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them
+aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now
+across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the
+clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder.
+A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in
+the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the
+next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool
+tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression
+those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a
+great body of machinery on a tripod stand.
+
+Then suddenly the trees in the pine wood ahead of me were parted, as
+brittle reeds are parted by a man thrusting through them; they were
+snapped off and driven headlong, and a second huge tripod appeared,
+rushing, as it seemed, headlong towards me. And I was galloping hard to
+meet it! At the sight of the second monster my nerve went altogether.
+Not stopping to look again, I wrenched the horse’s head hard round to
+the right and in another moment the dog cart had heeled over upon the
+horse; the shafts smashed noisily, and I was flung sideways and fell
+heavily into a shallow pool of water.
+
+I crawled out almost immediately, and crouched, my feet still in the
+water, under a clump of furze. The horse lay motionless (his neck was
+broken, poor brute!) and by the lightning flashes I saw the black bulk
+of the overturned dog cart and the silhouette of the wheel still
+spinning slowly. In another moment the colossal mechanism went striding
+by me, and passed uphill towards Pyrford.
+
+Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere
+insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing
+metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which
+gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange
+body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood
+that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a
+head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal
+like a gigantic fisherman’s basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted
+out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an
+instant it was gone.
+
+So much I saw then, all vaguely for the flickering of the lightning, in
+blinding highlights and dense black shadows.
+
+As it passed it set up an exultant deafening howl that drowned the
+thunder—“Aloo! Aloo!”—and in another minute it was with its companion,
+half a mile away, stooping over something in the field. I have no doubt
+this Thing in the field was the third of the ten cylinders they had
+fired at us from Mars.
+
+For some minutes I lay there in the rain and darkness watching, by the
+intermittent light, these monstrous beings of metal moving about in the
+distance over the hedge tops. A thin hail was now beginning, and as it
+came and went their figures grew misty and then flashed into clearness
+again. Now and then came a gap in the lightning, and the night
+swallowed them up.
+
+I was soaked with hail above and puddle water below. It was some time
+before my blank astonishment would let me struggle up the bank to a
+drier position, or think at all of my imminent peril.
+
+Not far from me was a little one-roomed squatter’s hut of wood,
+surrounded by a patch of potato garden. I struggled to my feet at last,
+and, crouching and making use of every chance of cover, I made a run
+for this. I hammered at the door, but I could not make the people hear
+(if there were any people inside), and after a time I desisted, and,
+availing myself of a ditch for the greater part of the way, succeeded
+in crawling, unobserved by these monstrous machines, into the pine
+woods towards Maybury.
+
+Under cover of this I pushed on, wet and shivering now, towards my own
+house. I walked among the trees trying to find the footpath. It was
+very dark indeed in the wood, for the lightning was now becoming
+infrequent, and the hail, which was pouring down in a torrent, fell in
+columns through the gaps in the heavy foliage.
+
+If I had fully realised the meaning of all the things I had seen I
+should have immediately worked my way round through Byfleet to Street
+Cobham, and so gone back to rejoin my wife at Leatherhead. But that
+night the strangeness of things about me, and my physical wretchedness,
+prevented me, for I was bruised, weary, wet to the skin, deafened and
+blinded by the storm.
+
+I had a vague idea of going on to my own house, and that was as much
+motive as I had. I staggered through the trees, fell into a ditch and
+bruised my knees against a plank, and finally splashed out into the
+lane that ran down from the College Arms. I say splashed, for the storm
+water was sweeping the sand down the hill in a muddy torrent. There in
+the darkness a man blundered into me and sent me reeling back.
+
+He gave a cry of terror, sprang sideways, and rushed on before I could
+gather my wits sufficiently to speak to him. So heavy was the stress of
+the storm just at this place that I had the hardest task to win my way
+up the hill. I went close up to the fence on the left and worked my way
+along its palings.
+
+Near the top I stumbled upon something soft, and, by a flash of
+lightning, saw between my feet a heap of black broadcloth and a pair of
+boots. Before I could distinguish clearly how the man lay, the flicker
+of light had passed. I stood over him waiting for the next flash. When
+it came, I saw that he was a sturdy man, cheaply but not shabbily
+dressed; his head was bent under his body, and he lay crumpled up close
+to the fence, as though he had been flung violently against it.
+
+Overcoming the repugnance natural to one who had never before touched a
+dead body, I stooped and turned him over to feel for his heart. He was
+quite dead. Apparently his neck had been broken. The lightning flashed
+for a third time, and his face leaped upon me. I sprang to my feet. It
+was the landlord of the Spotted Dog, whose conveyance I had taken.
+
+I stepped over him gingerly and pushed on up the hill. I made my way by
+the police station and the College Arms towards my own house. Nothing
+was burning on the hillside, though from the common there still came a
+red glare and a rolling tumult of ruddy smoke beating up against the
+drenching hail. So far as I could see by the flashes, the houses about
+me were mostly uninjured. By the College Arms a dark heap lay in the
+road.
+
+Down the road towards Maybury Bridge there were voices and the sound of
+feet, but I had not the courage to shout or to go to them. I let myself
+in with my latchkey, closed, locked and bolted the door, staggered to
+the foot of the staircase, and sat down. My imagination was full of
+those striding metallic monsters, and of the dead body smashed against
+the fence.
+
+I crouched at the foot of the staircase with my back to the wall,
+shivering violently.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+AT THE WINDOW.
+
+
+I have already said that my storms of emotion have a trick of
+exhausting themselves. After a time I discovered that I was cold and
+wet, and with little pools of water about me on the stair carpet. I got
+up almost mechanically, went into the dining room and drank some
+whisky, and then I was moved to change my clothes.
+
+After I had done that I went upstairs to my study, but why I did so I
+do not know. The window of my study looks over the trees and the
+railway towards Horsell Common. In the hurry of our departure this
+window had been left open. The passage was dark, and, by contrast with
+the picture the window frame enclosed, the side of the room seemed
+impenetrably dark. I stopped short in the doorway.
+
+The thunderstorm had passed. The towers of the Oriental College and the
+pine trees about it had gone, and very far away, lit by a vivid red
+glare, the common about the sand-pits was visible. Across the light
+huge black shapes, grotesque and strange, moved busily to and fro.
+
+It seemed indeed as if the whole country in that direction was on
+fire—a broad hillside set with minute tongues of flame, swaying and
+writhing with the gusts of the dying storm, and throwing a red
+reflection upon the cloud scud above. Every now and then a haze of
+smoke from some nearer conflagration drove across the window and hid
+the Martian shapes. I could not see what they were doing, nor the clear
+form of them, nor recognise the black objects they were busied upon.
+Neither could I see the nearer fire, though the reflections of it
+danced on the wall and ceiling of the study. A sharp, resinous tang of
+burning was in the air.
+
+I closed the door noiselessly and crept towards the window. As I did
+so, the view opened out until, on the one hand, it reached to the
+houses about Woking station, and on the other to the charred and
+blackened pine woods of Byfleet. There was a light down below the hill,
+on the railway, near the arch, and several of the houses along the
+Maybury road and the streets near the station were glowing ruins. The
+light upon the railway puzzled me at first; there were a black heap and
+a vivid glare, and to the right of that a row of yellow oblongs. Then I
+perceived this was a wrecked train, the fore part smashed and on fire,
+the hinder carriages still upon the rails.
+
+Between these three main centres of light—the houses, the train, and
+the burning county towards Chobham—stretched irregular patches of dark
+country, broken here and there by intervals of dimly glowing and
+smoking ground. It was the strangest spectacle, that black expanse set
+with fire. It reminded me, more than anything else, of the Potteries at
+night. At first I could distinguish no people at all, though I peered
+intently for them. Later I saw against the light of Woking station a
+number of black figures hurrying one after the other across the line.
+
+And this was the little world in which I had been living securely for
+years, this fiery chaos! What had happened in the last seven hours I
+still did not know; nor did I know, though I was beginning to guess,
+the relation between these mechanical colossi and the sluggish lumps I
+had seen disgorged from the cylinder. With a queer feeling of
+impersonal interest I turned my desk chair to the window, sat down, and
+stared at the blackened country, and particularly at the three gigantic
+black things that were going to and fro in the glare about the
+sand-pits.
+
+They seemed amazingly busy. I began to ask myself what they could be.
+Were they intelligent mechanisms? Such a thing I felt was impossible.
+Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a
+man’s brain sits and rules in his body? I began to compare the things
+to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an
+ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.
+
+The storm had left the sky clear, and over the smoke of the burning
+land the little fading pinpoint of Mars was dropping into the west,
+when a soldier came into my garden. I heard a slight scraping at the
+fence, and rousing myself from the lethargy that had fallen upon me, I
+looked down and saw him dimly, clambering over the palings. At the
+sight of another human being my torpor passed, and I leaned out of the
+window eagerly.
+
+“Hist!” said I, in a whisper.
+
+He stopped astride of the fence in doubt. Then he came over and across
+the lawn to the corner of the house. He bent down and stepped softly.
+
+“Who’s there?” he said, also whispering, standing under the window and
+peering up.
+
+“Where are you going?” I asked.
+
+“God knows.”
+
+“Are you trying to hide?”
+
+“That’s it.”
+
+“Come into the house,” I said.
+
+I went down, unfastened the door, and let him in, and locked the door
+again. I could not see his face. He was hatless, and his coat was
+unbuttoned.
+
+“My God!” he said, as I drew him in.
+
+“What has happened?” I asked.
+
+“What hasn’t?” In the obscurity I could see he made a gesture of
+despair. “They wiped us out—simply wiped us out,” he repeated again and
+again.
+
+He followed me, almost mechanically, into the dining room.
+
+“Take some whisky,” I said, pouring out a stiff dose.
+
+He drank it. Then abruptly he sat down before the table, put his head
+on his arms, and began to sob and weep like a little boy, in a perfect
+passion of emotion, while I, with a curious forgetfulness of my own
+recent despair, stood beside him, wondering.
+
+It was a long time before he could steady his nerves to answer my
+questions, and then he answered perplexingly and brokenly. He was a
+driver in the artillery, and had only come into action about seven. At
+that time firing was going on across the common, and it was said the
+first party of Martians were crawling slowly towards their second
+cylinder under cover of a metal shield.
+
+Later this shield staggered up on tripod legs and became the first of
+the fighting-machines I had seen. The gun he drove had been unlimbered
+near Horsell, in order to command the sand-pits, and its arrival it was
+that had precipitated the action. As the limber gunners went to the
+rear, his horse trod in a rabbit hole and came down, throwing him into
+a depression of the ground. At the same moment the gun exploded behind
+him, the ammunition blew up, there was fire all about him, and he found
+himself lying under a heap of charred dead men and dead horses.
+
+“I lay still,” he said, “scared out of my wits, with the fore quarter
+of a horse atop of me. We’d been wiped out. And the smell—good God!
+Like burnt meat! I was hurt across the back by the fall of the horse,
+and there I had to lie until I felt better. Just like parade it had
+been a minute before—then stumble, bang, swish!”
+
+“Wiped out!” he said.
+
+He had hid under the dead horse for a long time, peeping out furtively
+across the common. The Cardigan men had tried a rush, in skirmishing
+order, at the pit, simply to be swept out of existence. Then the
+monster had risen to its feet and had begun to walk leisurely to and
+fro across the common among the few fugitives, with its headlike hood
+turning about exactly like the head of a cowled human being. A kind of
+arm carried a complicated metallic case, about which green flashes
+scintillated, and out of the funnel of this there smoked the Heat-Ray.
+
+In a few minutes there was, so far as the soldier could see, not a
+living thing left upon the common, and every bush and tree upon it that
+was not already a blackened skeleton was burning. The hussars had been
+on the road beyond the curvature of the ground, and he saw nothing of
+them. He heard the Maxims rattle for a time and then become still. The
+giant saved Woking station and its cluster of houses until the last;
+then in a moment the Heat-Ray was brought to bear, and the town became
+a heap of fiery ruins. Then the Thing shut off the Heat-Ray, and
+turning its back upon the artilleryman, began to waddle away towards
+the smouldering pine woods that sheltered the second cylinder. As it
+did so a second glittering Titan built itself up out of the pit.
+
+The second monster followed the first, and at that the artilleryman
+began to crawl very cautiously across the hot heather ash towards
+Horsell. He managed to get alive into the ditch by the side of the
+road, and so escaped to Woking. There his story became ejaculatory. The
+place was impassable. It seems there were a few people alive there,
+frantic for the most part and many burned and scalded. He was turned
+aside by the fire, and hid among some almost scorching heaps of broken
+wall as one of the Martian giants returned. He saw this one pursue a
+man, catch him up in one of its steely tentacles, and knock his head
+against the trunk of a pine tree. At last, after nightfall, the
+artilleryman made a rush for it and got over the railway embankment.
+
+Since then he had been skulking along towards Maybury, in the hope of
+getting out of danger Londonward. People were hiding in trenches and
+cellars, and many of the survivors had made off towards Woking village
+and Send. He had been consumed with thirst until he found one of the
+water mains near the railway arch smashed, and the water bubbling out
+like a spring upon the road.
+
+That was the story I got from him, bit by bit. He grew calmer telling
+me and trying to make me see the things he had seen. He had eaten no
+food since midday, he told me early in his narrative, and I found some
+mutton and bread in the pantry and brought it into the room. We lit no
+lamp for fear of attracting the Martians, and ever and again our hands
+would touch upon bread or meat. As he talked, things about us came
+darkly out of the darkness, and the trampled bushes and broken rose
+trees outside the window grew distinct. It would seem that a number of
+men or animals had rushed across the lawn. I began to see his face,
+blackened and haggard, as no doubt mine was also.
+
+When we had finished eating we went softly upstairs to my study, and I
+looked again out of the open window. In one night the valley had become
+a valley of ashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where flames had been
+there were now streamers of smoke; but the countless ruins of shattered
+and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees that the night had
+hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn.
+Yet here and there some object had had the luck to escape—a white
+railway signal here, the end of a greenhouse there, white and fresh
+amid the wreckage. Never before in the history of warfare had
+destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal. And shining with
+the growing light of the east, three of the metallic giants stood about
+the pit, their cowls rotating as though they were surveying the
+desolation they had made.
+
+It seemed to me that the pit had been enlarged, and ever and again
+puffs of vivid green vapour streamed up and out of it towards the
+brightening dawn—streamed up, whirled, broke, and vanished.
+
+Beyond were the pillars of fire about Chobham. They became pillars of
+bloodshot smoke at the first touch of day.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON.
+
+
+As the dawn grew brighter we withdrew from the window from which we had
+watched the Martians, and went very quietly downstairs.
+
+The artilleryman agreed with me that the house was no place to stay in.
+He proposed, he said, to make his way Londonward, and thence rejoin his
+battery—No. 12, of the Horse Artillery. My plan was to return at once
+to Leatherhead; and so greatly had the strength of the Martians
+impressed me that I had determined to take my wife to Newhaven, and go
+with her out of the country forthwith. For I already perceived clearly
+that the country about London must inevitably be the scene of a
+disastrous struggle before such creatures as these could be destroyed.
+
+Between us and Leatherhead, however, lay the third cylinder, with its
+guarding giants. Had I been alone, I think I should have taken my
+chance and struck across country. But the artilleryman dissuaded me:
+“It’s no kindness to the right sort of wife,” he said, “to make her a
+widow”; and in the end I agreed to go with him, under cover of the
+woods, northward as far as Street Cobham before I parted with him.
+Thence I would make a big detour by Epsom to reach Leatherhead.
+
+I should have started at once, but my companion had been in active
+service and he knew better than that. He made me ransack the house for
+a flask, which he filled with whisky; and we lined every available
+pocket with packets of biscuits and slices of meat. Then we crept out
+of the house, and ran as quickly as we could down the ill-made road by
+which I had come overnight. The houses seemed deserted. In the road lay
+a group of three charred bodies close together, struck dead by the
+Heat-Ray; and here and there were things that people had dropped—a
+clock, a slipper, a silver spoon, and the like poor valuables. At the
+corner turning up towards the post office a little cart, filled with
+boxes and furniture, and horseless, heeled over on a broken wheel. A
+cash box had been hastily smashed open and thrown under the debris.
+
+Except the lodge at the Orphanage, which was still on fire, none of the
+houses had suffered very greatly here. The Heat-Ray had shaved the
+chimney tops and passed. Yet, save ourselves, there did not seem to be
+a living soul on Maybury Hill. The majority of the inhabitants had
+escaped, I suppose, by way of the Old Woking road—the road I had taken
+when I drove to Leatherhead—or they had hidden.
+
+We went down the lane, by the body of the man in black, sodden now from
+the overnight hail, and broke into the woods at the foot of the hill.
+We pushed through these towards the railway without meeting a soul. The
+woods across the line were but the scarred and blackened ruins of
+woods; for the most part the trees had fallen, but a certain proportion
+still stood, dismal grey stems, with dark brown foliage instead of
+green.
+
+On our side the fire had done no more than scorch the nearer trees; it
+had failed to secure its footing. In one place the woodmen had been at
+work on Saturday; trees, felled and freshly trimmed, lay in a clearing,
+with heaps of sawdust by the sawing-machine and its engine. Hard by was
+a temporary hut, deserted. There was not a breath of wind this morning,
+and everything was strangely still. Even the birds were hushed, and as
+we hurried along I and the artilleryman talked in whispers and looked
+now and again over our shoulders. Once or twice we stopped to listen.
+
+After a time we drew near the road, and as we did so we heard the
+clatter of hoofs and saw through the tree stems three cavalry soldiers
+riding slowly towards Woking. We hailed them, and they halted while we
+hurried towards them. It was a lieutenant and a couple of privates of
+the 8th Hussars, with a stand like a theodolite, which the artilleryman
+told me was a heliograph.
+
+“You are the first men I’ve seen coming this way this morning,” said
+the lieutenant. “What’s brewing?”
+
+His voice and face were eager. The men behind him stared curiously. The
+artilleryman jumped down the bank into the road and saluted.
+
+“Gun destroyed last night, sir. Have been hiding. Trying to rejoin
+battery, sir. You’ll come in sight of the Martians, I expect, about
+half a mile along this road.”
+
+“What the dickens are they like?” asked the lieutenant.
+
+“Giants in armour, sir. Hundred feet high. Three legs and a body like
+’luminium, with a mighty great head in a hood, sir.”
+
+“Get out!” said the lieutenant. “What confounded nonsense!”
+
+“You’ll see, sir. They carry a kind of box, sir, that shoots fire and
+strikes you dead.”
+
+“What d’ye mean—a gun?”
+
+“No, sir,” and the artilleryman began a vivid account of the Heat-Ray.
+Halfway through, the lieutenant interrupted him and looked up at me. I
+was still standing on the bank by the side of the road.
+
+“It’s perfectly true,” I said.
+
+“Well,” said the lieutenant, “I suppose it’s my business to see it too.
+Look here”—to the artilleryman—“we’re detailed here clearing people out
+of their houses. You’d better go along and report yourself to
+Brigadier-General Marvin, and tell him all you know. He’s at Weybridge.
+Know the way?”
+
+“I do,” I said; and he turned his horse southward again.
+
+“Half a mile, you say?” said he.
+
+“At most,” I answered, and pointed over the treetops southward. He
+thanked me and rode on, and we saw them no more.
+
+Farther along we came upon a group of three women and two children in
+the road, busy clearing out a labourer’s cottage. They had got hold of
+a little hand truck, and were piling it up with unclean-looking bundles
+and shabby furniture. They were all too assiduously engaged to talk to
+us as we passed.
+
+By Byfleet station we emerged from the pine trees, and found the
+country calm and peaceful under the morning sunlight. We were far
+beyond the range of the Heat-Ray there, and had it not been for the
+silent desertion of some of the houses, the stirring movement of
+packing in others, and the knot of soldiers standing on the bridge over
+the railway and staring down the line towards Woking, the day would
+have seemed very like any other Sunday.
+
+Several farm waggons and carts were moving creakily along the road to
+Addlestone, and suddenly through the gate of a field we saw, across a
+stretch of flat meadow, six twelve-pounders standing neatly at equal
+distances pointing towards Woking. The gunners stood by the guns
+waiting, and the ammunition waggons were at a business-like distance.
+The men stood almost as if under inspection.
+
+“That’s good!” said I. “They will get one fair shot, at any rate.”
+
+The artilleryman hesitated at the gate.
+
+“I shall go on,” he said.
+
+Farther on towards Weybridge, just over the bridge, there were a number
+of men in white fatigue jackets throwing up a long rampart, and more
+guns behind.
+
+“It’s bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow,” said the
+artilleryman. “They ’aven’t seen that fire-beam yet.”
+
+The officers who were not actively engaged stood and stared over the
+treetops southwestward, and the men digging would stop every now and
+again to stare in the same direction.
+
+Byfleet was in a tumult; people packing, and a score of hussars, some
+of them dismounted, some on horseback, were hunting them about. Three
+or four black government waggons, with crosses in white circles, and an
+old omnibus, among other vehicles, were being loaded in the village
+street. There were scores of people, most of them sufficiently
+sabbatical to have assumed their best clothes. The soldiers were having
+the greatest difficulty in making them realise the gravity of their
+position. We saw one shrivelled old fellow with a huge box and a score
+or more of flower pots containing orchids, angrily expostulating with
+the corporal who would leave them behind. I stopped and gripped his
+arm.
+
+“Do you know what’s over there?” I said, pointing at the pine tops that
+hid the Martians.
+
+“Eh?” said he, turning. “I was explainin’ these is vallyble.”
+
+“Death!” I shouted. “Death is coming! Death!” and leaving him to digest
+that if he could, I hurried on after the artillery-man. At the corner I
+looked back. The soldier had left him, and he was still standing by his
+box, with the pots of orchids on the lid of it, and staring vaguely
+over the trees.
+
+No one in Weybridge could tell us where the headquarters were
+established; the whole place was in such confusion as I had never seen
+in any town before. Carts, carriages everywhere, the most astonishing
+miscellany of conveyances and horseflesh. The respectable inhabitants
+of the place, men in golf and boating costumes, wives prettily dressed,
+were packing, river-side loafers energetically helping, children
+excited, and, for the most part, highly delighted at this astonishing
+variation of their Sunday experiences. In the midst of it all the
+worthy vicar was very pluckily holding an early celebration, and his
+bell was jangling out above the excitement.
+
+I and the artilleryman, seated on the step of the drinking fountain,
+made a very passable meal upon what we had brought with us. Patrols of
+soldiers—here no longer hussars, but grenadiers in white—were warning
+people to move now or to take refuge in their cellars as soon as the
+firing began. We saw as we crossed the railway bridge that a growing
+crowd of people had assembled in and about the railway station, and the
+swarming platform was piled with boxes and packages. The ordinary
+traffic had been stopped, I believe, in order to allow of the passage
+of troops and guns to Chertsey, and I have heard since that a savage
+struggle occurred for places in the special trains that were put on at
+a later hour.
+
+We remained at Weybridge until midday, and at that hour we found
+ourselves at the place near Shepperton Lock where the Wey and Thames
+join. Part of the time we spent helping two old women to pack a little
+cart. The Wey has a treble mouth, and at this point boats are to be
+hired, and there was a ferry across the river. On the Shepperton side
+was an inn with a lawn, and beyond that the tower of Shepperton
+Church—it has been replaced by a spire—rose above the trees.
+
+Here we found an excited and noisy crowd of fugitives. As yet the
+flight had not grown to a panic, but there were already far more people
+than all the boats going to and fro could enable to cross. People came
+panting along under heavy burdens; one husband and wife were even
+carrying a small outhouse door between them, with some of their
+household goods piled thereon. One man told us he meant to try to get
+away from Shepperton station.
+
+There was a lot of shouting, and one man was even jesting. The idea
+people seemed to have here was that the Martians were simply formidable
+human beings, who might attack and sack the town, to be certainly
+destroyed in the end. Every now and then people would glance nervously
+across the Wey, at the meadows towards Chertsey, but everything over
+there was still.
+
+Across the Thames, except just where the boats landed, everything was
+quiet, in vivid contrast with the Surrey side. The people who landed
+there from the boats went tramping off down the lane. The big ferryboat
+had just made a journey. Three or four soldiers stood on the lawn of
+the inn, staring and jesting at the fugitives, without offering to
+help. The inn was closed, as it was now within prohibited hours.
+
+“What’s that?” cried a boatman, and “Shut up, you fool!” said a man
+near me to a yelping dog. Then the sound came again, this time from the
+direction of Chertsey, a muffled thud—the sound of a gun.
+
+The fighting was beginning. Almost immediately unseen batteries across
+the river to our right, unseen because of the trees, took up the
+chorus, firing heavily one after the other. A woman screamed. Everyone
+stood arrested by the sudden stir of battle, near us and yet invisible
+to us. Nothing was to be seen save flat meadows, cows feeding
+unconcernedly for the most part, and silvery pollard willows motionless
+in the warm sunlight.
+
+“The sojers’ll stop ’em,” said a woman beside me, doubtfully. A
+haziness rose over the treetops.
+
+Then suddenly we saw a rush of smoke far away up the river, a puff of
+smoke that jerked up into the air and hung; and forthwith the ground
+heaved under foot and a heavy explosion shook the air, smashing two or
+three windows in the houses near, and leaving us astonished.
+
+“Here they are!” shouted a man in a blue jersey. “Yonder! D’yer see
+them? Yonder!”
+
+Quickly, one after the other, one, two, three, four of the armoured
+Martians appeared, far away over the little trees, across the flat
+meadows that stretched towards Chertsey, and striding hurriedly towards
+the river. Little cowled figures they seemed at first, going with a
+rolling motion and as fast as flying birds.
+
+Then, advancing obliquely towards us, came a fifth. Their armoured
+bodies glittered in the sun as they swept swiftly forward upon the
+guns, growing rapidly larger as they drew nearer. One on the extreme
+left, the remotest that is, flourished a huge case high in the air, and
+the ghostly, terrible Heat-Ray I had already seen on Friday night smote
+towards Chertsey, and struck the town.
+
+At sight of these strange, swift, and terrible creatures the crowd near
+the water’s edge seemed to me to be for a moment horror-struck. There
+was no screaming or shouting, but a silence. Then a hoarse murmur and a
+movement of feet—a splashing from the water. A man, too frightened to
+drop the portmanteau he carried on his shoulder, swung round and sent
+me staggering with a blow from the corner of his burden. A woman thrust
+at me with her hand and rushed past me. I turned with the rush of the
+people, but I was not too terrified for thought. The terrible Heat-Ray
+was in my mind. To get under water! That was it!
+
+“Get under water!” I shouted, unheeded.
+
+I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching Martian, rushed
+right down the gravelly beach and headlong into the water. Others did
+the same. A boatload of people putting back came leaping out as I
+rushed past. The stones under my feet were muddy and slippery, and the
+river was so low that I ran perhaps twenty feet scarcely waist-deep.
+Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely a couple of hundred
+yards away, I flung myself forward under the surface. The splashes of
+the people in the boats leaping into the river sounded like
+thunderclaps in my ears. People were landing hastily on both sides of
+the river. But the Martian machine took no more notice for the moment
+of the people running this way and that than a man would of the
+confusion of ants in a nest against which his foot has kicked. When,
+half suffocated, I raised my head above water, the Martian’s hood
+pointed at the batteries that were still firing across the river, and
+as it advanced it swung loose what must have been the generator of the
+Heat-Ray.
+
+In another moment it was on the bank, and in a stride wading halfway
+across. The knees of its foremost legs bent at the farther bank, and in
+another moment it had raised itself to its full height again, close to
+the village of Shepperton. Forthwith the six guns which, unknown to
+anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the outskirts of that
+village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near concussion, the last
+close upon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was already
+raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the first shell burst six
+yards above the hood.
+
+I gave a cry of astonishment. I saw and thought nothing of the other
+four Martian monsters; my attention was riveted upon the nearer
+incident. Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the
+body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to
+dodge, the fourth shell.
+
+The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged,
+flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh and
+glittering metal.
+
+“Hit!” shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.
+
+I heard answering shouts from the people in the water about me. I could
+have leaped out of the water with that momentary exultation.
+
+The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did not
+fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer
+heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now
+rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living
+intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to
+the four winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate
+device of metal whirling to destruction. It drove along in a straight
+line, incapable of guidance. It struck the tower of Shepperton Church,
+smashing it down as the impact of a battering ram might have done,
+swerved aside, blundered on and collapsed with tremendous force into
+the river out of my sight.
+
+A violent explosion shook the air, and a spout of water, steam, mud,
+and shattered metal shot far up into the sky. As the camera of the
+Heat-Ray hit the water, the latter had immediately flashed into steam.
+In another moment a huge wave, like a muddy tidal bore but almost
+scaldingly hot, came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw people
+struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and shouting faintly
+above the seething and roar of the Martian’s collapse.
+
+For a moment I heeded nothing of the heat, forgot the patent need of
+self-preservation. I splashed through the tumultuous water, pushing
+aside a man in black to do so, until I could see round the bend. Half a
+dozen deserted boats pitched aimlessly upon the confusion of the waves.
+The fallen Martian came into sight downstream, lying across the river,
+and for the most part submerged.
+
+Thick clouds of steam were pouring off the wreckage, and through the
+tumultuously whirling wisps I could see, intermittently and vaguely,
+the gigantic limbs churning the water and flinging a splash and spray
+of mud and froth into the air. The tentacles swayed and struck like
+living arms, and, save for the helpless purposelessness of these
+movements, it was as if some wounded thing were struggling for its life
+amid the waves. Enormous quantities of a ruddy-brown fluid were
+spurting up in noisy jets out of the machine.
+
+My attention was diverted from this death flurry by a furious yelling,
+like that of the thing called a siren in our manufacturing towns. A
+man, knee-deep near the towing path, shouted inaudibly to me and
+pointed. Looking back, I saw the other Martians advancing with gigantic
+strides down the riverbank from the direction of Chertsey. The
+Shepperton guns spoke this time unavailingly.
+
+At that I ducked at once under water, and, holding my breath until
+movement was an agony, blundered painfully ahead under the surface as
+long as I could. The water was in a tumult about me, and rapidly
+growing hotter.
+
+When for a moment I raised my head to take breath and throw the hair
+and water from my eyes, the steam was rising in a whirling white fog
+that at first hid the Martians altogether. The noise was deafening.
+Then I saw them dimly, colossal figures of grey, magnified by the mist.
+They had passed by me, and two were stooping over the frothing,
+tumultuous ruins of their comrade.
+
+The third and fourth stood beside him in the water, one perhaps two
+hundred yards from me, the other towards Laleham. The generators of the
+Heat-Rays waved high, and the hissing beams smote down this way and
+that.
+
+The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing conflict of
+noises—the clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of falling houses,
+the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into flame, and the crackling
+and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up to mingle with
+the steam from the river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and fro over
+Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent white, that
+gave place at once to a smoky dance of lurid flames. The nearer houses
+still stood intact, awaiting their fate, shadowy, faint and pallid in
+the steam, with the fire behind them going to and fro.
+
+For a moment perhaps I stood there, breast-high in the almost boiling
+water, dumbfounded at my position, hopeless of escape. Through the reek
+I could see the people who had been with me in the river scrambling out
+of the water through the reeds, like little frogs hurrying through
+grass from the advance of a man, or running to and fro in utter dismay
+on the towing path.
+
+Then suddenly the white flashes of the Heat-Ray came leaping towards
+me. The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and darted out
+flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar. The Ray flickered up and
+down the towing path, licking off the people who ran this way and that,
+and came down to the water’s edge not fifty yards from where I stood.
+It swept across the river to Shepperton, and the water in its track
+rose in a boiling weal crested with steam. I turned shoreward.
+
+In another moment the huge wave, well-nigh at the boiling-point had
+rushed upon me. I screamed aloud, and scalded, half blinded, agonised,
+I staggered through the leaping, hissing water towards the shore. Had
+my foot stumbled, it would have been the end. I fell helplessly, in
+full sight of the Martians, upon the broad, bare gravelly spit that
+runs down to mark the angle of the Wey and Thames. I expected nothing
+but death.
+
+I have a dim memory of the foot of a Martian coming down within a score
+of yards of my head, driving straight into the loose gravel, whirling
+it this way and that and lifting again; of a long suspense, and then of
+the four carrying the debris of their comrade between them, now clear
+and then presently faint through a veil of smoke, receding
+interminably, as it seemed to me, across a vast space of river and
+meadow. And then, very slowly, I realised that by a miracle I had
+escaped.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CURATE.
+
+
+After getting this sudden lesson in the power of terrestrial weapons,
+the Martians retreated to their original position upon Horsell Common;
+and in their haste, and encumbered with the debris of their smashed
+companion, they no doubt overlooked many such a stray and negligible
+victim as myself. Had they left their comrade and pushed on forthwith,
+there was nothing at that time between them and London but batteries of
+twelve-pounder guns, and they would certainly have reached the capital
+in advance of the tidings of their approach; as sudden, dreadful, and
+destructive their advent would have been as the earthquake that
+destroyed Lisbon a century ago.
+
+But they were in no hurry. Cylinder followed cylinder on its
+interplanetary flight; every twenty-four hours brought them
+reinforcement. And meanwhile the military and naval authorities, now
+fully alive to the tremendous power of their antagonists, worked with
+furious energy. Every minute a fresh gun came into position until,
+before twilight, every copse, every row of suburban villas on the hilly
+slopes about Kingston and Richmond, masked an expectant black muzzle.
+And through the charred and desolated area—perhaps twenty square miles
+altogether—that encircled the Martian encampment on Horsell Common,
+through charred and ruined villages among the green trees, through the
+blackened and smoking arcades that had been but a day ago pine
+spinneys, crawled the devoted scouts with the heliographs that were
+presently to warn the gunners of the Martian approach. But the Martians
+now understood our command of artillery and the danger of human
+proximity, and not a man ventured within a mile of either cylinder,
+save at the price of his life.
+
+It would seem that these giants spent the earlier part of the afternoon
+in going to and fro, transferring everything from the second and third
+cylinders—the second in Addlestone Golf Links and the third at
+Pyrford—to their original pit on Horsell Common. Over that, above the
+blackened heather and ruined buildings that stretched far and wide,
+stood one as sentinel, while the rest abandoned their vast
+fighting-machines and descended into the pit. They were hard at work
+there far into the night, and the towering pillar of dense green smoke
+that rose therefrom could be seen from the hills about Merrow, and
+even, it is said, from Banstead and Epsom Downs.
+
+And while the Martians behind me were thus preparing for their next
+sally, and in front of me Humanity gathered for the battle, I made my
+way with infinite pains and labour from the fire and smoke of burning
+Weybridge towards London.
+
+I saw an abandoned boat, very small and remote, drifting down-stream;
+and throwing off the most of my sodden clothes, I went after it, gained
+it, and so escaped out of that destruction. There were no oars in the
+boat, but I contrived to paddle, as well as my parboiled hands would
+allow, down the river towards Halliford and Walton, going very
+tediously and continually looking behind me, as you may well
+understand. I followed the river, because I considered that the water
+gave me my best chance of escape should these giants return.
+
+The hot water from the Martian’s overthrow drifted downstream with me,
+so that for the best part of a mile I could see little of either bank.
+Once, however, I made out a string of black figures hurrying across the
+meadows from the direction of Weybridge. Halliford, it seemed, was
+deserted, and several of the houses facing the river were on fire. It
+was strange to see the place quite tranquil, quite desolate under the
+hot blue sky, with the smoke and little threads of flame going straight
+up into the heat of the afternoon. Never before had I seen houses
+burning without the accompaniment of an obstructive crowd. A little
+farther on the dry reeds up the bank were smoking and glowing, and a
+line of fire inland was marching steadily across a late field of hay.
+
+For a long time I drifted, so painful and weary was I after the
+violence I had been through, and so intense the heat upon the water.
+Then my fears got the better of me again, and I resumed my paddling.
+The sun scorched my bare back. At last, as the bridge at Walton was
+coming into sight round the bend, my fever and faintness overcame my
+fears, and I landed on the Middlesex bank and lay down, deadly sick,
+amid the long grass. I suppose the time was then about four or five
+o’clock. I got up presently, walked perhaps half a mile without meeting
+a soul, and then lay down again in the shadow of a hedge. I seem to
+remember talking, wanderingly, to myself during that last spurt. I was
+also very thirsty, and bitterly regretful I had drunk no more water. It
+is a curious thing that I felt angry with my wife; I cannot account for
+it, but my impotent desire to reach Leatherhead worried me excessively.
+
+I do not clearly remember the arrival of the curate, so that probably I
+dozed. I became aware of him as a seated figure in soot-smudged shirt
+sleeves, and with his upturned, clean-shaven face staring at a faint
+flickering that danced over the sky. The sky was what is called a
+mackerel sky—rows and rows of faint down-plumes of cloud, just tinted
+with the midsummer sunset.
+
+I sat up, and at the rustle of my motion he looked at me quickly.
+
+“Have you any water?” I asked abruptly.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“You have been asking for water for the last hour,” he said.
+
+For a moment we were silent, taking stock of each other. I dare say he
+found me a strange enough figure, naked, save for my water-soaked
+trousers and socks, scalded, and my face and shoulders blackened by the
+smoke. His face was a fair weakness, his chin retreated, and his hair
+lay in crisp, almost flaxen curls on his low forehead; his eyes were
+rather large, pale blue, and blankly staring. He spoke abruptly,
+looking vacantly away from me.
+
+“What does it mean?” he said. “What do these things mean?”
+
+I stared at him and made no answer.
+
+He extended a thin white hand and spoke in almost a complaining tone.
+
+“Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning
+service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for
+the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom
+and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work—— What are these
+Martians?”
+
+“What are we?” I answered, clearing my throat.
+
+He gripped his knees and turned to look at me again. For half a minute,
+perhaps, he stared silently.
+
+“I was walking through the roads to clear my brain,” he said. “And
+suddenly—fire, earthquake, death!”
+
+He relapsed into silence, with his chin now sunken almost to his knees.
+
+Presently he began waving his hand.
+
+“All the work—all the Sunday schools—What have we done—what has
+Weybridge done? Everything gone—everything destroyed. The church! We
+rebuilt it only three years ago. Gone! Swept out of existence! Why?”
+
+Another pause, and he broke out again like one demented.
+
+“The smoke of her burning goeth up for ever and ever!” he shouted.
+
+His eyes flamed, and he pointed a lean finger in the direction of
+Weybridge.
+
+By this time I was beginning to take his measure. The tremendous
+tragedy in which he had been involved—it was evident he was a fugitive
+from Weybridge—had driven him to the very verge of his reason.
+
+“Are we far from Sunbury?” I said, in a matter-of-fact tone.
+
+“What are we to do?” he asked. “Are these creatures everywhere? Has the
+earth been given over to them?”
+
+“Are we far from Sunbury?”
+
+“Only this morning I officiated at early celebration——”
+
+“Things have changed,” I said, quietly. “You must keep your head. There
+is still hope.”
+
+“Hope!”
+
+“Yes. Plentiful hope—for all this destruction!”
+
+I began to explain my view of our position. He listened at first, but
+as I went on the interest dawning in his eyes gave place to their
+former stare, and his regard wandered from me.
+
+“This must be the beginning of the end,” he said, interrupting me. “The
+end! The great and terrible day of the Lord! When men shall call upon
+the mountains and the rocks to fall upon them and hide them—hide them
+from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne!”
+
+I began to understand the position. I ceased my laboured reasoning,
+struggled to my feet, and, standing over him, laid my hand on his
+shoulder.
+
+“Be a man!” said I. “You are scared out of your wits! What good is
+religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and
+floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God
+had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.”
+
+For a time he sat in blank silence.
+
+“But how can we escape?” he asked, suddenly. “They are invulnerable,
+they are pitiless.”
+
+“Neither the one nor, perhaps, the other,” I answered. “And the
+mightier they are the more sane and wary should we be. One of them was
+killed yonder not three hours ago.”
+
+“Killed!” he said, staring about him. “How can God’s ministers be
+killed?”
+
+“I saw it happen.” I proceeded to tell him. “We have chanced to come in
+for the thick of it,” said I, “and that is all.”
+
+“What is that flicker in the sky?” he asked abruptly.
+
+I told him it was the heliograph signalling—that it was the sign of
+human help and effort in the sky.
+
+“We are in the midst of it,” I said, “quiet as it is. That flicker in
+the sky tells of the gathering storm. Yonder, I take it are the
+Martians, and Londonward, where those hills rise about Richmond and
+Kingston and the trees give cover, earthworks are being thrown up and
+guns are being placed. Presently the Martians will be coming this way
+again.”
+
+And even as I spoke he sprang to his feet and stopped me by a gesture.
+
+“Listen!” he said.
+
+From beyond the low hills across the water came the dull resonance of
+distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A
+cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the west
+the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and
+Shepperton and the hot, still splendour of the sunset.
+
+“We had better follow this path,” I said, “northward.”
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+IN LONDON.
+
+
+My younger brother was in London when the Martians fell at Woking. He
+was a medical student working for an imminent examination, and he heard
+nothing of the arrival until Saturday morning. The morning papers on
+Saturday contained, in addition to lengthy special articles on the
+planet Mars, on life in the planets, and so forth, a brief and vaguely
+worded telegram, all the more striking for its brevity.
+
+The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd, had killed a number
+of people with a quick-firing gun, so the story ran. The telegram
+concluded with the words: “Formidable as they seem to be, the Martians
+have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen, and, indeed,
+seem incapable of doing so. Probably this is due to the relative
+strength of the earth’s gravitational energy.” On that last text their
+leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.
+
+Of course all the students in the crammer’s biology class, to which my
+brother went that day, were intensely interested, but there were no
+signs of any unusual excitement in the streets. The afternoon papers
+puffed scraps of news under big headlines. They had nothing to tell
+beyond the movements of troops about the common, and the burning of the
+pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, until eight. Then the _St.
+James’s Gazette_, in an extra-special edition, announced the bare fact
+of the interruption of telegraphic communication. This was thought to
+be due to the falling of burning pine trees across the line. Nothing
+more of the fighting was known that night, the night of my drive to
+Leatherhead and back.
+
+My brother felt no anxiety about us, as he knew from the description in
+the papers that the cylinder was a good two miles from my house. He
+made up his mind to run down that night to me, in order, as he says, to
+see the Things before they were killed. He dispatched a telegram, which
+never reached me, about four o’clock, and spent the evening at a music
+hall.
+
+In London, also, on Saturday night there was a thunderstorm, and my
+brother reached Waterloo in a cab. On the platform from which the
+midnight train usually starts he learned, after some waiting, that an
+accident prevented trains from reaching Woking that night. The nature
+of the accident he could not ascertain; indeed, the railway authorities
+did not clearly know at that time. There was very little excitement in
+the station, as the officials, failing to realise that anything further
+than a breakdown between Byfleet and Woking junction had occurred, were
+running the theatre trains which usually passed through Woking round by
+Virginia Water or Guildford. They were busy making the necessary
+arrangements to alter the route of the Southampton and Portsmouth
+Sunday League excursions. A nocturnal newspaper reporter, mistaking my
+brother for the traffic manager, to whom he bears a slight resemblance,
+waylaid and tried to interview him. Few people, excepting the railway
+officials, connected the breakdown with the Martians.
+
+I have read, in another account of these events, that on Sunday morning
+“all London was electrified by the news from Woking.” As a matter of
+fact, there was nothing to justify that very extravagant phrase. Plenty
+of Londoners did not hear of the Martians until the panic of Monday
+morning. Those who did took some time to realise all that the hastily
+worded telegrams in the Sunday papers conveyed. The majority of people
+in London do not read Sunday papers.
+
+The habit of personal security, moreover, is so deeply fixed in the
+Londoner’s mind, and startling intelligence so much a matter of course
+in the papers, that they could read without any personal tremors:
+“About seven o’clock last night the Martians came out of the cylinder,
+and, moving about under an armour of metallic shields, have completely
+wrecked Woking station with the adjacent houses, and massacred an
+entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment. No details are known. Maxims
+have been absolutely useless against their armour; the field guns have
+been disabled by them. Flying hussars have been galloping into
+Chertsey. The Martians appear to be moving slowly towards Chertsey or
+Windsor. Great anxiety prevails in West Surrey, and earthworks are
+being thrown up to check the advance Londonward.” That was how the
+_Sunday Sun_ put it, and a clever and remarkably prompt “handbook”
+article in the _Referee_ compared the affair to a menagerie suddenly
+let loose in a village.
+
+No one in London knew positively of the nature of the armoured
+Martians, and there was still a fixed idea that these monsters must be
+sluggish: “crawling,” “creeping painfully”—such expressions occurred in
+almost all the earlier reports. None of the telegrams could have been
+written by an eyewitness of their advance. The Sunday papers printed
+separate editions as further news came to hand, some even in default of
+it. But there was practically nothing more to tell people until late in
+the afternoon, when the authorities gave the press agencies the news in
+their possession. It was stated that the people of Walton and
+Weybridge, and all the district were pouring along the roads
+Londonward, and that was all.
+
+My brother went to church at the Foundling Hospital in the morning,
+still in ignorance of what had happened on the previous night. There he
+heard allusions made to the invasion, and a special prayer for peace.
+Coming out, he bought a _Referee_. He became alarmed at the news in
+this, and went again to Waterloo station to find out if communication
+were restored. The omnibuses, carriages, cyclists, and innumerable
+people walking in their best clothes seemed scarcely affected by the
+strange intelligence that the newsvendors were disseminating. People
+were interested, or, if alarmed, alarmed only on account of the local
+residents. At the station he heard for the first time that the Windsor
+and Chertsey lines were now interrupted. The porters told him that
+several remarkable telegrams had been received in the morning from
+Byfleet and Chertsey stations, but that these had abruptly ceased. My
+brother could get very little precise detail out of them.
+
+“There’s fighting going on about Weybridge” was the extent of their
+information.
+
+The train service was now very much disorganised. Quite a number of
+people who had been expecting friends from places on the South-Western
+network were standing about the station. One grey-headed old gentleman
+came and abused the South-Western Company bitterly to my brother. “It
+wants showing up,” he said.
+
+One or two trains came in from Richmond, Putney, and Kingston,
+containing people who had gone out for a day’s boating and found the
+locks closed and a feeling of panic in the air. A man in a blue and
+white blazer addressed my brother, full of strange tidings.
+
+“There’s hosts of people driving into Kingston in traps and carts and
+things, with boxes of valuables and all that,” he said. “They come from
+Molesey and Weybridge and Walton, and they say there’s been guns heard
+at Chertsey, heavy firing, and that mounted soldiers have told them to
+get off at once because the Martians are coming. We heard guns firing
+at Hampton Court station, but we thought it was thunder. What the
+dickens does it all mean? The Martians can’t get out of their pit, can
+they?”
+
+My brother could not tell him.
+
+Afterwards he found that the vague feeling of alarm had spread to the
+clients of the underground railway, and that the Sunday excursionists
+began to return from all over the South-Western “lung”—Barnes,
+Wimbledon, Richmond Park, Kew, and so forth—at unnaturally early hours;
+but not a soul had anything more than vague hearsay to tell of.
+Everyone connected with the terminus seemed ill-tempered.
+
+About five o’clock the gathering crowd in the station was immensely
+excited by the opening of the line of communication, which is almost
+invariably closed, between the South-Eastern and the South-Western
+stations, and the passage of carriage trucks bearing huge guns and
+carriages crammed with soldiers. These were the guns that were brought
+up from Woolwich and Chatham to cover Kingston. There was an exchange
+of pleasantries: “You’ll get eaten!” “We’re the beast-tamers!” and so
+forth. A little while after that a squad of police came into the
+station and began to clear the public off the platforms, and my brother
+went out into the street again.
+
+The church bells were ringing for evensong, and a squad of Salvation
+Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road. On the bridge a number of
+loafers were watching a curious brown scum that came drifting down the
+stream in patches. The sun was just setting, and the Clock Tower and
+the Houses of Parliament rose against one of the most peaceful skies it
+is possible to imagine, a sky of gold, barred with long transverse
+stripes of reddish-purple cloud. There was talk of a floating body. One
+of the men there, a reservist he said he was, told my brother he had
+seen the heliograph flickering in the west.
+
+In Wellington Street my brother met a couple of sturdy roughs who had
+just been rushed out of Fleet Street with still-wet newspapers and
+staring placards. “Dreadful catastrophe!” they bawled one to the other
+down Wellington Street. “Fighting at Weybridge! Full description!
+Repulse of the Martians! London in Danger!” He had to give threepence
+for a copy of that paper.
+
+Then it was, and then only, that he realised something of the full
+power and terror of these monsters. He learned that they were not
+merely a handful of small sluggish creatures, but that they were minds
+swaying vast mechanical bodies; and that they could move swiftly and
+smite with such power that even the mightiest guns could not stand
+against them.
+
+They were described as “vast spiderlike machines, nearly a hundred feet
+high, capable of the speed of an express train, and able to shoot out a
+beam of intense heat.” Masked batteries, chiefly of field guns, had
+been planted in the country about Horsell Common, and especially
+between the Woking district and London. Five of the machines had been
+seen moving towards the Thames, and one, by a happy chance, had been
+destroyed. In the other cases the shells had missed, and the batteries
+had been at once annihilated by the Heat-Rays. Heavy losses of soldiers
+were mentioned, but the tone of the dispatch was optimistic.
+
+The Martians had been repulsed; they were not invulnerable. They had
+retreated to their triangle of cylinders again, in the circle about
+Woking. Signallers with heliographs were pushing forward upon them from
+all sides. Guns were in rapid transit from Windsor, Portsmouth,
+Aldershot, Woolwich—even from the north; among others, long wire-guns
+of ninety-five tons from Woolwich. Altogether one hundred and sixteen
+were in position or being hastily placed, chiefly covering London.
+Never before in England had there been such a vast or rapid
+concentration of military material.
+
+Any further cylinders that fell, it was hoped, could be destroyed at
+once by high explosives, which were being rapidly manufactured and
+distributed. No doubt, ran the report, the situation was of the
+strangest and gravest description, but the public was exhorted to avoid
+and discourage panic. No doubt the Martians were strange and terrible
+in the extreme, but at the outside there could not be more than twenty
+of them against our millions.
+
+The authorities had reason to suppose, from the size of the cylinders,
+that at the outside there could not be more than five in each
+cylinder—fifteen altogether. And one at least was disposed of—perhaps
+more. The public would be fairly warned of the approach of danger, and
+elaborate measures were being taken for the protection of the people in
+the threatened southwestern suburbs. And so, with reiterated assurances
+of the safety of London and the ability of the authorities to cope with
+the difficulty, this quasi-proclamation closed.
+
+This was printed in enormous type on paper so fresh that it was still
+wet, and there had been no time to add a word of comment. It was
+curious, my brother said, to see how ruthlessly the usual contents of
+the paper had been hacked and taken out to give this place.
+
+All down Wellington Street people could be seen fluttering out the pink
+sheets and reading, and the Strand was suddenly noisy with the voices
+of an army of hawkers following these pioneers. Men came scrambling off
+buses to secure copies. Certainly this news excited people intensely,
+whatever their previous apathy. The shutters of a map shop in the
+Strand were being taken down, my brother said, and a man in his Sunday
+raiment, lemon-yellow gloves even, was visible inside the window
+hastily fastening maps of Surrey to the glass.
+
+Going on along the Strand to Trafalgar Square, the paper in his hand,
+my brother saw some of the fugitives from West Surrey. There was a man
+with his wife and two boys and some articles of furniture in a cart
+such as greengrocers use. He was driving from the direction of
+Westminster Bridge; and close behind him came a hay waggon with five or
+six respectable-looking people in it, and some boxes and bundles. The
+faces of these people were haggard, and their entire appearance
+contrasted conspicuously with the Sabbath-best appearance of the people
+on the omnibuses. People in fashionable clothing peeped at them out of
+cabs. They stopped at the Square as if undecided which way to take, and
+finally turned eastward along the Strand. Some way behind these came a
+man in workday clothes, riding one of those old-fashioned tricycles
+with a small front wheel. He was dirty and white in the face.
+
+My brother turned down towards Victoria, and met a number of such
+people. He had a vague idea that he might see something of me. He
+noticed an unusual number of police regulating the traffic. Some of the
+refugees were exchanging news with the people on the omnibuses. One was
+professing to have seen the Martians. “Boilers on stilts, I tell you,
+striding along like men.” Most of them were excited and animated by
+their strange experience.
+
+Beyond Victoria the public-houses were doing a lively trade with these
+arrivals. At all the street corners groups of people were reading
+papers, talking excitedly, or staring at these unusual Sunday visitors.
+They seemed to increase as night drew on, until at last the roads, my
+brother said, were like Epsom High Street on a Derby Day. My brother
+addressed several of these fugitives and got unsatisfactory answers
+from most.
+
+None of them could tell him any news of Woking except one man, who
+assured him that Woking had been entirely destroyed on the previous
+night.
+
+“I come from Byfleet,” he said; “a man on a bicycle came through the
+place in the early morning, and ran from door to door warning us to
+come away. Then came soldiers. We went out to look, and there were
+clouds of smoke to the south—nothing but smoke, and not a soul coming
+that way. Then we heard the guns at Chertsey, and folks coming from
+Weybridge. So I’ve locked up my house and come on.”
+
+At that time there was a strong feeling in the streets that the
+authorities were to blame for their incapacity to dispose of the
+invaders without all this inconvenience.
+
+About eight o’clock a noise of heavy firing was distinctly audible all
+over the south of London. My brother could not hear it for the traffic
+in the main thoroughfares, but by striking through the quiet back
+streets to the river he was able to distinguish it quite plainly.
+
+He walked from Westminster to his apartments near Regent’s Park, about
+two. He was now very anxious on my account, and disturbed at the
+evident magnitude of the trouble. His mind was inclined to run, even as
+mine had run on Saturday, on military details. He thought of all those
+silent, expectant guns, of the suddenly nomadic countryside; he tried
+to imagine “boilers on stilts” a hundred feet high.
+
+There were one or two cartloads of refugees passing along Oxford
+Street, and several in the Marylebone Road, but so slowly was the news
+spreading that Regent Street and Portland Place were full of their
+usual Sunday-night promenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and along
+the edge of Regent’s Park there were as many silent couples “walking
+out” together under the scattered gas lamps as ever there had been. The
+night was warm and still, and a little oppressive; the sound of guns
+continued intermittently, and after midnight there seemed to be sheet
+lightning in the south.
+
+He read and re-read the paper, fearing the worst had happened to me. He
+was restless, and after supper prowled out again aimlessly. He returned
+and tried in vain to divert his attention to his examination notes. He
+went to bed a little after midnight, and was awakened from lurid dreams
+in the small hours of Monday by the sound of door knockers, feet
+running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour of bells. Red
+reflections danced on the ceiling. For a moment he lay astonished,
+wondering whether day had come or the world gone mad. Then he jumped
+out of bed and ran to the window.
+
+His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up and down the
+street there were a dozen echoes to the noise of his window sash, and
+heads in every kind of night disarray appeared. Enquiries were being
+shouted. “They are coming!” bawled a policeman, hammering at the door;
+“the Martians are coming!” and hurried to the next door.
+
+The sound of drumming and trumpeting came from the Albany Street
+Barracks, and every church within earshot was hard at work killing
+sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin. There was a noise of doors
+opening, and window after window in the houses opposite flashed from
+darkness into yellow illumination.
+
+Up the street came galloping a closed carriage, bursting abruptly into
+noise at the corner, rising to a clattering climax under the window,
+and dying away slowly in the distance. Close on the rear of this came a
+couple of cabs, the forerunners of a long procession of flying
+vehicles, going for the most part to Chalk Farm station, where the
+North-Western special trains were loading up, instead of coming down
+the gradient into Euston.
+
+For a long time my brother stared out of the window in blank
+astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after door, and
+delivering their incomprehensible message. Then the door behind him
+opened, and the man who lodged across the landing came in, dressed only
+in shirt, trousers, and slippers, his braces loose about his waist, his
+hair disordered from his pillow.
+
+“What the devil is it?” he asked. “A fire? What a devil of a row!”
+
+They both craned their heads out of the window, straining to hear what
+the policemen were shouting. People were coming out of the side
+streets, and standing in groups at the corners talking.
+
+“What the devil is it all about?” said my brother’s fellow lodger.
+
+My brother answered him vaguely and began to dress, running with each
+garment to the window in order to miss nothing of the growing
+excitement. And presently men selling unnaturally early newspapers came
+bawling into the street:
+
+“London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond defences
+forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!”
+
+And all about him—in the rooms below, in the houses on each side and
+across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the hundred
+other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the Westbourne Park
+district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kilburn and St.
+John’s Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and Highbury and
+Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the vastness of London
+from Ealing to East Ham—people were rubbing their eyes, and opening
+windows to stare out and ask aimless questions, dressing hastily as the
+first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It
+was the dawn of the great panic. London, which had gone to bed on
+Sunday night oblivious and inert, was awakened, in the small hours of
+Monday morning, to a vivid sense of danger.
+
+Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother went
+down and out into the street, just as the sky between the parapets of
+the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying people on foot and
+in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. “Black Smoke!” he heard
+people crying, and again “Black Smoke!” The contagion of such a
+unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on the
+door-step, he saw another newsvendor approaching, and got a paper
+forthwith. The man was running away with the rest, and selling his
+papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and
+panic.
+
+And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic dispatch of the
+Commander-in-Chief:
+
+“The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a black and
+poisonous vapour by means of rockets. They have smothered our
+batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are
+advancing slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way. It
+is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Black Smoke but
+in instant flight.”
+
+
+That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the great
+six-million city was stirring, slipping, running; presently it would be
+pouring _en masse_ northward.
+
+“Black Smoke!” the voices cried. “Fire!”
+
+The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, a cart
+carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks and curses, against the water
+trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights went to and fro in the
+houses, and some of the passing cabs flaunted unextinguished lamps. And
+overhead the dawn was growing brighter, clear and steady and calm.
+
+He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down
+stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in
+dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed, ejaculating.
+
+As my brother began to realise the import of all these things, he
+turned hastily to his own room, put all his available money—some ten
+pounds altogether—into his pockets, and went out again into the
+streets.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY.
+
+
+It was while the curate had sat and talked so wildly to me under the
+hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford, and while my brother was
+watching the fugitives stream over Westminster Bridge, that the
+Martians had resumed the offensive. So far as one can ascertain from
+the conflicting accounts that have been put forth, the majority of them
+remained busied with preparations in the Horsell pit until nine that
+night, hurrying on some operation that disengaged huge volumes of green
+smoke.
+
+But three certainly came out about eight o’clock and, advancing slowly
+and cautiously, made their way through Byfleet and Pyrford towards
+Ripley and Weybridge, and so came in sight of the expectant batteries
+against the setting sun. These Martians did not advance in a body, but
+in a line, each perhaps a mile and a half from his nearest fellow. They
+communicated with one another by means of sirenlike howls, running up
+and down the scale from one note to another.
+
+It was this howling and firing of the guns at Ripley and St. George’s
+Hill that we had heard at Upper Halliford. The Ripley gunners,
+unseasoned artillery volunteers who ought never to have been placed in
+such a position, fired one wild, premature, ineffectual volley, and
+bolted on horse and foot through the deserted village, while the
+Martian, without using his Heat-Ray, walked serenely over their guns,
+stepped gingerly among them, passed in front of them, and so came
+unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, which he destroyed.
+
+The St. George’s Hill men, however, were better led or of a better
+mettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they were, they seem to have been
+quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to them. They laid their guns
+as deliberately as if they had been on parade, and fired at about a
+thousand yards’ range.
+
+The shells flashed all round him, and he was seen to advance a few
+paces, stagger, and go down. Everybody yelled together, and the guns
+were reloaded in frantic haste. The overthrown Martian set up a
+prolonged ululation, and immediately a second glittering giant,
+answering him, appeared over the trees to the south. It would seem that
+a leg of the tripod had been smashed by one of the shells. The whole of
+the second volley flew wide of the Martian on the ground, and,
+simultaneously, both his companions brought their Heat-Rays to bear on
+the battery. The ammunition blew up, the pine trees all about the guns
+flashed into fire, and only one or two of the men who were already
+running over the crest of the hill escaped.
+
+After this it would seem that the three took counsel together and
+halted, and the scouts who were watching them report that they remained
+absolutely stationary for the next half hour. The Martian who had been
+overthrown crawled tediously out of his hood, a small brown figure,
+oddly suggestive from that distance of a speck of blight, and
+apparently engaged in the repair of his support. About nine he had
+finished, for his cowl was then seen above the trees again.
+
+It was a few minutes past nine that night when these three sentinels
+were joined by four other Martians, each carrying a thick black tube. A
+similar tube was handed to each of the three, and the seven proceeded
+to distribute themselves at equal distances along a curved line between
+St. George’s Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of
+Ripley.
+
+A dozen rockets sprang out of the hills before them so soon as they
+began to move, and warned the waiting batteries about Ditton and Esher.
+At the same time four of their fighting machines, similarly armed with
+tubes, crossed the river, and two of them, black against the western
+sky, came into sight of myself and the curate as we hurried wearily and
+painfully along the road that runs northward out of Halliford. They
+moved, as it seemed to us, upon a cloud, for a milky mist covered the
+fields and rose to a third of their height.
+
+At this sight the curate cried faintly in his throat, and began
+running; but I knew it was no good running from a Martian, and I turned
+aside and crawled through dewy nettles and brambles into the broad
+ditch by the side of the road. He looked back, saw what I was doing,
+and turned to join me.
+
+The two halted, the nearer to us standing and facing Sunbury, the
+remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the evening star, away
+towards Staines.
+
+The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took up their
+positions in the huge crescent about their cylinders in absolute
+silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never
+since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still.
+To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the
+same effect—the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling
+night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the stars, the afterglow
+of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St. George’s Hill and the
+woods of Painshill.
+
+But facing that crescent everywhere—at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton,
+Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and across
+the flat grass meadows to the north of it, wherever a cluster of trees
+or village houses gave sufficient cover—the guns were waiting. The
+signal rockets burst and rained their sparks through the night and
+vanished, and the spirit of all those watching batteries rose to a
+tense expectation. The Martians had but to advance into the line of
+fire, and instantly those motionless black forms of men, those guns
+glittering so darkly in the early night, would explode into a
+thunderous fury of battle.
+
+No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant
+minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle—how much they
+understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions were
+organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret our
+spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady
+investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of
+onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might
+exterminate us? (At that time no one knew what food they needed.) A
+hundred such questions struggled together in my mind as I watched that
+vast sentinel shape. And in the back of my mind was the sense of all
+the huge unknown and hidden forces Londonward. Had they prepared
+pitfalls? Were the powder mills at Hounslow ready as a snare? Would the
+Londoners have the heart and courage to make a greater Moscow of their
+mighty province of houses?
+
+Then, after an interminable time, as it seemed to us, crouching and
+peering through the hedge, came a sound like the distant concussion of
+a gun. Another nearer, and then another. And then the Martian beside us
+raised his tube on high and discharged it, gunwise, with a heavy report
+that made the ground heave. The one towards Staines answered him. There
+was no flash, no smoke, simply that loaded detonation.
+
+I was so excited by these heavy minute-guns following one another that
+I so far forgot my personal safety and my scalded hands as to clamber
+up into the hedge and stare towards Sunbury. As I did so a second
+report followed, and a big projectile hurtled overhead towards
+Hounslow. I expected at least to see smoke or fire, or some such
+evidence of its work. But all I saw was the deep blue sky above, with
+one solitary star, and the white mist spreading wide and low beneath.
+And there had been no crash, no answering explosion. The silence was
+restored; the minute lengthened to three.
+
+“What has happened?” said the curate, standing up beside me.
+
+“Heaven knows!” said I.
+
+A bat flickered by and vanished. A distant tumult of shouting began and
+ceased. I looked again at the Martian, and saw he was now moving
+eastward along the riverbank, with a swift, rolling motion.
+
+Every moment I expected the fire of some hidden battery to spring upon
+him; but the evening calm was unbroken. The figure of the Martian grew
+smaller as he receded, and presently the mist and the gathering night
+had swallowed him up. By a common impulse we clambered higher. Towards
+Sunbury was a dark appearance, as though a conical hill had suddenly
+come into being there, hiding our view of the farther country; and
+then, remoter across the river, over Walton, we saw another such
+summit. These hill-like forms grew lower and broader even as we stared.
+
+Moved by a sudden thought, I looked northward, and there I perceived a
+third of these cloudy black kopjes had risen.
+
+Everything had suddenly become very still. Far away to the southeast,
+marking the quiet, we heard the Martians hooting to one another, and
+then the air quivered again with the distant thud of their guns. But
+the earthly artillery made no reply.
+
+Now at the time we could not understand these things, but later I was
+to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes that gathered in the
+twilight. Each of the Martians, standing in the great crescent I have
+described, had discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he carried, a
+huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other
+possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of him. Some fired only
+one of these, some two—as in the case of the one we had seen; the one
+at Ripley is said to have discharged no fewer than five at that time.
+These canisters smashed on striking the ground—they did not explode—and
+incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour,
+coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous
+hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country.
+And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was
+death to all that breathes.
+
+It was heavy, this vapour, heavier than the densest smoke, so that,
+after the first tumultuous uprush and outflow of its impact, it sank
+down through the air and poured over the ground in a manner rather
+liquid than gaseous, abandoning the hills, and streaming into the
+valleys and ditches and watercourses even as I have heard the
+carbonic-acid gas that pours from volcanic clefts is wont to do. And
+where it came upon water some chemical action occurred, and the surface
+would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank slowly and
+made way for more. The scum was absolutely insoluble, and it is a
+strange thing, seeing the instant effect of the gas, that one could
+drink without hurt the water from which it had been strained. The
+vapour did not diffuse as a true gas would do. It hung together in
+banks, flowing sluggishly down the slope of the land and driving
+reluctantly before the wind, and very slowly it combined with the mist
+and moisture of the air, and sank to the earth in the form of dust.
+Save that an unknown element giving a group of four lines in the blue
+of the spectrum is concerned, we are still entirely ignorant of the
+nature of this substance.
+
+Once the tumultuous upheaval of its dispersion was over, the black
+smoke clung so closely to the ground, even before its precipitation,
+that fifty feet up in the air, on the roofs and upper stories of high
+houses and on great trees, there was a chance of escaping its poison
+altogether, as was proved even that night at Street Cobham and Ditton.
+
+The man who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful story of the
+strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he looked down from the church
+spire and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts out of its
+inky nothingness. For a day and a half he remained there, weary,
+starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and against the
+prospect of the distant hills a velvet-black expanse, with red roofs,
+green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns,
+outhouses, and walls, rising here and there into the sunlight.
+
+But that was at Street Cobham, where the black vapour was allowed to
+remain until it sank of its own accord into the ground. As a rule the
+Martians, when it had served its purpose, cleared the air of it again
+by wading into it and directing a jet of steam upon it.
+
+This they did with the vapour banks near us, as we saw in the starlight
+from the window of a deserted house at Upper Halliford, whither we had
+returned. From there we could see the searchlights on Richmond Hill and
+Kingston Hill going to and fro, and about eleven the windows rattled,
+and we heard the sound of the huge siege guns that had been put in
+position there. These continued intermittently for the space of a
+quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the invisible Martians at
+Hampton and Ditton, and then the pale beams of the electric light
+vanished, and were replaced by a bright red glow.
+
+Then the fourth cylinder fell—a brilliant green meteor—as I learned
+afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the Richmond and
+Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful cannonade far away in
+the southwest, due, I believe, to guns being fired haphazard before the
+black vapour could overwhelm the gunners.
+
+So, setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out a wasps’
+nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling vapour over the
+Londonward country. The horns of the crescent slowly moved apart, until
+at last they formed a line from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden. All night
+through their destructive tubes advanced. Never once, after the Martian
+at St. George’s Hill was brought down, did they give the artillery the
+ghost of a chance against them. Wherever there was a possibility of
+guns being laid for them unseen, a fresh canister of the black vapour
+was discharged, and where the guns were openly displayed the Heat-Ray
+was brought to bear.
+
+By midnight the blazing trees along the slopes of Richmond Park and the
+glare of Kingston Hill threw their light upon a network of black smoke,
+blotting out the whole valley of the Thames and extending as far as the
+eye could reach. And through this two Martians slowly waded, and turned
+their hissing steam jets this way and that.
+
+They were sparing of the Heat-Ray that night, either because they had
+but a limited supply of material for its production or because they did
+not wish to destroy the country but only to crush and overawe the
+opposition they had aroused. In the latter aim they certainly
+succeeded. Sunday night was the end of the organised opposition to
+their movements. After that no body of men would stand against them, so
+hopeless was the enterprise. Even the crews of the torpedo-boats and
+destroyers that had brought their quick-firers up the Thames refused to
+stop, mutinied, and went down again. The only offensive operation men
+ventured upon after that night was the preparation of mines and
+pitfalls, and even in that their energies were frantic and spasmodic.
+
+One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those batteries
+towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the twilight. Survivors there were
+none. One may picture the orderly expectation, the officers alert and
+watchful, the gunners ready, the ammunition piled to hand, the limber
+gunners with their horses and waggons, the groups of civilian
+spectators standing as near as they were permitted, the evening
+stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents with the burned and
+wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of the shots the
+Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling over the trees and
+houses and smashing amid the neighbouring fields.
+
+One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly
+spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong,
+towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a
+strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims,
+men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling
+headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking
+and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque
+cone of smoke. And then night and extinction—nothing but a silent mass
+of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.
+
+Before dawn the black vapour was pouring through the streets of
+Richmond, and the disintegrating organism of government was, with a
+last expiring effort, rousing the population of London to the necessity
+of flight.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+THE EXODUS FROM LONDON.
+
+
+So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the
+greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning—the stream of
+flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round
+the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the
+shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel
+northward and eastward. By ten o’clock the police organisation, and by
+midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing
+shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that
+swift liquefaction of the social body.
+
+All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern people
+at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and trains were
+being filled. People were fighting savagely for standing-room in the
+carriages even at two o’clock. By three, people were being trampled and
+crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards or more
+from Liverpool Street station; revolvers were fired, people stabbed,
+and the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted
+and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the people they were called
+out to protect.
+
+And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers refused to
+return to London, the pressure of the flight drove the people in an
+ever-thickening multitude away from the stations and along the
+northward-running roads. By midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes,
+and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thames and
+across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the bridges in
+its sluggish advance. Another bank drove over Ealing, and surrounded a
+little island of survivors on Castle Hill, alive, but unable to escape.
+
+After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North-Western train at Chalk
+Farm—the engines of the trains that had loaded in the goods yard there
+_ploughed_ through shrieking people, and a dozen stalwart men fought to
+keep the crowd from crushing the driver against his furnace—my brother
+emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across through a hurrying
+swarm of vehicles, and had the luck to be foremost in the sack of a
+cycle shop. The front tire of the machine he got was punctured in
+dragging it through the window, but he got up and off, notwithstanding,
+with no further injury than a cut wrist. The steep foot of Haverstock
+Hill was impassable owing to several overturned horses, and my brother
+struck into Belsize Road.
+
+So he got out of the fury of the panic, and, skirting the Edgware Road,
+reached Edgware about seven, fasting and wearied, but well ahead of the
+crowd. Along the road people were standing in the roadway, curious,
+wondering. He was passed by a number of cyclists, some horsemen, and
+two motor cars. A mile from Edgware the rim of the wheel broke, and the
+machine became unridable. He left it by the roadside and trudged
+through the village. There were shops half opened in the main street of
+the place, and people crowded on the pavement and in the doorways and
+windows, staring astonished at this extraordinary procession of
+fugitives that was beginning. He succeeded in getting some food at an
+inn.
+
+For a time he remained in Edgware not knowing what next to do. The
+flying people increased in number. Many of them, like my brother,
+seemed inclined to loiter in the place. There was no fresh news of the
+invaders from Mars.
+
+At that time the road was crowded, but as yet far from congested. Most
+of the fugitives at that hour were mounted on cycles, but there were
+soon motor cars, hansom cabs, and carriages hurrying along, and the
+dust hung in heavy clouds along the road to St. Albans.
+
+It was perhaps a vague idea of making his way to Chelmsford, where some
+friends of his lived, that at last induced my brother to strike into a
+quiet lane running eastward. Presently he came upon a stile, and,
+crossing it, followed a footpath northeastward. He passed near several
+farmhouses and some little places whose names he did not learn. He saw
+few fugitives until, in a grass lane towards High Barnet, he happened
+upon two ladies who became his fellow travellers. He came upon them
+just in time to save them.
+
+He heard their screams, and, hurrying round the corner, saw a couple of
+men struggling to drag them out of the little pony-chaise in which they
+had been driving, while a third with difficulty held the frightened
+pony’s head. One of the ladies, a short woman dressed in white, was
+simply screaming; the other, a dark, slender figure, slashed at the man
+who gripped her arm with a whip she held in her disengaged hand.
+
+My brother immediately grasped the situation, shouted, and hurried
+towards the struggle. One of the men desisted and turned towards him,
+and my brother, realising from his antagonist’s face that a fight was
+unavoidable, and being an expert boxer, went into him forthwith and
+sent him down against the wheel of the chaise.
+
+It was no time for pugilistic chivalry and my brother laid him quiet
+with a kick, and gripped the collar of the man who pulled at the
+slender lady’s arm. He heard the clatter of hoofs, the whip stung
+across his face, a third antagonist struck him between the eyes, and
+the man he held wrenched himself free and made off down the lane in the
+direction from which he had come.
+
+Partly stunned, he found himself facing the man who had held the
+horse’s head, and became aware of the chaise receding from him down the
+lane, swaying from side to side, and with the women in it looking back.
+The man before him, a burly rough, tried to close, and he stopped him
+with a blow in the face. Then, realising that he was deserted, he
+dodged round and made off down the lane after the chaise, with the
+sturdy man close behind him, and the fugitive, who had turned now,
+following remotely.
+
+Suddenly he stumbled and fell; his immediate pursuer went headlong, and
+he rose to his feet to find himself with a couple of antagonists again.
+He would have had little chance against them had not the slender lady
+very pluckily pulled up and returned to his help. It seems she had had
+a revolver all this time, but it had been under the seat when she and
+her companion were attacked. She fired at six yards’ distance, narrowly
+missing my brother. The less courageous of the robbers made off, and
+his companion followed him, cursing his cowardice. They both stopped in
+sight down the lane, where the third man lay insensible.
+
+“Take this!” said the slender lady, and she gave my brother her
+revolver.
+
+“Go back to the chaise,” said my brother, wiping the blood from his
+split lip.
+
+She turned without a word—they were both panting—and they went back to
+where the lady in white struggled to hold back the frightened pony.
+
+The robbers had evidently had enough of it. When my brother looked
+again they were retreating.
+
+“I’ll sit here,” said my brother, “if I may”; and he got upon the empty
+front seat. The lady looked over her shoulder.
+
+“Give me the reins,” she said, and laid the whip along the pony’s side.
+In another moment a bend in the road hid the three men from my
+brother’s eyes.
+
+So, quite unexpectedly, my brother found himself, panting, with a cut
+mouth, a bruised jaw, and bloodstained knuckles, driving along an
+unknown lane with these two women.
+
+He learned they were the wife and the younger sister of a surgeon
+living at Stanmore, who had come in the small hours from a dangerous
+case at Pinner, and heard at some railway station on his way of the
+Martian advance. He had hurried home, roused the women—their servant
+had left them two days before—packed some provisions, put his revolver
+under the seat—luckily for my brother—and told them to drive on to
+Edgware, with the idea of getting a train there. He stopped behind to
+tell the neighbours. He would overtake them, he said, at about half
+past four in the morning, and now it was nearly nine and they had seen
+nothing of him. They could not stop in Edgware because of the growing
+traffic through the place, and so they had come into this side lane.
+
+That was the story they told my brother in fragments when presently
+they stopped again, nearer to New Barnet. He promised to stay with
+them, at least until they could determine what to do, or until the
+missing man arrived, and professed to be an expert shot with the
+revolver—a weapon strange to him—in order to give them confidence.
+
+They made a sort of encampment by the wayside, and the pony became
+happy in the hedge. He told them of his own escape out of London, and
+all that he knew of these Martians and their ways. The sun crept higher
+in the sky, and after a time their talk died out and gave place to an
+uneasy state of anticipation. Several wayfarers came along the lane,
+and of these my brother gathered such news as he could. Every broken
+answer he had deepened his impression of the great disaster that had
+come on humanity, deepened his persuasion of the immediate necessity
+for prosecuting this flight. He urged the matter upon them.
+
+“We have money,” said the slender woman, and hesitated.
+
+Her eyes met my brother’s, and her hesitation ended.
+
+“So have I,” said my brother.
+
+She explained that they had as much as thirty pounds in gold, besides a
+five-pound note, and suggested that with that they might get upon a
+train at St. Albans or New Barnet. My brother thought that was
+hopeless, seeing the fury of the Londoners to crowd upon the trains,
+and broached his own idea of striking across Essex towards Harwich and
+thence escaping from the country altogether.
+
+Mrs. Elphinstone—that was the name of the woman in white—would listen
+to no reasoning, and kept calling upon “George”; but her sister-in-law
+was astonishingly quiet and deliberate, and at last agreed to my
+brother’s suggestion. So, designing to cross the Great North Road, they
+went on towards Barnet, my brother leading the pony to save it as much
+as possible. As the sun crept up the sky the day became excessively
+hot, and under foot a thick, whitish sand grew burning and blinding, so
+that they travelled only very slowly. The hedges were grey with dust.
+And as they advanced towards Barnet a tumultuous murmuring grew
+stronger.
+
+They began to meet more people. For the most part these were staring
+before them, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard, unclean.
+One man in evening dress passed them on foot, his eyes on the ground.
+They heard his voice, and, looking back at him, saw one hand clutched
+in his hair and the other beating invisible things. His paroxysm of
+rage over, he went on his way without once looking back.
+
+As my brother’s party went on towards the crossroads to the south of
+Barnet they saw a woman approaching the road across some fields on
+their left, carrying a child and with two other children; and then
+passed a man in dirty black, with a thick stick in one hand and a small
+portmanteau in the other. Then round the corner of the lane, from
+between the villas that guarded it at its confluence with the high
+road, came a little cart drawn by a sweating black pony and driven by a
+sallow youth in a bowler hat, grey with dust. There were three girls,
+East End factory girls, and a couple of little children crowded in the
+cart.
+
+“This’ll tike us rahnd Edgware?” asked the driver, wild-eyed,
+white-faced; and when my brother told him it would if he turned to the
+left, he whipped up at once without the formality of thanks.
+
+My brother noticed a pale grey smoke or haze rising among the houses in
+front of them, and veiling the white façade of a terrace beyond the
+road that appeared between the backs of the villas. Mrs. Elphinstone
+suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky red flame leaping up
+above the houses in front of them against the hot, blue sky. The
+tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of
+many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of waggons, and the
+staccato of hoofs. The lane came round sharply not fifty yards from the
+crossroads.
+
+“Good heavens!” cried Mrs. Elphinstone. “What is this you are driving
+us into?”
+
+My brother stopped.
+
+For the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of human
+beings rushing northward, one pressing on another. A great bank of
+dust, white and luminous in the blaze of the sun, made everything
+within twenty feet of the ground grey and indistinct and was
+perpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense crowd of horses and
+of men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every
+description.
+
+“Way!” my brother heard voices crying. “Make way!”
+
+It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to approach the meeting
+point of the lane and road; the crowd roared like a fire, and the dust
+was hot and pungent. And, indeed, a little way up the road a villa was
+burning and sending rolling masses of black smoke across the road to
+add to the confusion.
+
+Two men came past them. Then a dirty woman, carrying a heavy bundle and
+weeping. A lost retriever dog, with hanging tongue, circled dubiously
+round them, scared and wretched, and fled at my brother’s threat.
+
+So much as they could see of the road Londonward between the houses to
+the right was a tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying people, pent in
+between the villas on either side; the black heads, the crowded forms,
+grew into distinctness as they rushed towards the corner, hurried past,
+and merged their individuality again in a receding multitude that was
+swallowed up at last in a cloud of dust.
+
+“Go on! Go on!” cried the voices. “Way! Way!”
+
+One man’s hands pressed on the back of another. My brother stood at the
+pony’s head. Irresistibly attracted, he advanced slowly, pace by pace,
+down the lane.
+
+Edgware had been a scene of confusion, Chalk Farm a riotous tumult, but
+this was a whole population in movement. It is hard to imagine that
+host. It had no character of its own. The figures poured out past the
+corner, and receded with their backs to the group in the lane. Along
+the margin came those who were on foot threatened by the wheels,
+stumbling in the ditches, blundering into one another.
+
+The carts and carriages crowded close upon one another, making little
+way for those swifter and more impatient vehicles that darted forward
+every now and then when an opportunity showed itself of doing so,
+sending the people scattering against the fences and gates of the
+villas.
+
+“Push on!” was the cry. “Push on! They are coming!”
+
+In one cart stood a blind man in the uniform of the Salvation Army,
+gesticulating with his crooked fingers and bawling, “Eternity!
+Eternity!” His voice was hoarse and very loud so that my brother could
+hear him long after he was lost to sight in the dust. Some of the
+people who crowded in the carts whipped stupidly at their horses and
+quarrelled with other drivers; some sat motionless, staring at nothing
+with miserable eyes; some gnawed their hands with thirst, or lay
+prostrate in the bottoms of their conveyances. The horses’ bits were
+covered with foam, their eyes bloodshot.
+
+There were cabs, carriages, shop-carts, waggons, beyond counting; a
+mail cart, a road-cleaner’s cart marked “Vestry of St. Pancras,” a huge
+timber waggon crowded with roughs. A brewer’s dray rumbled by with its
+two near wheels splashed with fresh blood.
+
+“Clear the way!” cried the voices. “Clear the way!”
+
+“Eter-nity! Eter-nity!” came echoing down the road.
+
+There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, with children
+that cried and stumbled, their dainty clothes smothered in dust, their
+weary faces smeared with tears. With many of these came men, sometimes
+helpful, sometimes lowering and savage. Fighting side by side with them
+pushed some weary street outcast in faded black rags, wide-eyed,
+loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. There were sturdy workmen thrusting
+their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothed like clerks or shopmen,
+struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier my brother noticed, men
+dressed in the clothes of railway porters, one wretched creature in a
+nightshirt with a coat thrown over it.
+
+But varied as its composition was, certain things all that host had in
+common. There were fear and pain on their faces, and fear behind them.
+A tumult up the road, a quarrel for a place in a waggon, sent the whole
+host of them quickening their pace; even a man so scared and broken
+that his knees bent under him was galvanised for a moment into renewed
+activity. The heat and dust had already been at work upon this
+multitude. Their skins were dry, their lips black and cracked. They
+were all thirsty, weary, and footsore. And amid the various cries one
+heard disputes, reproaches, groans of weariness and fatigue; the voices
+of most of them were hoarse and weak. Through it all ran a refrain:
+
+“Way! Way! The Martians are coming!”
+
+Few stopped and came aside from that flood. The lane opened slantingly
+into the main road with a narrow opening, and had a delusive appearance
+of coming from the direction of London. Yet a kind of eddy of people
+drove into its mouth; weaklings elbowed out of the stream, who for the
+most part rested but a moment before plunging into it again. A little
+way down the lane, with two friends bending over him, lay a man with a
+bare leg, wrapped about with bloody rags. He was a lucky man to have
+friends.
+
+A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a filthy black
+frock coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed his
+boot—his sock was blood-stained—shook out a pebble, and hobbled on
+again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw
+herself under the hedge close by my brother, weeping.
+
+“I can’t go on! I can’t go on!”
+
+My brother woke from his torpor of astonishment and lifted her up,
+speaking gently to her, and carried her to Miss Elphinstone. So soon as
+my brother touched her she became quite still, as if frightened.
+
+“Ellen!” shrieked a woman in the crowd, with tears in her
+voice—“Ellen!” And the child suddenly darted away from my brother,
+crying “Mother!”
+
+“They are coming,” said a man on horseback, riding past along the lane.
+
+“Out of the way, there!” bawled a coachman, towering high; and my
+brother saw a closed carriage turning into the lane.
+
+The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. My brother
+pushed the pony and chaise back into the hedge, and the man drove by
+and stopped at the turn of the way. It was a carriage, with a pole for
+a pair of horses, but only one was in the traces. My brother saw dimly
+through the dust that two men lifted out something on a white stretcher
+and put it gently on the grass beneath the privet hedge.
+
+One of the men came running to my brother.
+
+“Where is there any water?” he said. “He is dying fast, and very
+thirsty. It is Lord Garrick.”
+
+“Lord Garrick!” said my brother; “the Chief Justice?”
+
+“The water?” he said.
+
+“There may be a tap,” said my brother, “in some of the houses. We have
+no water. I dare not leave my people.”
+
+The man pushed against the crowd towards the gate of the corner house.
+
+“Go on!” said the people, thrusting at him. “They are coming! Go on!”
+
+Then my brother’s attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced
+man lugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother’s eyes
+rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed to break up
+into separate coins as it struck the ground. They rolled hither and
+thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. The man stopped
+and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his
+shoulder and sent him reeling. He gave a shriek and dodged back, and a
+cartwheel shaved him narrowly.
+
+“Way!” cried the men all about him. “Make way!”
+
+So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both hands open,
+upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in his pocket. A
+horse rose close upon him, and in another moment, half rising, he had
+been borne down under the horse’s hoofs.
+
+“Stop!” screamed my brother, and pushing a woman out of his way, tried
+to clutch the bit of the horse.
+
+Before he could get to it, he heard a scream under the wheels, and saw
+through the dust the rim passing over the poor wretch’s back. The
+driver of the cart slashed his whip at my brother, who ran round behind
+the cart. The multitudinous shouting confused his ears. The man was
+writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to rise, for the
+wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp and dead. My
+brother stood up and yelled at the next driver, and a man on a black
+horse came to his assistance.
+
+“Get him out of the road,” said he; and, clutching the man’s collar
+with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. But he still
+clutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammering
+at his arm with a handful of gold. “Go on! Go on!” shouted angry voices
+behind. “Way! Way!”
+
+There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the cart that
+the man on horseback stopped. My brother looked up, and the man with
+the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist that held his collar.
+There was a concussion, and the black horse came staggering sideways,
+and the carthorse pushed beside it. A hoof missed my brother’s foot by
+a hair’s breadth. He released his grip on the fallen man and jumped
+back. He saw anger change to terror on the face of the poor wretch on
+the ground, and in a moment he was hidden and my brother was borne
+backward and carried past the entrance of the lane, and had to fight
+hard in the torrent to recover it.
+
+He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little child, with all
+a child’s want of sympathetic imagination, staring with dilated eyes at
+a dusty something that lay black and still, ground and crushed under
+the rolling wheels. “Let us go back!” he shouted, and began turning the
+pony round. “We cannot cross this—hell,” he said and they went back a
+hundred yards the way they had come, until the fighting crowd was
+hidden. As they passed the bend in the lane my brother saw the face of
+the dying man in the ditch under the privet, deadly white and drawn,
+and shining with perspiration. The two women sat silent, crouching in
+their seat and shivering.
+
+Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again. Miss Elphinstone was
+white and pale, and her sister-in-law sat weeping, too wretched even to
+call upon “George.” My brother was horrified and perplexed. So soon as
+they had retreated he realised how urgent and unavoidable it was to
+attempt this crossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone, suddenly
+resolute.
+
+“We must go that way,” he said, and led the pony round again.
+
+For the second time that day this girl proved her quality. To force
+their way into the torrent of people, my brother plunged into the
+traffic and held back a cab horse, while she drove the pony across its
+head. A waggon locked wheels for a moment and ripped a long splinter
+from the chaise. In another moment they were caught and swept forward
+by the stream. My brother, with the cabman’s whip marks red across his
+face and hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the reins from her.
+
+“Point the revolver at the man behind,” he said, giving it to her, “if
+he presses us too hard. No!—point it at his horse.”
+
+Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the right across
+the road. But once in the stream he seemed to lose volition, to become
+a part of that dusty rout. They swept through Chipping Barnet with the
+torrent; they were nearly a mile beyond the centre of the town before
+they had fought across to the opposite side of the way. It was din and
+confusion indescribable; but in and beyond the town the road forks
+repeatedly, and this to some extent relieved the stress.
+
+They struck eastward through Hadley, and there on either side of the
+road, and at another place farther on they came upon a great multitude
+of people drinking at the stream, some fighting to come at the water.
+And farther on, from a lull near East Barnet, they saw two trains
+running slowly one after the other without signal or order—trains
+swarming with people, with men even among the coals behind the
+engines—going northward along the Great Northern Railway. My brother
+supposes they must have filled outside London, for at that time the
+furious terror of the people had rendered the central termini
+impossible.
+
+Near this place they halted for the rest of the afternoon, for the
+violence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three of them.
+They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger; the night was cold, and
+none of them dared to sleep. And in the evening many people came
+hurrying along the road nearby their stopping place, fleeing from
+unknown dangers before them, and going in the direction from which my
+brother had come.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+THE “THUNDER CHILD”.
+
+
+Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday have
+annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself slowly
+through the home counties. Not only along the road through Barnet, but
+also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the roads eastward to
+Southend and Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames to Deal and
+Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one could have hung that
+June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London every
+northward and eastward road running out of the tangled maze of streets
+would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot
+a human agony of terror and physical distress. I have set forth at
+length in the last chapter my brother’s account of the road through
+Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise how that swarming
+of black dots appeared to one of those concerned. Never before in the
+history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered
+together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia
+has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. And this was
+no disciplined march; it was a stampede—a stampede gigantic and
+terrible—without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed
+and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout
+of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.
+
+Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network of
+streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents,
+gardens—already derelict—spread out like a huge map, and in the
+southward _blotted_. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would have
+seemed as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart. Steadily,
+incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting out
+ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising
+ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found valley,
+exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting paper.
+
+And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the river, the
+glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and methodically spreading
+their poison cloud over this patch of country and then over that,
+laying it again with their steam jets when it had served its purpose,
+and taking possession of the conquered country. They do not seem to
+have aimed at extermination so much as at complete demoralisation and
+the destruction of any opposition. They exploded any stores of powder
+they came upon, cut every telegraph, and wrecked the railways here and
+there. They were hamstringing mankind. They seemed in no hurry to
+extend the field of their operations, and did not come beyond the
+central part of London all that day. It is possible that a very
+considerable number of people in London stuck to their houses through
+Monday morning. Certain it is that many died at home suffocated by the
+Black Smoke.
+
+Until about midday the Pool of London was an astonishing scene.
+Steamboats and shipping of all sorts lay there, tempted by the enormous
+sums of money offered by fugitives, and it is said that many who swam
+out to these vessels were thrust off with boathooks and drowned. About
+one o’clock in the afternoon the thinning remnant of a cloud of the
+black vapour appeared between the arches of Blackfriars Bridge. At that
+the Pool became a scene of mad confusion, fighting, and collision, and
+for some time a multitude of boats and barges jammed in the northern
+arch of the Tower Bridge, and the sailors and lightermen had to fight
+savagely against the people who swarmed upon them from the riverfront.
+People were actually clambering down the piers of the bridge from
+above.
+
+When, an hour later, a Martian appeared beyond the Clock Tower and
+waded down the river, nothing but wreckage floated above Limehouse.
+
+Of the falling of the fifth cylinder I have presently to tell. The
+sixth star fell at Wimbledon. My brother, keeping watch beside the
+women in the chaise in a meadow, saw the green flash of it far beyond
+the hills. On Tuesday the little party, still set upon getting across
+the sea, made its way through the swarming country towards Colchester.
+The news that the Martians were now in possession of the whole of
+London was confirmed. They had been seen at Highgate, and even, it was
+said, at Neasden. But they did not come into my brother’s view until
+the morrow.
+
+That day the scattered multitudes began to realise the urgent need of
+provisions. As they grew hungry the rights of property ceased to be
+regarded. Farmers were out to defend their cattle-sheds, granaries, and
+ripening root crops with arms in their hands. A number of people now,
+like my brother, had their faces eastward, and there were some
+desperate souls even going back towards London to get food. These were
+chiefly people from the northern suburbs, whose knowledge of the Black
+Smoke came by hearsay. He heard that about half the members of the
+government had gathered at Birmingham, and that enormous quantities of
+high explosives were being prepared to be used in automatic mines
+across the Midland counties.
+
+He was also told that the Midland Railway Company had replaced the
+desertions of the first day’s panic, had resumed traffic, and was
+running northward trains from St. Albans to relieve the congestion of
+the home counties. There was also a placard in Chipping Ongar
+announcing that large stores of flour were available in the northern
+towns and that within twenty-four hours bread would be distributed
+among the starving people in the neighbourhood. But this intelligence
+did not deter him from the plan of escape he had formed, and the three
+pressed eastward all day, and heard no more of the bread distribution
+than this promise. Nor, as a matter of fact, did anyone else hear more
+of it. That night fell the seventh star, falling upon Primrose Hill. It
+fell while Miss Elphinstone was watching, for she took that duty
+alternately with my brother. She saw it.
+
+On Wednesday the three fugitives—they had passed the night in a field
+of unripe wheat—reached Chelmsford, and there a body of the
+inhabitants, calling itself the Committee of Public Supply, seized the
+pony as provisions, and would give nothing in exchange for it but the
+promise of a share in it the next day. Here there were rumours of
+Martians at Epping, and news of the destruction of Waltham Abbey Powder
+Mills in a vain attempt to blow up one of the invaders.
+
+People were watching for Martians here from the church towers. My
+brother, very luckily for him as it chanced, preferred to push on at
+once to the coast rather than wait for food, although all three of them
+were very hungry. By midday they passed through Tillingham, which,
+strangely enough, seemed to be quite silent and deserted, save for a
+few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham they suddenly
+came in sight of the sea, and the most amazing crowd of shipping of all
+sorts that it is possible to imagine.
+
+For after the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they came on
+to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and afterwards
+to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They lay in a huge
+sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last towards the Naze.
+Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks—English, Scotch,
+French, Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts,
+electric boats; and beyond were ships of larger burden, a multitude of
+filthy colliers, trim merchantmen, cattle ships, passenger boats,
+petroleum tanks, ocean tramps, an old white transport even, neat white
+and grey liners from Southampton and Hamburg; and along the blue coast
+across the Blackwater my brother could make out dimly a dense swarm of
+boats chaffering with the people on the beach, a swarm which also
+extended up the Blackwater almost to Maldon.
+
+About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water,
+almost, to my brother’s perception, like a water-logged ship. This was
+the ram _Thunder Child_. It was the only warship in sight, but far away
+to the right over the smooth surface of the sea—for that day there was
+a dead calm—lay a serpent of black smoke to mark the next ironclads of
+the Channel Fleet, which hovered in an extended line, steam up and
+ready for action, across the Thames estuary during the course of the
+Martian conquest, vigilant and yet powerless to prevent it.
+
+At the sight of the sea, Mrs. Elphinstone, in spite of the assurances
+of her sister-in-law, gave way to panic. She had never been out of
+England before, she would rather die than trust herself friendless in a
+foreign country, and so forth. She seemed, poor woman, to imagine that
+the French and the Martians might prove very similar. She had been
+growing increasingly hysterical, fearful, and depressed during the two
+days’ journeyings. Her great idea was to return to Stanmore. Things had
+been always well and safe at Stanmore. They would find George at
+Stanmore....
+
+It was with the greatest difficulty they could get her down to the
+beach, where presently my brother succeeded in attracting the attention
+of some men on a paddle steamer from the Thames. They sent a boat and
+drove a bargain for thirty-six pounds for the three. The steamer was
+going, these men said, to Ostend.
+
+It was about two o’clock when my brother, having paid their fares at
+the gangway, found himself safely aboard the steamboat with his
+charges. There was food aboard, albeit at exorbitant prices, and the
+three of them contrived to eat a meal on one of the seats forward.
+
+There were already a couple of score of passengers aboard, some of whom
+had expended their last money in securing a passage, but the captain
+lay off the Blackwater until five in the afternoon, picking up
+passengers until the seated decks were even dangerously crowded. He
+would probably have remained longer had it not been for the sound of
+guns that began about that hour in the south. As if in answer, the
+ironclad seaward fired a small gun and hoisted a string of flags. A jet
+of smoke sprang out of her funnels.
+
+Some of the passengers were of opinion that this firing came from
+Shoeburyness, until it was noticed that it was growing louder. At the
+same time, far away in the southeast the masts and upperworks of three
+ironclads rose one after the other out of the sea, beneath clouds of
+black smoke. But my brother’s attention speedily reverted to the
+distant firing in the south. He fancied he saw a column of smoke rising
+out of the distant grey haze.
+
+The little steamer was already flapping her way eastward of the big
+crescent of shipping, and the low Essex coast was growing blue and
+hazy, when a Martian appeared, small and faint in the remote distance,
+advancing along the muddy coast from the direction of Foulness. At that
+the captain on the bridge swore at the top of his voice with fear and
+anger at his own delay, and the paddles seemed infected with his
+terror. Every soul aboard stood at the bulwarks or on the seats of the
+steamer and stared at that distant shape, higher than the trees or
+church towers inland, and advancing with a leisurely parody of a human
+stride.
+
+It was the first Martian my brother had seen, and he stood, more amazed
+than terrified, watching this Titan advancing deliberately towards the
+shipping, wading farther and farther into the water as the coast fell
+away. Then, far away beyond the Crouch, came another, striding over
+some stunted trees, and then yet another, still farther off, wading
+deeply through a shiny mudflat that seemed to hang halfway up between
+sea and sky. They were all stalking seaward, as if to intercept the
+escape of the multitudinous vessels that were crowded between Foulness
+and the Naze. In spite of the throbbing exertions of the engines of the
+little paddle-boat, and the pouring foam that her wheels flung behind
+her, she receded with terrifying slowness from this ominous advance.
+
+Glancing northwestward, my brother saw the large crescent of shipping
+already writhing with the approaching terror; one ship passing behind
+another, another coming round from broadside to end on, steamships
+whistling and giving off volumes of steam, sails being let out,
+launches rushing hither and thither. He was so fascinated by this and
+by the creeping danger away to the left that he had no eyes for
+anything seaward. And then a swift movement of the steamboat (she had
+suddenly come round to avoid being run down) flung him headlong from
+the seat upon which he was standing. There was a shouting all about
+him, a trampling of feet, and a cheer that seemed to be answered
+faintly. The steamboat lurched and rolled him over upon his hands.
+
+He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards
+from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the blade of a
+plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either side in huge
+waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her paddles
+helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the
+waterline.
+
+A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes were
+clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing landward. Big
+iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin
+funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the
+torpedo ram, _Thunder Child_, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue
+of the threatened shipping.
+
+Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my
+brother looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again, and
+he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far out to
+sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus
+sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less
+formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was
+pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new
+antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the
+giant was even such another as themselves. The _Thunder Child_ fired no
+gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not
+firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did
+not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her
+to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.
+
+She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway
+between the steamboat and the Martians—a diminishing black bulk against
+the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.
+
+Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a
+canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and
+glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding
+torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear. To the
+watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their
+eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the Martians.
+
+They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as
+they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like
+generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and
+a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have driven
+through the iron of the ship’s side like a white-hot iron rod through
+paper.
+
+A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the
+Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and a
+great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the
+_Thunder Child_ sounded through the reek, going off one after the
+other, and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer,
+ricocheted towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a
+smack to matchwood.
+
+But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian’s
+collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the
+crowding passengers on the steamer’s stern shouted together. And then
+they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove
+something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts,
+its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.
+
+She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and her
+engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and was
+within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then with
+a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped
+upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her explosion, and
+in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward with the
+impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing of
+cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of steam
+hid everything again.
+
+“Two!” yelled the captain.
+
+Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end rang with
+frantic cheering that was taken up first by one and then by all in the
+crowding multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to sea.
+
+The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the third
+Martian and the coast altogether. And all this time the boat was
+paddling steadily out to sea and away from the fight; and when at last
+the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour intervened,
+and nothing of the _Thunder Child_ could be made out, nor could the
+third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to seaward were now quite
+close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.
+
+The little vessel continued to beat its way seaward, and the ironclads
+receded slowly towards the coast, which was hidden still by a marbled
+bank of vapour, part steam, part black gas, eddying and combining in
+the strangest way. The fleet of refugees was scattering to the
+northeast; several smacks were sailing between the ironclads and the
+steamboat. After a time, and before they reached the sinking cloud
+bank, the warships turned northward, and then abruptly went about and
+passed into the thickening haze of evening southward. The coast grew
+faint, and at last indistinguishable amid the low banks of clouds that
+were gathering about the sinking sun.
+
+Then suddenly out of the golden haze of the sunset came the vibration
+of guns, and a form of black shadows moving. Everyone struggled to the
+rail of the steamer and peered into the blinding furnace of the west,
+but nothing was to be distinguished clearly. A mass of smoke rose
+slanting and barred the face of the sun. The steamboat throbbed on its
+way through an interminable suspense.
+
+The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the
+evening star trembled into sight. It was deep twilight when the captain
+cried out and pointed. My brother strained his eyes. Something rushed
+up into the sky out of the greyness—rushed slantingly upward and very
+swiftly into the luminous clearness above the clouds in the western
+sky; something flat and broad, and very large, that swept round in a
+vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly, and vanished again into the grey
+mystery of the night. And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the
+land.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK TWO
+THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+UNDER FOOT.
+
+
+In the first book I have wandered so much from my own adventures to
+tell of the experiences of my brother that all through the last two
+chapters I and the curate have been lurking in the empty house at
+Halliford whither we fled to escape the Black Smoke. There I will
+resume. We stopped there all Sunday night and all the next day—the day
+of the panic—in a little island of daylight, cut off by the Black Smoke
+from the rest of the world. We could do nothing but wait in aching
+inactivity during those two weary days.
+
+My mind was occupied by anxiety for my wife. I figured her at
+Leatherhead, terrified, in danger, mourning me already as a dead man. I
+paced the rooms and cried aloud when I thought of how I was cut off
+from her, of all that might happen to her in my absence. My cousin I
+knew was brave enough for any emergency, but he was not the sort of man
+to realise danger quickly, to rise promptly. What was needed now was
+not bravery, but circumspection. My only consolation was to believe
+that the Martians were moving Londonward and away from her. Such vague
+anxieties keep the mind sensitive and painful. I grew very weary and
+irritable with the curate’s perpetual ejaculations; I tired of the
+sight of his selfish despair. After some ineffectual remonstrance I
+kept away from him, staying in a room—evidently a children’s
+schoolroom—containing globes, forms, and copybooks. When he followed me
+thither, I went to a box room at the top of the house and, in order to
+be alone with my aching miseries, locked myself in.
+
+We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day and the
+morning of the next. There were signs of people in the next house on
+Sunday evening—a face at a window and moving lights, and later the
+slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people were, nor what
+became of them. We saw nothing of them next day. The Black Smoke
+drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer
+and nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway outside the house
+that hid us.
+
+A Martian came across the fields about midday, laying the stuff with a
+jet of superheated steam that hissed against the walls, smashed all the
+windows it touched, and scalded the curate’s hand as he fled out of the
+front room. When at last we crept across the sodden rooms and looked
+out again, the country northward was as though a black snowstorm had
+passed over it. Looking towards the river, we were astonished to see an
+unaccountable redness mingling with the black of the scorched meadows.
+
+For a time we did not see how this change affected our position, save
+that we were relieved of our fear of the Black Smoke. But later I
+perceived that we were no longer hemmed in, that now we might get away.
+So soon as I realised that the way of escape was open, my dream of
+action returned. But the curate was lethargic, unreasonable.
+
+“We are safe here,” he repeated; “safe here.”
+
+I resolved to leave him—would that I had! Wiser now for the
+artilleryman’s teaching, I sought out food and drink. I had found oil
+and rags for my burns, and I also took a hat and a flannel shirt that I
+found in one of the bedrooms. When it was clear to him that I meant to
+go alone—had reconciled myself to going alone—he suddenly roused
+himself to come. And all being quiet throughout the afternoon, we
+started about five o’clock, as I should judge, along the blackened road
+to Sunbury.
+
+In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies lying in
+contorted attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts and
+luggage, all covered thickly with black dust. That pall of cindery
+powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of Pompeii.
+We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full of strange
+and unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were relieved
+to find a patch of green that had escaped the suffocating drift. We
+went through Bushey Park, with its deer going to and fro under the
+chestnuts, and some men and women hurrying in the distance towards
+Hampton, and so we came to Twickenham. These were the first people we
+saw.
+
+Away across the road the woods beyond Ham and Petersham were still
+afire. Twickenham was uninjured by either Heat-Ray or Black Smoke, and
+there were more people about here, though none could give us news. For
+the most part they were like ourselves, taking advantage of a lull to
+shift their quarters. I have an impression that many of the houses here
+were still occupied by scared inhabitants, too frightened even for
+flight. Here too the evidence of a hasty rout was abundant along the
+road. I remember most vividly three smashed bicycles in a heap, pounded
+into the road by the wheels of subsequent carts. We crossed Richmond
+Bridge about half past eight. We hurried across the exposed bridge, of
+course, but I noticed floating down the stream a number of red masses,
+some many feet across. I did not know what these were—there was no time
+for scrutiny—and I put a more horrible interpretation on them than they
+deserved. Here again on the Surrey side were black dust that had once
+been smoke, and dead bodies—a heap near the approach to the station;
+but we had no glimpse of the Martians until we were some way towards
+Barnes.
+
+We saw in the blackened distance a group of three people running down a
+side street towards the river, but otherwise it seemed deserted. Up the
+hill Richmond town was burning briskly; outside the town of Richmond
+there was no trace of the Black Smoke.
+
+Then suddenly, as we approached Kew, came a number of people running,
+and the upperworks of a Martian fighting-machine loomed in sight over
+the housetops, not a hundred yards away from us. We stood aghast at our
+danger, and had the Martian looked down we must immediately have
+perished. We were so terrified that we dared not go on, but turned
+aside and hid in a shed in a garden. There the curate crouched, weeping
+silently, and refusing to stir again.
+
+But my fixed idea of reaching Leatherhead would not let me rest, and in
+the twilight I ventured out again. I went through a shrubbery, and
+along a passage beside a big house standing in its own grounds, and so
+emerged upon the road towards Kew. The curate I left in the shed, but
+he came hurrying after me.
+
+That second start was the most foolhardy thing I ever did. For it was
+manifest the Martians were about us. No sooner had the curate overtaken
+me than we saw either the fighting-machine we had seen before or
+another, far away across the meadows in the direction of Kew Lodge.
+Four or five little black figures hurried before it across the
+green-grey of the field, and in a moment it was evident this Martian
+pursued them. In three strides he was among them, and they ran
+radiating from his feet in all directions. He used no Heat-Ray to
+destroy them, but picked them up one by one. Apparently he tossed them
+into the great metallic carrier which projected behind him, much as a
+workman’s basket hangs over his shoulder.
+
+It was the first time I realised that the Martians might have any other
+purpose than destruction with defeated humanity. We stood for a moment
+petrified, then turned and fled through a gate behind us into a walled
+garden, fell into, rather than found, a fortunate ditch, and lay there,
+scarce daring to whisper to each other until the stars were out.
+
+I suppose it was nearly eleven o’clock before we gathered courage to
+start again, no longer venturing into the road, but sneaking along
+hedgerows and through plantations, and watching keenly through the
+darkness, he on the right and I on the left, for the Martians, who
+seemed to be all about us. In one place we blundered upon a scorched
+and blackened area, now cooling and ashen, and a number of scattered
+dead bodies of men, burned horribly about the heads and trunks but with
+their legs and boots mostly intact; and of dead horses, fifty feet,
+perhaps, behind a line of four ripped guns and smashed gun carriages.
+
+Sheen, it seemed, had escaped destruction, but the place was silent and
+deserted. Here we happened on no dead, though the night was too dark
+for us to see into the side roads of the place. In Sheen my companion
+suddenly complained of faintness and thirst, and we decided to try one
+of the houses.
+
+The first house we entered, after a little difficulty with the window,
+was a small semi-detached villa, and I found nothing eatable left in
+the place but some mouldy cheese. There was, however, water to drink;
+and I took a hatchet, which promised to be useful in our next
+house-breaking.
+
+We then crossed to a place where the road turns towards Mortlake. Here
+there stood a white house within a walled garden, and in the pantry of
+this domicile we found a store of food—two loaves of bread in a pan, an
+uncooked steak, and the half of a ham. I give this catalogue so
+precisely because, as it happened, we were destined to subsist upon
+this store for the next fortnight. Bottled beer stood under a shelf,
+and there were two bags of haricot beans and some limp lettuces. This
+pantry opened into a kind of wash-up kitchen, and in this was firewood;
+there was also a cupboard, in which we found nearly a dozen of
+burgundy, tinned soups and salmon, and two tins of biscuits.
+
+We sat in the adjacent kitchen in the dark—for we dared not strike a
+light—and ate bread and ham, and drank beer out of the same bottle. The
+curate, who was still timorous and restless, was now, oddly enough, for
+pushing on, and I was urging him to keep up his strength by eating when
+the thing happened that was to imprison us.
+
+“It can’t be midnight yet,” I said, and then came a blinding glare of
+vivid green light. Everything in the kitchen leaped out, clearly
+visible in green and black, and vanished again. And then followed such
+a concussion as I have never heard before or since. So close on the
+heels of this as to seem instantaneous came a thud behind me, a clash
+of glass, a crash and rattle of falling masonry all about us, and the
+plaster of the ceiling came down upon us, smashing into a multitude of
+fragments upon our heads. I was knocked headlong across the floor
+against the oven handle and stunned. I was insensible for a long time,
+the curate told me, and when I came to we were in darkness again, and
+he, with a face wet, as I found afterwards, with blood from a cut
+forehead, was dabbing water over me.
+
+For some time I could not recollect what had happened. Then things came
+to me slowly. A bruise on my temple asserted itself.
+
+“Are you better?” asked the curate in a whisper.
+
+At last I answered him. I sat up.
+
+“Don’t move,” he said. “The floor is covered with smashed crockery from
+the dresser. You can’t possibly move without making a noise, and I
+fancy _they_ are outside.”
+
+We both sat quite silent, so that we could scarcely hear each other
+breathing. Everything seemed deadly still, but once something near us,
+some plaster or broken brickwork, slid down with a rumbling sound.
+Outside and very near was an intermittent, metallic rattle.
+
+“That!” said the curate, when presently it happened again.
+
+“Yes,” I said. “But what is it?”
+
+“A Martian!” said the curate.
+
+I listened again.
+
+“It was not like the Heat-Ray,” I said, and for a time I was inclined
+to think one of the great fighting-machines had stumbled against the
+house, as I had seen one stumble against the tower of Shepperton
+Church.
+
+Our situation was so strange and incomprehensible that for three or
+four hours, until the dawn came, we scarcely moved. And then the light
+filtered in, not through the window, which remained black, but through
+a triangular aperture between a beam and a heap of broken bricks in the
+wall behind us. The interior of the kitchen we now saw greyly for the
+first time.
+
+The window had been burst in by a mass of garden mould, which flowed
+over the table upon which we had been sitting and lay about our feet.
+Outside, the soil was banked high against the house. At the top of the
+window frame we could see an uprooted drainpipe. The floor was littered
+with smashed hardware; the end of the kitchen towards the house was
+broken into, and since the daylight shone in there, it was evident the
+greater part of the house had collapsed. Contrasting vividly with this
+ruin was the neat dresser, stained in the fashion, pale green, and with
+a number of copper and tin vessels below it, the wallpaper imitating
+blue and white tiles, and a couple of coloured supplements fluttering
+from the walls above the kitchen range.
+
+As the dawn grew clearer, we saw through the gap in the wall the body
+of a Martian, standing sentinel, I suppose, over the still glowing
+cylinder. At the sight of that we crawled as circumspectly as possible
+out of the twilight of the kitchen into the darkness of the scullery.
+
+Abruptly the right interpretation dawned upon my mind.
+
+“The fifth cylinder,” I whispered, “the fifth shot from Mars, has
+struck this house and buried us under the ruins!”
+
+For a time the curate was silent, and then he whispered:
+
+“God have mercy upon us!”
+
+I heard him presently whimpering to himself.
+
+Save for that sound we lay quite still in the scullery; I for my part
+scarce dared breathe, and sat with my eyes fixed on the faint light of
+the kitchen door. I could just see the curate’s face, a dim, oval
+shape, and his collar and cuffs. Outside there began a metallic
+hammering, then a violent hooting, and then again, after a quiet
+interval, a hissing like the hissing of an engine. These noises, for
+the most part problematical, continued intermittently, and seemed if
+anything to increase in number as time wore on. Presently a measured
+thudding and a vibration that made everything about us quiver and the
+vessels in the pantry ring and shift, began and continued. Once the
+light was eclipsed, and the ghostly kitchen doorway became absolutely
+dark. For many hours we must have crouched there, silent and shivering,
+until our tired attention failed. . . .
+
+At last I found myself awake and very hungry. I am inclined to believe
+we must have spent the greater portion of a day before that awakening.
+My hunger was at a stride so insistent that it moved me to action. I
+told the curate I was going to seek food, and felt my way towards the
+pantry. He made me no answer, but so soon as I began eating the faint
+noise I made stirred him up and I heard him crawling after me.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE.
+
+
+After eating we crept back to the scullery, and there I must have dozed
+again, for when presently I looked round I was alone. The thudding
+vibration continued with wearisome persistence. I whispered for the
+curate several times, and at last felt my way to the door of the
+kitchen. It was still daylight, and I perceived him across the room,
+lying against the triangular hole that looked out upon the Martians.
+His shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hidden from me.
+
+I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an engine shed;
+and the place rocked with that beating thud. Through the aperture in
+the wall I could see the top of a tree touched with gold and the warm
+blue of a tranquil evening sky. For a minute or so I remained watching
+the curate, and then I advanced, crouching and stepping with extreme
+care amid the broken crockery that littered the floor.
+
+I touched the curate’s leg, and he started so violently that a mass of
+plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a loud impact. I
+gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out, and for a long time we
+crouched motionless. Then I turned to see how much of our rampart
+remained. The detachment of the plaster had left a vertical slit open
+in the debris, and by raising myself cautiously across a beam I was
+able to see out of this gap into what had been overnight a quiet
+suburban roadway. Vast, indeed, was the change that we beheld.
+
+The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the house
+we had first visited. The building had vanished, completely smashed,
+pulverised, and dispersed by the blow. The cylinder lay now far beneath
+the original foundations—deep in a hole, already vastly larger than the
+pit I had looked into at Woking. The earth all round it had splashed
+under that tremendous impact—“splashed” is the only word—and lay in
+heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent houses. It had behaved
+exactly like mud under the violent blow of a hammer. Our house had
+collapsed backward; the front portion, even on the ground floor, had
+been destroyed completely; by a chance the kitchen and scullery had
+escaped, and stood buried now under soil and ruins, closed in by tons
+of earth on every side save towards the cylinder. Over that aspect we
+hung now on the very edge of the great circular pit the Martians were
+engaged in making. The heavy beating sound was evidently just behind
+us, and ever and again a bright green vapour drove up like a veil
+across our peephole.
+
+The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on the
+farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped shrubbery,
+one of the great fighting-machines, deserted by its occupant, stood
+stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I scarcely noticed the
+pit and the cylinder, although it has been convenient to describe them
+first, on account of the extraordinary glittering mechanism I saw busy
+in the excavation, and on account of the strange creatures that were
+crawling slowly and painfully across the heaped mould near it.
+
+The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It was one
+of those complicated fabrics that have since been called
+handling-machines, and the study of which has already given such an
+enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As it dawned upon me first,
+it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs,
+and with an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching
+and clutching tentacles about its body. Most of its arms were
+retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fishing out a number of
+rods, plates, and bars which lined the covering and apparently
+strengthened the walls of the cylinder. These, as it extracted them,
+were lifted out and deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it.
+
+Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did not
+see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. The
+fighting-machines were coordinated and animated to an extraordinary
+pitch, but nothing to compare with this. People who have never seen
+these structures, and have only the ill-imagined efforts of artists or
+the imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go upon,
+scarcely realise that living quality.
+
+I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to
+give a consecutive account of the war. The artist had evidently made a
+hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and there his knowledge
+ended. He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either
+flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading monotony of
+effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings had a considerable
+vogue, and I mention them here simply to warn the reader against the
+impression they may have created. They were no more like the Martians I
+saw in action than a Dutch doll is like a human being. To my mind, the
+pamphlet would have been much better without them.
+
+At first, I say, the handling-machine did not impress me as a machine,
+but as a crablike creature with a glittering integument, the
+controlling Martian whose delicate tentacles actuated its movements
+seeming to be simply the equivalent of the crab’s cerebral portion. But
+then I perceived the resemblance of its grey-brown, shiny, leathery
+integument to that of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and the true
+nature of this dexterous workman dawned upon me. With that realisation
+my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real Martians.
+Already I had had a transient impression of these, and the first nausea
+no longer obscured my observation. Moreover, I was concealed and
+motionless, and under no urgency of action.
+
+They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to
+conceive. They were huge round bodies—or, rather, heads—about four feet
+in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no
+nostrils—indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of
+smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just
+beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body—I
+scarcely know how to speak of it—was the single tight tympanic surface,
+since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost
+useless in our dense air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen
+slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight
+each. These bunches have since been named rather aptly, by that
+distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, the _hands_. Even as I saw
+these Martians for the first time they seemed to be endeavouring to
+raise themselves on these hands, but of course, with the increased
+weight of terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There is reason
+to suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon them with some
+facility.
+
+The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since shown,
+was almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure was the
+brain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles.
+Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the
+heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused by the denser
+atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was only too evident in
+the convulsive movements of the outer skin.
+
+And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as it may seem to a
+human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the
+bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were
+heads—merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less
+digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures,
+and _injected_ it into their own veins. I have myself seen this being
+done, as I shall mention in its place. But, squeamish as I may seem, I
+cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure even to
+continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still
+living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by
+means of a little pipette into the recipient canal. . . .
+
+The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the
+same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous
+habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.
+
+The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are
+undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and
+energy occasioned by eating and the digestive process. Our bodies are
+half made up of glands and tubes and organs, occupied in turning
+heterogeneous food into blood. The digestive processes and their
+reaction upon the nervous system sap our strength and colour our minds.
+Men go happy or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy livers, or
+sound gastric glands. But the Martians were lifted above all these
+organic fluctuations of mood and emotion.
+
+Their undeniable preference for men as their source of nourishment is
+partly explained by the nature of the remains of the victims they had
+brought with them as provisions from Mars. These creatures, to judge
+from the shrivelled remains that have fallen into human hands, were
+bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost like those of the
+silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet high
+and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets. Two or
+three of these seem to have been brought in each cylinder, and all were
+killed before earth was reached. It was just as well for them, for the
+mere attempt to stand upright upon our planet would have broken every
+bone in their bodies.
+
+And while I am engaged in this description, I may add in this place
+certain further details which, although they were not all evident to us
+at the time, will enable the reader who is unacquainted with them to
+form a clearer picture of these offensive creatures.
+
+In three other points their physiology differed strangely from ours.
+Their organisms did not sleep, any more than the heart of man sleeps.
+Since they had no extensive muscular mechanism to recuperate, that
+periodical extinction was unknown to them. They had little or no sense
+of fatigue, it would seem. On earth they could never have moved without
+effort, yet even to the last they kept in action. In twenty-four hours
+they did twenty-four hours of work, as even on earth is perhaps the
+case with the ants.
+
+In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the
+Martians were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the
+tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference among men. A young
+Martian, there can now be no dispute, was really born upon earth during
+the war, and it was found attached to its parent, partially _budded_
+off, just as young lilybulbs bud off, or like the young animals in the
+fresh-water polyp.
+
+In man, in all the higher terrestrial animals, such a method of
+increase has disappeared; but even on this earth it was certainly the
+primitive method. Among the lower animals, up even to those first
+cousins of the vertebrated animals, the Tunicates, the two processes
+occur side by side, but finally the sexual method superseded its
+competitor altogether. On Mars, however, just the reverse has
+apparently been the case.
+
+It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of
+quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the Martian invasion, did
+forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual Martian
+condition. His prophecy, I remember, appeared in November or December,
+1893, in a long-defunct publication, the _Pall Mall Budget_, and I
+recall a caricature of it in a pre-Martian periodical called _Punch_.
+He pointed out—writing in a foolish, facetious tone—that the perfection
+of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the
+perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair,
+external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of
+the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie
+in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages.
+The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part of
+the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the hand,
+“teacher and agent of the brain.” While the rest of the body dwindled,
+the hands would grow larger.
+
+There is many a true word written in jest, and here in the Martians we
+have beyond dispute the actual accomplishment of such a suppression of
+the animal side of the organism by the intelligence. To me it is quite
+credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike
+ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the latter
+giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at the
+expense of the rest of the body. Without the body the brain would, of
+course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the
+emotional substratum of the human being.
+
+The last salient point in which the systems of these creatures differed
+from ours was in what one might have thought a very trivial particular.
+Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease and pain on earth, have
+either never appeared upon Mars or Martian sanitary science eliminated
+them ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the fevers and contagions of
+human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such morbidities, never
+enter the scheme of their life. And speaking of the differences between
+the life on Mars and terrestrial life, I may allude here to the curious
+suggestions of the red weed.
+
+Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green for a
+dominant colour, is of a vivid blood-red tint. At any rate, the seeds
+which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally) brought with them
+gave rise in all cases to red-coloured growths. Only that known
+popularly as the red weed, however, gained any footing in competition
+with terrestrial forms. The red creeper was quite a transitory growth,
+and few people have seen it growing. For a time, however, the red weed
+grew with astonishing vigour and luxuriance. It spread up the sides of
+the pit by the third or fourth day of our imprisonment, and its
+cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe to the edges of our
+triangular window. And afterwards I found it broadcast throughout the
+country, and especially wherever there was a stream of water.
+
+The Martians had what appears to have been an auditory organ, a single
+round drum at the back of the head-body, and eyes with a visual range
+not very different from ours except that, according to Philips, blue
+and violet were as black to them. It is commonly supposed that they
+communicated by sounds and tentacular gesticulations; this is asserted,
+for instance, in the able but hastily compiled pamphlet (written
+evidently by someone not an eye-witness of Martian actions) to which I
+have already alluded, and which, so far, has been the chief source of
+information concerning them. Now no surviving human being saw so much
+of the Martians in action as I did. I take no credit to myself for an
+accident, but the fact is so. And I assert that I watched them closely
+time after time, and that I have seen four, five, and (once) six of
+them sluggishly performing the most elaborately complicated operations
+together without either sound or gesture. Their peculiar hooting
+invariably preceded feeding; it had no modulation, and was, I believe,
+in no sense a signal, but merely the expiration of air preparatory to
+the suctional operation. I have a certain claim to at least an
+elementary knowledge of psychology, and in this matter I am
+convinced—as firmly as I am convinced of anything—that the Martians
+interchanged thoughts without any physical intermediation. And I have
+been convinced of this in spite of strong preconceptions. Before the
+Martian invasion, as an occasional reader here or there may remember, I
+had written with some little vehemence against the telepathic theory.
+
+The Martians wore no clothing. Their conceptions of ornament and
+decorum were necessarily different from ours; and not only were they
+evidently much less sensible of changes of temperature than we are, but
+changes of pressure do not seem to have affected their health at all
+seriously. Yet though they wore no clothing, it was in the other
+artificial additions to their bodily resources that their great
+superiority over man lay. We men, with our bicycles and road-skates,
+our Lilienthal soaring-machines, our guns and sticks and so forth, are
+just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked
+out. They have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies
+according to their needs just as men wear suits of clothes and take a
+bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the wet. And of their appliances,
+perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the curious fact that
+what is the dominant feature of almost all human devices in mechanism
+is absent—the _wheel_ is absent; among all the things they brought to
+earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels. One would
+have at least expected it in locomotion. And in this connection it is
+curious to remark that even on this earth Nature has never hit upon the
+wheel, or has preferred other expedients to its development. And not
+only did the Martians either not know of (which is incredible), or
+abstain from, the wheel, but in their apparatus singularly little use
+is made of the fixed pivot or relatively fixed pivot, with circular
+motions thereabout confined to one plane. Almost all the joints of the
+machinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over
+small but beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this
+matter of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their
+machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of
+the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn
+closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of
+electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions,
+which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was
+attained. Such quasi-muscles abounded in the crablike handling-machine
+which, on my first peeping out of the slit, I watched unpacking the
+cylinder. It seemed infinitely more alive than the actual Martians
+lying beyond it in the sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual
+tentacles, and moving feebly after their vast journey across space.
+
+While I was still watching their sluggish motions in the sunlight, and
+noting each strange detail of their form, the curate reminded me of his
+presence by pulling violently at my arm. I turned to a scowling face,
+and silent, eloquent lips. He wanted the slit, which permitted only one
+of us to peep through; and so I had to forego watching them for a time
+while he enjoyed that privilege.
+
+When I looked again, the busy handling-machine had already put together
+several of the pieces of apparatus it had taken out of the cylinder
+into a shape having an unmistakable likeness to its own; and down on
+the left a busy little digging mechanism had come into view, emitting
+jets of green vapour and working its way round the pit, excavating and
+embanking in a methodical and discriminating manner. This it was which
+had caused the regular beating noise, and the rhythmic shocks that had
+kept our ruinous refuge quivering. It piped and whistled as it worked.
+So far as I could see, the thing was without a directing Martian at
+all.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+THE DAYS OF IMPRISONMENT.
+
+
+The arrival of a second fighting-machine drove us from our peephole
+into the scullery, for we feared that from his elevation the Martian
+might see down upon us behind our barrier. At a later date we began to
+feel less in danger of their eyes, for to an eye in the dazzle of the
+sunlight outside our refuge must have been blank blackness, but at
+first the slightest suggestion of approach drove us into the scullery
+in heart-throbbing retreat. Yet terrible as was the danger we incurred,
+the attraction of peeping was for both of us irresistible. And I recall
+now with a sort of wonder that, in spite of the infinite danger in
+which we were between starvation and a still more terrible death, we
+could yet struggle bitterly for that horrible privilege of sight. We
+would race across the kitchen in a grotesque way between eagerness and
+the dread of making a noise, and strike each other, and thrust and
+kick, within a few inches of exposure.
+
+The fact is that we had absolutely incompatible dispositions and habits
+of thought and action, and our danger and isolation only accentuated
+the incompatibility. At Halliford I had already come to hate the
+curate’s trick of helpless exclamation, his stupid rigidity of mind.
+His endless muttering monologue vitiated every effort I made to think
+out a line of action, and drove me at times, thus pent up and
+intensified, almost to the verge of craziness. He was as lacking in
+restraint as a silly woman. He would weep for hours together, and I
+verily believe that to the very end this spoiled child of life thought
+his weak tears in some way efficacious. And I would sit in the darkness
+unable to keep my mind off him by reason of his importunities. He ate
+more than I did, and it was in vain I pointed out that our only chance
+of life was to stop in the house until the Martians had done with their
+pit, that in that long patience a time might presently come when we
+should need food. He ate and drank impulsively in heavy meals at long
+intervals. He slept little.
+
+As the days wore on, his utter carelessness of any consideration so
+intensified our distress and danger that I had, much as I loathed doing
+it, to resort to threats, and at last to blows. That brought him to
+reason for a time. But he was one of those weak creatures, void of
+pride, timorous, anæmic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who
+face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves.
+
+It is disagreeable for me to recall and write these things, but I set
+them down that my story may lack nothing. Those who have escaped the
+dark and terrible aspects of life will find my brutality, my flash of
+rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they know what is
+wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But
+those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to
+elemental things, will have a wider charity.
+
+And while within we fought out our dark, dim contest of whispers,
+snatched food and drink, and gripping hands and blows, without, in the
+pitiless sunlight of that terrible June, was the strange wonder, the
+unfamiliar routine of the Martians in the pit. Let me return to those
+first new experiences of mine. After a long time I ventured back to the
+peephole, to find that the new-comers had been reinforced by the
+occupants of no fewer than three of the fighting-machines. These last
+had brought with them certain fresh appliances that stood in an orderly
+manner about the cylinder. The second handling-machine was now
+completed, and was busied in serving one of the novel contrivances the
+big machine had brought. This was a body resembling a milk can in its
+general form, above which oscillated a pear-shaped receptacle, and from
+which a stream of white powder flowed into a circular basin below.
+
+The oscillatory motion was imparted to this by one tentacle of the
+handling-machine. With two spatulate hands the handling-machine was
+digging out and flinging masses of clay into the pear-shaped receptacle
+above, while with another arm it periodically opened a door and removed
+rusty and blackened clinkers from the middle part of the machine.
+Another steely tentacle directed the powder from the basin along a
+ribbed channel towards some receiver that was hidden from me by the
+mound of bluish dust. From this unseen receiver a little thread of
+green smoke rose vertically into the quiet air. As I looked, the
+handling-machine, with a faint and musical clinking, extended,
+telescopic fashion, a tentacle that had been a moment before a mere
+blunt projection, until its end was hidden behind the mound of clay. In
+another second it had lifted a bar of white aluminium into sight,
+untarnished as yet, and shining dazzlingly, and deposited it in a
+growing stack of bars that stood at the side of the pit. Between sunset
+and starlight this dexterous machine must have made more than a hundred
+such bars out of the crude clay, and the mound of bluish dust rose
+steadily until it topped the side of the pit.
+
+The contrast between the swift and complex movements of these
+contrivances and the inert panting clumsiness of their masters was
+acute, and for days I had to tell myself repeatedly that these latter
+were indeed the living of the two things.
+
+The curate had possession of the slit when the first men were brought
+to the pit. I was sitting below, huddled up, listening with all my
+ears. He made a sudden movement backward, and I, fearful that we were
+observed, crouched in a spasm of terror. He came sliding down the
+rubbish and crept beside me in the darkness, inarticulate,
+gesticulating, and for a moment I shared his panic. His gesture
+suggested a resignation of the slit, and after a little while my
+curiosity gave me courage, and I rose up, stepped across him, and
+clambered up to it. At first I could see no reason for his frantic
+behaviour. The twilight had now come, the stars were little and faint,
+but the pit was illuminated by the flickering green fire that came from
+the aluminium-making. The whole picture was a flickering scheme of
+green gleams and shifting rusty black shadows, strangely trying to the
+eyes. Over and through it all went the bats, heeding it not at all. The
+sprawling Martians were no longer to be seen, the mound of blue-green
+powder had risen to cover them from sight, and a fighting-machine, with
+its legs contracted, crumpled, and abbreviated, stood across the corner
+of the pit. And then, amid the clangour of the machinery, came a
+drifting suspicion of human voices, that I entertained at first only to
+dismiss.
+
+I crouched, watching this fighting-machine closely, satisfying myself
+now for the first time that the hood did indeed contain a Martian. As
+the green flames lifted I could see the oily gleam of his integument
+and the brightness of his eyes. And suddenly I heard a yell, and saw a
+long tentacle reaching over the shoulder of the machine to the little
+cage that hunched upon its back. Then something—something struggling
+violently—was lifted high against the sky, a black, vague enigma
+against the starlight; and as this black object came down again, I saw
+by the green brightness that it was a man. For an instant he was
+clearly visible. He was a stout, ruddy, middle-aged man, well dressed;
+three days before, he must have been walking the world, a man of
+considerable consequence. I could see his staring eyes and gleams of
+light on his studs and watch chain. He vanished behind the mound, and
+for a moment there was silence. And then began a shrieking and a
+sustained and cheerful hooting from the Martians.
+
+I slid down the rubbish, struggled to my feet, clapped my hands over my
+ears, and bolted into the scullery. The curate, who had been crouching
+silently with his arms over his head, looked up as I passed, cried out
+quite loudly at my desertion of him, and came running after me.
+
+That night, as we lurked in the scullery, balanced between our horror
+and the terrible fascination this peeping had, although I felt an
+urgent need of action I tried in vain to conceive some plan of escape;
+but afterwards, during the second day, I was able to consider our
+position with great clearness. The curate, I found, was quite incapable
+of discussion; this new and culminating atrocity had robbed him of all
+vestiges of reason or forethought. Practically he had already sunk to
+the level of an animal. But as the saying goes, I gripped myself with
+both hands. It grew upon my mind, once I could face the facts, that
+terrible as our position was, there was as yet no justification for
+absolute despair. Our chief chance lay in the possibility of the
+Martians making the pit nothing more than a temporary encampment. Or
+even if they kept it permanently, they might not consider it necessary
+to guard it, and a chance of escape might be afforded us. I also
+weighed very carefully the possibility of our digging a way out in a
+direction away from the pit, but the chances of our emerging within
+sight of some sentinel fighting-machine seemed at first too great. And
+I should have had to do all the digging myself. The curate would
+certainly have failed me.
+
+It was on the third day, if my memory serves me right, that I saw the
+lad killed. It was the only occasion on which I actually saw the
+Martians feed. After that experience I avoided the hole in the wall for
+the better part of a day. I went into the scullery, removed the door,
+and spent some hours digging with my hatchet as silently as possible;
+but when I had made a hole about a couple of feet deep the loose earth
+collapsed noisily, and I did not dare continue. I lost heart, and lay
+down on the scullery floor for a long time, having no spirit even to
+move. And after that I abandoned altogether the idea of escaping by
+excavation.
+
+It says much for the impression the Martians had made upon me that at
+first I entertained little or no hope of our escape being brought about
+by their overthrow through any human effort. But on the fourth or fifth
+night I heard a sound like heavy guns.
+
+It was very late in the night, and the moon was shining brightly. The
+Martians had taken away the excavating-machine, and, save for a
+fighting-machine that stood in the remoter bank of the pit and a
+handling-machine that was buried out of my sight in a corner of the pit
+immediately beneath my peephole, the place was deserted by them. Except
+for the pale glow from the handling-machine and the bars and patches of
+white moonlight the pit was in darkness, and, except for the clinking
+of the handling-machine, quite still. That night was a beautiful
+serenity; save for one planet, the moon seemed to have the sky to
+herself. I heard a dog howling, and that familiar sound it was that
+made me listen. Then I heard quite distinctly a booming exactly like
+the sound of great guns. Six distinct reports I counted, and after a
+long interval six again. And that was all.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+THE DEATH OF THE CURATE.
+
+
+It was on the sixth day of our imprisonment that I peeped for the last
+time, and presently found myself alone. Instead of keeping close to me
+and trying to oust me from the slit, the curate had gone back into the
+scullery. I was struck by a sudden thought. I went back quickly and
+quietly into the scullery. In the darkness I heard the curate drinking.
+I snatched in the darkness, and my fingers caught a bottle of burgundy.
+
+For a few minutes there was a tussle. The bottle struck the floor and
+broke, and I desisted and rose. We stood panting and threatening each
+other. In the end I planted myself between him and the food, and told
+him of my determination to begin a discipline. I divided the food in
+the pantry, into rations to last us ten days. I would not let him eat
+any more that day. In the afternoon he made a feeble effort to get at
+the food. I had been dozing, but in an instant I was awake. All day and
+all night we sat face to face, I weary but resolute, and he weeping and
+complaining of his immediate hunger. It was, I know, a night and a day,
+but to me it seemed—it seems now—an interminable length of time.
+
+And so our widened incompatibility ended at last in open conflict. For
+two vast days we struggled in undertones and wrestling contests. There
+were times when I beat and kicked him madly, times when I cajoled and
+persuaded him, and once I tried to bribe him with the last bottle of
+burgundy, for there was a rain-water pump from which I could get water.
+But neither force nor kindness availed; he was indeed beyond reason. He
+would neither desist from his attacks on the food nor from his noisy
+babbling to himself. The rudimentary precautions to keep our
+imprisonment endurable he would not observe. Slowly I began to realise
+the complete overthrow of his intelligence, to perceive that my sole
+companion in this close and sickly darkness was a man insane.
+
+From certain vague memories I am inclined to think my own mind wandered
+at times. I had strange and hideous dreams whenever I slept. It sounds
+paradoxical, but I am inclined to think that the weakness and insanity
+of the curate warned me, braced me, and kept me a sane man.
+
+On the eighth day he began to talk aloud instead of whispering, and
+nothing I could do would moderate his speech.
+
+“It is just, O God!” he would say, over and over again. “It is just. On
+me and mine be the punishment laid. We have sinned, we have fallen
+short. There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in the dust,
+and I held my peace. I preached acceptable folly—my God, what
+folly!—when I should have stood up, though I died for it, and called
+upon them to repent—repent! . . . Oppressors of the poor and needy . .
+. ! The wine press of God!”
+
+Then he would suddenly revert to the matter of the food I withheld from
+him, praying, begging, weeping, at last threatening. He began to raise
+his voice—I prayed him not to. He perceived a hold on me—he threatened
+he would shout and bring the Martians upon us. For a time that scared
+me; but any concession would have shortened our chance of escape beyond
+estimating. I defied him, although I felt no assurance that he might
+not do this thing. But that day, at any rate, he did not. He talked
+with his voice rising slowly, through the greater part of the eighth
+and ninth days—threats, entreaties, mingled with a torrent of half-sane
+and always frothy repentance for his vacant sham of God’s service, such
+as made me pity him. Then he slept awhile, and began again with renewed
+strength, so loudly that I must needs make him desist.
+
+“Be still!” I implored.
+
+He rose to his knees, for he had been sitting in the darkness near the
+copper.
+
+“I have been still too long,” he said, in a tone that must have reached
+the pit, “and now I must bear my witness. Woe unto this unfaithful
+city! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! To the inhabitants of the earth by
+reason of the other voices of the trumpet——”
+
+“Shut up!” I said, rising to my feet, and in a terror lest the Martians
+should hear us. “For God’s sake——”
+
+“Nay,” shouted the curate, at the top of his voice, standing likewise
+and extending his arms. “Speak! The word of the Lord is upon me!”
+
+In three strides he was at the door leading into the kitchen.
+
+“I must bear my witness! I go! It has already been too long delayed.”
+
+I put out my hand and felt the meat chopper hanging to the wall. In a
+flash I was after him. I was fierce with fear. Before he was halfway
+across the kitchen I had overtaken him. With one last touch of humanity
+I turned the blade back and struck him with the butt. He went headlong
+forward and lay stretched on the ground. I stumbled over him and stood
+panting. He lay still.
+
+Suddenly I heard a noise without, the run and smash of slipping
+plaster, and the triangular aperture in the wall was darkened. I looked
+up and saw the lower surface of a handling-machine coming slowly across
+the hole. One of its gripping limbs curled amid the debris; another
+limb appeared, feeling its way over the fallen beams. I stood
+petrified, staring. Then I saw through a sort of glass plate near the
+edge of the body the face, as we may call it, and the large dark eyes
+of a Martian, peering, and then a long metallic snake of tentacle came
+feeling slowly through the hole.
+
+I turned by an effort, stumbled over the curate, and stopped at the
+scullery door. The tentacle was now some way, two yards or more, in the
+room, and twisting and turning, with queer sudden movements, this way
+and that. For a while I stood fascinated by that slow, fitful advance.
+Then, with a faint, hoarse cry, I forced myself across the scullery. I
+trembled violently; I could scarcely stand upright. I opened the door
+of the coal cellar, and stood there in the darkness staring at the
+faintly lit doorway into the kitchen, and listening. Had the Martian
+seen me? What was it doing now?
+
+Something was moving to and fro there, very quietly; every now and then
+it tapped against the wall, or started on its movements with a faint
+metallic ringing, like the movements of keys on a split-ring. Then a
+heavy body—I knew too well what—was dragged across the floor of the
+kitchen towards the opening. Irresistibly attracted, I crept to the
+door and peeped into the kitchen. In the triangle of bright outer
+sunlight I saw the Martian, in its Briareus of a handling-machine,
+scrutinizing the curate’s head. I thought at once that it would infer
+my presence from the mark of the blow I had given him.
+
+I crept back to the coal cellar, shut the door, and began to cover
+myself up as much as I could, and as noiselessly as possible in the
+darkness, among the firewood and coal therein. Every now and then I
+paused, rigid, to hear if the Martian had thrust its tentacles through
+the opening again.
+
+Then the faint metallic jingle returned. I traced it slowly feeling
+over the kitchen. Presently I heard it nearer—in the scullery, as I
+judged. I thought that its length might be insufficient to reach me. I
+prayed copiously. It passed, scraping faintly across the cellar door.
+An age of almost intolerable suspense intervened; then I heard it
+fumbling at the latch! It had found the door! The Martians understood
+doors!
+
+It worried at the catch for a minute, perhaps, and then the door
+opened.
+
+In the darkness I could just see the thing—like an elephant’s trunk
+more than anything else—waving towards me and touching and examining
+the wall, coals, wood and ceiling. It was like a black worm swaying its
+blind head to and fro.
+
+Once, even, it touched the heel of my boot. I was on the verge of
+screaming; I bit my hand. For a time the tentacle was silent. I could
+have fancied it had been withdrawn. Presently, with an abrupt click, it
+gripped something—I thought it had me!—and seemed to go out of the
+cellar again. For a minute I was not sure. Apparently it had taken a
+lump of coal to examine.
+
+I seized the opportunity of slightly shifting my position, which had
+become cramped, and then listened. I whispered passionate prayers for
+safety.
+
+Then I heard the slow, deliberate sound creeping towards me again.
+Slowly, slowly it drew near, scratching against the walls and tapping
+the furniture.
+
+While I was still doubtful, it rapped smartly against the cellar door
+and closed it. I heard it go into the pantry, and the biscuit-tins
+rattled and a bottle smashed, and then came a heavy bump against the
+cellar door. Then silence that passed into an infinity of suspense.
+
+Had it gone?
+
+At last I decided that it had.
+
+It came into the scullery no more; but I lay all the tenth day in the
+close darkness, buried among coals and firewood, not daring even to
+crawl out for the drink for which I craved. It was the eleventh day
+before I ventured so far from my security.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+THE STILLNESS.
+
+
+My first act before I went into the pantry was to fasten the door
+between the kitchen and the scullery. But the pantry was empty; every
+scrap of food had gone. Apparently, the Martian had taken it all on the
+previous day. At that discovery I despaired for the first time. I took
+no food, or no drink either, on the eleventh or the twelfth day.
+
+At first my mouth and throat were parched, and my strength ebbed
+sensibly. I sat about in the darkness of the scullery, in a state of
+despondent wretchedness. My mind ran on eating. I thought I had become
+deaf, for the noises of movement I had been accustomed to hear from the
+pit had ceased absolutely. I did not feel strong enough to crawl
+noiselessly to the peephole, or I would have gone there.
+
+On the twelfth day my throat was so painful that, taking the chance of
+alarming the Martians, I attacked the creaking rain-water pump that
+stood by the sink, and got a couple of glassfuls of blackened and
+tainted rain water. I was greatly refreshed by this, and emboldened by
+the fact that no enquiring tentacle followed the noise of my pumping.
+
+During these days, in a rambling, inconclusive way, I thought much of
+the curate and of the manner of his death.
+
+On the thirteenth day I drank some more water, and dozed and thought
+disjointedly of eating and of vague impossible plans of escape.
+Whenever I dozed I dreamt of horrible phantasms, of the death of the
+curate, or of sumptuous dinners; but, asleep or awake, I felt a keen
+pain that urged me to drink again and again. The light that came into
+the scullery was no longer grey, but red. To my disordered imagination
+it seemed the colour of blood.
+
+On the fourteenth day I went into the kitchen, and I was surprised to
+find that the fronds of the red weed had grown right across the hole in
+the wall, turning the half-light of the place into a crimson-coloured
+obscurity.
+
+It was early on the fifteenth day that I heard a curious, familiar
+sequence of sounds in the kitchen, and, listening, identified it as the
+snuffing and scratching of a dog. Going into the kitchen, I saw a dog’s
+nose peering in through a break among the ruddy fronds. This greatly
+surprised me. At the scent of me he barked shortly.
+
+I thought if I could induce him to come into the place quietly I should
+be able, perhaps, to kill and eat him; and in any case, it would be
+advisable to kill him, lest his actions attracted the attention of the
+Martians.
+
+I crept forward, saying “Good dog!” very softly; but he suddenly
+withdrew his head and disappeared.
+
+I listened—I was not deaf—but certainly the pit was still. I heard a
+sound like the flutter of a bird’s wings, and a hoarse croaking, but
+that was all.
+
+For a long while I lay close to the peephole, but not daring to move
+aside the red plants that obscured it. Once or twice I heard a faint
+pitter-patter like the feet of the dog going hither and thither on the
+sand far below me, and there were more birdlike sounds, but that was
+all. At length, encouraged by the silence, I looked out.
+
+Except in the corner, where a multitude of crows hopped and fought over
+the skeletons of the dead the Martians had consumed, there was not a
+living thing in the pit.
+
+I stared about me, scarcely believing my eyes. All the machinery had
+gone. Save for the big mound of greyish-blue powder in one corner,
+certain bars of aluminium in another, the black birds, and the
+skeletons of the killed, the place was merely an empty circular pit in
+the sand.
+
+Slowly I thrust myself out through the red weed, and stood upon the
+mound of rubble. I could see in any direction save behind me, to the
+north, and neither Martians nor sign of Martians were to be seen. The
+pit dropped sheerly from my feet, but a little way along the rubbish
+afforded a practicable slope to the summit of the ruins. My chance of
+escape had come. I began to tremble.
+
+I hesitated for some time, and then, in a gust of desperate resolution,
+and with a heart that throbbed violently, I scrambled to the top of the
+mound in which I had been buried so long.
+
+I looked about again. To the northward, too, no Martian was visible.
+
+When I had last seen this part of Sheen in the daylight it had been a
+straggling street of comfortable white and red houses, interspersed
+with abundant shady trees. Now I stood on a mound of smashed brickwork,
+clay, and gravel, over which spread a multitude of red cactus-shaped
+plants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial growth to dispute
+their footing. The trees near me were dead and brown, but further a
+network of red thread scaled the still living stems.
+
+The neighbouring houses had all been wrecked, but none had been burned;
+their walls stood, sometimes to the second story, with smashed windows
+and shattered doors. The red weed grew tumultuously in their roofless
+rooms. Below me was the great pit, with the crows struggling for its
+refuse. A number of other birds hopped about among the ruins. Far away
+I saw a gaunt cat slink crouchingly along a wall, but traces of men
+there were none.
+
+The day seemed, by contrast with my recent confinement, dazzlingly
+bright, the sky a glowing blue. A gentle breeze kept the red weed that
+covered every scrap of unoccupied ground gently swaying. And oh! the
+sweetness of the air!
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS.
+
+
+For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of my safety.
+Within that noisome den from which I had emerged I had thought with a
+narrow intensity only of our immediate security. I had not realised
+what had been happening to the world, had not anticipated this
+startling vision of unfamiliar things. I had expected to see Sheen in
+ruins—I found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of another
+planet.
+
+For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men,
+yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as
+a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by
+the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I
+felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my
+mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a
+persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the
+animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to
+lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed
+away.
+
+But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and my
+dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast. In the
+direction away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patch
+of garden ground unburied. This gave me a hint, and I went knee-deep,
+and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed. The density of the weed gave
+me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wall was some six feet high, and
+when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not lift my feet to the
+crest. So I went along by the side of it, and came to a corner and a
+rockwork that enabled me to get to the top, and tumble into the garden
+I coveted. Here I found some young onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs,
+and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which I secured, and,
+scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way through scarlet and
+crimson trees towards Kew—it was like walking through an avenue of
+gigantic blood drops—possessed with two ideas: to get more food, and to
+limp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out of this accursed
+unearthly region of the pit.
+
+Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms which
+also I devoured, and then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallow
+water, where meadows used to be. These fragments of nourishment served
+only to whet my hunger. At first I was surprised at this flood in a
+hot, dry summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by the
+tropical exuberance of the red weed. Directly this extraordinary growth
+encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of unparalleled
+fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured down into the water of the Wey
+and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanic water fronds speedily
+choked both those rivers.
+
+At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost in a tangle
+of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in a broad
+and shallow stream across the meadows of Hampton and Twickenham. As the
+water spread the weed followed them, until the ruined villas of the
+Thames valley were for a time lost in this red swamp, whose margin I
+explored, and much of the desolation the Martians had caused was
+concealed.
+
+In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A
+cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain
+bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of natural
+selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power
+against bacterial diseases—they never succumb without a severe
+struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. The fronds
+became bleached, and then shrivelled and brittle. They broke off at the
+least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early growth
+carried their last vestiges out to sea.
+
+My first act on coming to this water was, of course, to slake my
+thirst. I drank a great deal of it and, moved by an impulse, gnawed
+some fronds of red weed; but they were watery, and had a sickly,
+metallic taste. I found the water was sufficiently shallow for me to
+wade securely, although the red weed impeded my feet a little; but the
+flood evidently got deeper towards the river, and I turned back to
+Mortlake. I managed to make out the road by means of occasional ruins
+of its villas and fences and lamps, and so presently I got out of this
+spate and made my way to the hill going up towards Roehampton and came
+out on Putney Common.
+
+Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the
+wreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation
+of a cyclone, and in a few score yards I would come upon perfectly
+undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly drawn and doors
+closed, as if they had been left for a day by the owners, or as if
+their inhabitants slept within. The red weed was less abundant; the
+tall trees along the lane were free from the red creeper. I hunted for
+food among the trees, finding nothing, and I also raided a couple of
+silent houses, but they had already been broken into and ransacked. I
+rested for the remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery, being, in my
+enfeebled condition, too fatigued to push on.
+
+All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the Martians. I
+encountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both hurried
+circuitously away from the advances I made them. Near Roehampton I had
+seen two human skeletons—not bodies, but skeletons, picked clean—and in
+the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones of several cats
+and rabbits and the skull of a sheep. But though I gnawed parts of
+these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from them.
+
+After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where I
+think the Heat-Ray must have been used for some reason. And in the
+garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes,
+sufficient to stay my hunger. From this garden one looked down upon
+Putney and the river. The aspect of the place in the dusk was
+singularly desolate: blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and
+down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-tinged with the
+weed. And over all—silence. It filled me with indescribable terror to
+think how swiftly that desolating change had come.
+
+For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and
+that I stood there alone, the last man left alive. Hard by the top of
+Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton, with the arms dislocated and
+removed several yards from the rest of the body. As I proceeded I
+became more and more convinced that the extermination of mankind was,
+save for such stragglers as myself, already accomplished in this part
+of the world. The Martians, I thought, had gone on and left the country
+desolated, seeking food elsewhere. Perhaps even now they were
+destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might be they had gone northward.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL.
+
+
+I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney Hill,
+sleeping in a made bed for the first time since my flight to
+Leatherhead. I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking into
+that house—afterwards I found the front door was on the latch—nor how I
+ransacked every room for food, until just on the verge of despair, in
+what seemed to me to be a servant’s bedroom, I found a rat-gnawed crust
+and two tins of pineapple. The place had been already searched and
+emptied. In the bar I afterwards found some biscuits and sandwiches
+that had been overlooked. The latter I could not eat, they were too
+rotten, but the former not only stayed my hunger, but filled my
+pockets. I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian might come beating that
+part of London for food in the night. Before I went to bed I had an
+interval of restlessness, and prowled from window to window, peering
+out for some sign of these monsters. I slept little. As I lay in bed I
+found myself thinking consecutively—a thing I do not remember to have
+done since my last argument with the curate. During all the intervening
+time my mental condition had been a hurrying succession of vague
+emotional states or a sort of stupid receptivity. But in the night my
+brain, reinforced, I suppose, by the food I had eaten, grew clear
+again, and I thought.
+
+Three things struggled for possession of my mind: the killing of the
+curate, the whereabouts of the Martians, and the possible fate of my
+wife. The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall; I
+saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but
+quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself
+now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the creature of a
+sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no
+condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted me. In the
+silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that
+sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial,
+my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every step
+of our conversation from the moment when I had found him crouching
+beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing to the fire and smoke
+that streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge. We had been incapable of
+co-operation—grim chance had taken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I
+should have left him at Halliford. But I did not foresee; and crime is
+to foresee and do. And I set this down as I have set all this story
+down, as it was. There were no witnesses—all these things I might have
+concealed. But I set it down, and the reader must form his judgment as
+he will.
+
+And when, by an effort, I had set aside that picture of a prostrate
+body, I faced the problem of the Martians and the fate of my wife. For
+the former I had no data; I could imagine a hundred things, and so,
+unhappily, I could for the latter. And suddenly that night became
+terrible. I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at the dark. I
+found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and
+painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of my return from
+Leatherhead I had not prayed. I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers,
+had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in extremity; but now I
+prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with the
+darkness of God. Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn
+had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat
+leaving its hiding place—a creature scarcely larger, an inferior
+animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be
+hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely,
+if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity—pity for
+those witless souls that suffer our dominion.
+
+The morning was bright and fine, and the eastern sky glowed pink, and
+was fretted with little golden clouds. In the road that runs from the
+top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of the
+panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the Sunday night
+after the fighting began. There was a little two-wheeled cart inscribed
+with the name of Thomas Lobb, Greengrocer, New Malden, with a smashed
+wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there was a straw hat trampled into
+the now hardened mud, and at the top of West Hill a lot of
+blood-stained glass about the overturned water trough. My movements
+were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I had an idea of going to
+Leatherhead, though I knew that there I had the poorest chance of
+finding my wife. Certainly, unless death had overtaken them suddenly,
+my cousins and she would have fled thence; but it seemed to me I might
+find or learn there whither the Surrey people had fled. I knew I wanted
+to find my wife, that my heart ached for her and the world of men, but
+I had no clear idea how the finding might be done. I was also sharply
+aware now of my intense loneliness. From the corner I went, under cover
+of a thicket of trees and bushes, to the edge of Wimbledon Common,
+stretching wide and far.
+
+That dark expanse was lit in patches by yellow gorse and broom; there
+was no red weed to be seen, and as I prowled, hesitating, on the verge
+of the open, the sun rose, flooding it all with light and vitality. I
+came upon a busy swarm of little frogs in a swampy place among the
+trees. I stopped to look at them, drawing a lesson from their stout
+resolve to live. And presently, turning suddenly, with an odd feeling
+of being watched, I beheld something crouching amid a clump of bushes.
+I stood regarding this. I made a step towards it, and it rose up and
+became a man armed with a cutlass. I approached him slowly. He stood
+silent and motionless, regarding me.
+
+As I drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and
+filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged
+through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches
+mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His
+black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and
+sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him. There was a red cut
+across the lower part of his face.
+
+“Stop!” he cried, when I was within ten yards of him, and I stopped.
+His voice was hoarse. “Where do you come from?” he said.
+
+I thought, surveying him.
+
+“I come from Mortlake,” I said. “I was buried near the pit the Martians
+made about their cylinder. I have worked my way out and escaped.”
+
+“There is no food about here,” he said. “This is my country. All this
+hill down to the river, and back to Clapham, and up to the edge of the
+common. There is only food for one. Which way are you going?”
+
+I answered slowly.
+
+“I don’t know,” I said. “I have been buried in the ruins of a house
+thirteen or fourteen days. I don’t know what has happened.”
+
+He looked at me doubtfully, then started, and looked with a changed
+expression.
+
+“I’ve no wish to stop about here,” said I. “I think I shall go to
+Leatherhead, for my wife was there.”
+
+He shot out a pointing finger.
+
+“It is you,” said he; “the man from Woking. And you weren’t killed at
+Weybridge?”
+
+I recognised him at the same moment.
+
+“You are the artilleryman who came into my garden.”
+
+“Good luck!” he said. “We are lucky ones! Fancy _you_!” He put out a
+hand, and I took it. “I crawled up a drain,” he said. “But they didn’t
+kill everyone. And after they went away I got off towards Walton across
+the fields. But—— It’s not sixteen days altogether—and your hair is
+grey.” He looked over his shoulder suddenly. “Only a rook,” he said.
+“One gets to know that birds have shadows these days. This is a bit
+open. Let us crawl under those bushes and talk.”
+
+“Have you seen any Martians?” I said. “Since I crawled out——”
+
+“They’ve gone away across London,” he said. “I guess they’ve got a
+bigger camp there. Of a night, all over there, Hampstead way, the sky
+is alive with their lights. It’s like a great city, and in the glare
+you can just see them moving. By daylight you can’t. But nearer—I
+haven’t seen them—” (he counted on his fingers) “five days. Then I saw
+a couple across Hammersmith way carrying something big. And the night
+before last”—he stopped and spoke impressively—“it was just a matter of
+lights, but it was something up in the air. I believe they’ve built a
+flying-machine, and are learning to fly.”
+
+I stopped, on hands and knees, for we had come to the bushes.
+
+“Fly!”
+
+“Yes,” he said, “fly.”
+
+I went on into a little bower, and sat down.
+
+“It is all over with humanity,” I said. “If they can do that they will
+simply go round the world.”
+
+He nodded.
+
+“They will. But—— It will relieve things over here a bit. And
+besides——” He looked at me. “Aren’t you satisfied it _is_ up with
+humanity? I am. We’re down; we’re beat.”
+
+I stared. Strange as it may seem, I had not arrived at this fact—a fact
+perfectly obvious so soon as he spoke. I had still held a vague hope;
+rather, I had kept a lifelong habit of mind. He repeated his words,
+“We’re beat.” They carried absolute conviction.
+
+“It’s all over,” he said. “They’ve lost _one_—just _one_. And they’ve
+made their footing good and crippled the greatest power in the world.
+They’ve walked over us. The death of that one at Weybridge was an
+accident. And these are only pioneers. They kept on coming. These green
+stars—I’ve seen none these five or six days, but I’ve no doubt they’re
+falling somewhere every night. Nothing’s to be done. We’re under! We’re
+beat!”
+
+I made him no answer. I sat staring before me, trying in vain to devise
+some countervailing thought.
+
+“This isn’t a war,” said the artilleryman. “It never was a war, any
+more than there’s war between man and ants.”
+
+Suddenly I recalled the night in the observatory.
+
+“After the tenth shot they fired no more—at least, until the first
+cylinder came.”
+
+“How do you know?” said the artilleryman. I explained. He thought.
+“Something wrong with the gun,” he said. “But what if there is? They’ll
+get it right again. And even if there’s a delay, how can it alter the
+end? It’s just men and ants. There’s the ants builds their cities, live
+their lives, have wars, revolutions, until the men want them out of the
+way, and then they go out of the way. That’s what we are now—just ants.
+Only——”
+
+“Yes,” I said.
+
+“We’re eatable ants.”
+
+We sat looking at each other.
+
+“And what will they do with us?” I said.
+
+“That’s what I’ve been thinking,” he said; “that’s what I’ve been
+thinking. After Weybridge I went south—thinking. I saw what was up.
+Most of the people were hard at it squealing and exciting themselves.
+But I’m not so fond of squealing. I’ve been in sight of death once or
+twice; I’m not an ornamental soldier, and at the best and worst,
+death—it’s just death. And it’s the man that keeps on thinking comes
+through. I saw everyone tracking away south. Says I, ‘Food won’t last
+this way,’ and I turned right back. I went for the Martians like a
+sparrow goes for man. All round”—he waved a hand to the
+horizon—“they’re starving in heaps, bolting, treading on each other. .
+. .”
+
+He saw my face, and halted awkwardly.
+
+“No doubt lots who had money have gone away to France,” he said. He
+seemed to hesitate whether to apologise, met my eyes, and went on:
+“There’s food all about here. Canned things in shops; wines, spirits,
+mineral waters; and the water mains and drains are empty. Well, I was
+telling you what I was thinking. ‘Here’s intelligent things,’ I said,
+‘and it seems they want us for food. First, they’ll smash us up—ships,
+machines, guns, cities, all the order and organisation. All that will
+go. If we were the size of ants we might pull through. But we’re not.
+It’s all too bulky to stop. That’s the first certainty.’ Eh?”
+
+I assented.
+
+“It is; I’ve thought it out. Very well, then—next; at present we’re
+caught as we’re wanted. A Martian has only to go a few miles to get a
+crowd on the run. And I saw one, one day, out by Wandsworth, picking
+houses to pieces and routing among the wreckage. But they won’t keep on
+doing that. So soon as they’ve settled all our guns and ships, and
+smashed our railways, and done all the things they are doing over
+there, they will begin catching us systematic, picking the best and
+storing us in cages and things. That’s what they will start doing in a
+bit. Lord! They haven’t begun on us yet. Don’t you see that?”
+
+“Not begun!” I exclaimed.
+
+“Not begun. All that’s happened so far is through our not having the
+sense to keep quiet—worrying them with guns and such foolery. And
+losing our heads, and rushing off in crowds to where there wasn’t any
+more safety than where we were. They don’t want to bother us yet.
+They’re making their things—making all the things they couldn’t bring
+with them, getting things ready for the rest of their people. Very
+likely that’s why the cylinders have stopped for a bit, for fear of
+hitting those who are here. And instead of our rushing about blind, on
+the howl, or getting dynamite on the chance of busting them up, we’ve
+got to fix ourselves up according to the new state of affairs. That’s
+how I figure it out. It isn’t quite according to what a man wants for
+his species, but it’s about what the facts point to. And that’s the
+principle I acted upon. Cities, nations, civilisation, progress—it’s
+all over. That game’s up. We’re beat.”
+
+“But if that is so, what is there to live for?”
+
+The artilleryman looked at me for a moment.
+
+“There won’t be any more blessed concerts for a million years or so;
+there won’t be any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds at
+restaurants. If it’s amusement you’re after, I reckon the game is up.
+If you’ve got any drawing-room manners or a dislike to eating peas with
+a knife or dropping aitches, you’d better chuck ’em away. They ain’t no
+further use.”
+
+“You mean——”
+
+“I mean that men like me are going on living—for the sake of the breed.
+I tell you, I’m grim set on living. And if I’m not mistaken, you’ll
+show what insides _you’ve_ got, too, before long. We aren’t going to be
+exterminated. And I don’t mean to be caught either, and tamed and
+fattened and bred like a thundering ox. Ugh! Fancy those brown
+creepers!”
+
+“You don’t mean to say——”
+
+“I do. I’m going on, under their feet. I’ve got it planned; I’ve
+thought it out. We men are beat. We don’t know enough. We’ve got to
+learn before we’ve got a chance. And we’ve got to live and keep
+independent while we learn. See! That’s what has to be done.”
+
+I stared, astonished, and stirred profoundly by the man’s resolution.
+
+“Great God!” cried I. “But you are a man indeed!” And suddenly I
+gripped his hand.
+
+“Eh!” he said, with his eyes shining. “I’ve thought it out, eh?”
+
+“Go on,” I said.
+
+“Well, those who mean to escape their catching must get ready. I’m
+getting ready. Mind you, it isn’t all of us that are made for wild
+beasts; and that’s what it’s got to be. That’s why I watched you. I had
+my doubts. You’re slender. I didn’t know that it was you, you see, or
+just how you’d been buried. All these—the sort of people that lived in
+these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used to live down
+_that_ way—they’d be no good. They haven’t any spirit in them—no proud
+dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other—Lord!
+What is he but funk and precautions? They just used to skedaddle off to
+work—I’ve seen hundreds of ’em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild
+and shining to catch their little season-ticket train, for fear they’d
+get dismissed if they didn’t; working at businesses they were afraid to
+take the trouble to understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn’t
+be in time for dinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of the
+back streets, and sleeping with the wives they married, not because
+they wanted them, but because they had a bit of money that would make
+for safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world.
+Lives insured and a bit invested for fear of accidents. And on
+Sundays—fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits! Well,
+the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages,
+fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing
+about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they’ll come and be
+caught cheerful. They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder what
+people did before there were Martians to take care of them. And the bar
+loafers, and mashers, and singers—I can imagine them. I can imagine
+them,” he said, with a sort of sombre gratification. “There’ll be any
+amount of sentiment and religion loose among them. There’s hundreds of
+things I saw with my eyes that I’ve only begun to see clearly these
+last few days. There’s lots will take things as they are—fat and
+stupid; and lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it’s all
+wrong, and that they ought to be doing something. Now whenever things
+are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the
+weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always
+make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and
+submit to persecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you’ve seen
+the same thing. It’s energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean inside
+out. These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety. And those
+of a less simple sort will work in a bit of—what is it?—eroticism.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them; train them
+to do tricks—who knows?—get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up
+and had to be killed. And some, maybe, they will train to hunt us.”
+
+“No,” I cried, “that’s impossible! No human being——”
+
+“What’s the good of going on with such lies?” said the artilleryman.
+“There’s men who’d do it cheerful. What nonsense to pretend there
+isn’t!”
+
+And I succumbed to his conviction.
+
+“If they come after me,” he said; “Lord, if they come after me!” and
+subsided into a grim meditation.
+
+I sat contemplating these things. I could find nothing to bring against
+this man’s reasoning. In the days before the invasion no one would have
+questioned my intellectual superiority to his—I, a professed and
+recognised writer on philosophical themes, and he, a common soldier;
+and yet he had already formulated a situation that I had scarcely
+realised.
+
+“What are you doing?” I said presently. “What plans have you made?”
+
+He hesitated.
+
+“Well, it’s like this,” he said. “What have we to do? We have to invent
+a sort of life where men can live and breed, and be sufficiently secure
+to bring the children up. Yes—wait a bit, and I’ll make it clearer what
+I think ought to be done. The tame ones will go like all tame beasts;
+in a few generations they’ll be big, beautiful, rich-blooded,
+stupid—rubbish! The risk is that we who keep wild will go
+savage—degenerate into a sort of big, savage rat. . . . You see, how I
+mean to live is underground. I’ve been thinking about the drains. Of
+course those who don’t know drains think horrible things; but under
+this London are miles and miles—hundreds of miles—and a few days rain
+and London empty will leave them sweet and clean. The main drains are
+big enough and airy enough for anyone. Then there’s cellars, vaults,
+stores, from which bolting passages may be made to the drains. And the
+railway tunnels and subways. Eh? You begin to see? And we form a
+band—able-bodied, clean-minded men. We’re not going to pick up any
+rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out again.”
+
+“As you meant me to go?”
+
+“Well—I parleyed, didn’t I?”
+
+“We won’t quarrel about that. Go on.”
+
+“Those who stop obey orders. Able-bodied, clean-minded women we want
+also—mothers and teachers. No lackadaisical ladies—no blasted rolling
+eyes. We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the
+useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die.
+They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all,
+to live and taint the race. And they can’t be happy. Moreover, dying’s
+none so dreadful; it’s the funking makes it bad. And in all those
+places we shall gather. Our district will be London. And we may even be
+able to keep a watch, and run about in the open when the Martians keep
+away. Play cricket, perhaps. That’s how we shall save the race. Eh?
+It’s a possible thing? But saving the race is nothing in itself. As I
+say, that’s only being rats. It’s saving our knowledge and adding to it
+is the thing. There men like you come in. There’s books, there’s
+models. We must make great safe places down deep, and get all the books
+we can; not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books. That’s
+where men like you come in. We must go to the British Museum and pick
+all those books through. Especially we must keep up our science—learn
+more. We must watch these Martians. Some of us must go as spies. When
+it’s all working, perhaps I will. Get caught, I mean. And the great
+thing is, we must leave the Martians alone. We mustn’t even steal. If
+we get in their way, we clear out. We must show them we mean no harm.
+Yes, I know. But they’re intelligent things, and they won’t hunt us
+down if they have all they want, and think we’re just harmless vermin.”
+
+The artilleryman paused and laid a brown hand upon my arm.
+
+“After all, it may not be so much we may have to learn before—Just
+imagine this: four or five of their fighting machines suddenly starting
+off—Heat-Rays right and left, and not a Martian in ’em. Not a Martian
+in ’em, but men—men who have learned the way how. It may be in my time,
+even—those men. Fancy having one of them lovely things, with its
+Heat-Ray wide and free! Fancy having it in control! What would it
+matter if you smashed to smithereens at the end of the run, after a
+bust like that? I reckon the Martians’ll open their beautiful eyes!
+Can’t you see them, man? Can’t you see them hurrying, hurrying—puffing
+and blowing and hooting to their other mechanical affairs? Something
+out of gear in every case. And swish, bang, rattle, swish! Just as they
+are fumbling over it, _swish_ comes the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has
+come back to his own.”
+
+For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and the tone of
+assurance and courage he assumed, completely dominated my mind. I
+believed unhesitatingly both in his forecast of human destiny and in
+the practicability of his astonishing scheme, and the reader who thinks
+me susceptible and foolish must contrast his position, reading steadily
+with all his thoughts about his subject, and mine, crouching fearfully
+in the bushes and listening, distracted by apprehension. We talked in
+this manner through the early morning time, and later crept out of the
+bushes, and, after scanning the sky for Martians, hurried precipitately
+to the house on Putney Hill where he had made his lair. It was the coal
+cellar of the place, and when I saw the work he had spent a week
+upon—it was a burrow scarcely ten yards long, which he designed to
+reach to the main drain on Putney Hill—I had my first inkling of the
+gulf between his dreams and his powers. Such a hole I could have dug in
+a day. But I believed in him sufficiently to work with him all that
+morning until past midday at his digging. We had a garden barrow and
+shot the earth we removed against the kitchen range. We refreshed
+ourselves with a tin of mock-turtle soup and wine from the neighbouring
+pantry. I found a curious relief from the aching strangeness of the
+world in this steady labour. As we worked, I turned his project over in
+my mind, and presently objections and doubts began to arise; but I
+worked there all the morning, so glad was I to find myself with a
+purpose again. After working an hour I began to speculate on the
+distance one had to go before the cloaca was reached, the chances we
+had of missing it altogether. My immediate trouble was why we should
+dig this long tunnel, when it was possible to get into the drain at
+once down one of the manholes, and work back to the house. It seemed to
+me, too, that the house was inconveniently chosen, and required a
+needless length of tunnel. And just as I was beginning to face these
+things, the artilleryman stopped digging, and looked at me.
+
+“We’re working well,” he said. He put down his spade. “Let us knock off
+a bit” he said. “I think it’s time we reconnoitred from the roof of the
+house.”
+
+I was for going on, and after a little hesitation he resumed his spade;
+and then suddenly I was struck by a thought. I stopped, and so did he
+at once.
+
+“Why were you walking about the common,” I said, “instead of being
+here?”
+
+“Taking the air,” he said. “I was coming back. It’s safer by night.”
+
+“But the work?”
+
+“Oh, one can’t always work,” he said, and in a flash I saw the man
+plain. He hesitated, holding his spade. “We ought to reconnoitre now,”
+he said, “because if any come near they may hear the spades and drop
+upon us unawares.”
+
+I was no longer disposed to object. We went together to the roof and
+stood on a ladder peeping out of the roof door. No Martians were to be
+seen, and we ventured out on the tiles, and slipped down under shelter
+of the parapet.
+
+From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of Putney, but
+we could see the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed, and the low
+parts of Lambeth flooded and red. The red creeper swarmed up the trees
+about the old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and dead, and
+set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters. It was strange how
+entirely dependent both these things were upon flowing water for their
+propagation. About us neither had gained a footing; laburnums, pink
+mays, snowballs, and trees of arbor-vitae, rose out of laurels and
+hydrangeas, green and brilliant into the sunlight. Beyond Kensington
+dense smoke was rising, and that and a blue haze hid the northward
+hills.
+
+The artilleryman began to tell me of the sort of people who still
+remained in London.
+
+“One night last week,” he said, “some fools got the electric light in
+order, and there was all Regent Street and the Circus ablaze, crowded
+with painted and ragged drunkards, men and women, dancing and shouting
+till dawn. A man who was there told me. And as the day came they became
+aware of a fighting-machine standing near by the Langham and looking
+down at them. Heaven knows how long he had been there. It must have
+given some of them a nasty turn. He came down the road towards them,
+and picked up nearly a hundred too drunk or frightened to run away.”
+
+Grotesque gleam of a time no history will ever fully describe!
+
+From that, in answer to my questions, he came round to his grandiose
+plans again. He grew enthusiastic. He talked so eloquently of the
+possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I more than half
+believed in him again. But now that I was beginning to understand
+something of his quality, I could divine the stress he laid on doing
+nothing precipitately. And I noted that now there was no question that
+he personally was to capture and fight the great machine.
+
+After a time we went down to the cellar. Neither of us seemed disposed
+to resume digging, and when he suggested a meal, I was nothing loath.
+He became suddenly very generous, and when we had eaten he went away
+and returned with some excellent cigars. We lit these, and his optimism
+glowed. He was inclined to regard my coming as a great occasion.
+
+“There’s some champagne in the cellar,” he said.
+
+“We can dig better on this Thames-side burgundy,” said I.
+
+“No,” said he; “I am host today. Champagne! Great God! We’ve a heavy
+enough task before us! Let us take a rest and gather strength while we
+may. Look at these blistered hands!”
+
+And pursuant to this idea of a holiday, he insisted upon playing cards
+after we had eaten. He taught me euchre, and after dividing London
+between us, I taking the northern side and he the southern, we played
+for parish points. Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to the sober
+reader, it is absolutely true, and what is more remarkable, I found the
+card game and several others we played extremely interesting.
+
+Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of
+extermination or appalling degradation, with no clear prospect before
+us but the chance of a horrible death, we could sit following the
+chance of this painted pasteboard, and playing the “joker” with vivid
+delight. Afterwards he taught me poker, and I beat him at three tough
+chess games. When dark came we decided to take the risk, and lit a
+lamp.
+
+After an interminable string of games, we supped, and the artilleryman
+finished the champagne. We went on smoking the cigars. He was no longer
+the energetic regenerator of his species I had encountered in the
+morning. He was still optimistic, but it was a less kinetic, a more
+thoughtful optimism. I remember he wound up with my health, proposed in
+a speech of small variety and considerable intermittence. I took a
+cigar, and went upstairs to look at the lights of which he had spoken
+that blazed so greenly along the Highgate hills.
+
+At first I stared unintelligently across the London valley. The
+northern hills were shrouded in darkness; the fires near Kensington
+glowed redly, and now and then an orange-red tongue of flame flashed up
+and vanished in the deep blue night. All the rest of London was black.
+Then, nearer, I perceived a strange light, a pale, violet-purple
+fluorescent glow, quivering under the night breeze. For a space I could
+not understand it, and then I knew that it must be the red weed from
+which this faint irradiation proceeded. With that realisation my
+dormant sense of wonder, my sense of the proportion of things, awoke
+again. I glanced from that to Mars, red and clear, glowing high in the
+west, and then gazed long and earnestly at the darkness of Hampstead
+and Highgate.
+
+I remained a very long time upon the roof, wondering at the grotesque
+changes of the day. I recalled my mental states from the midnight
+prayer to the foolish card-playing. I had a violent revulsion of
+feeling. I remember I flung away the cigar with a certain wasteful
+symbolism. My folly came to me with glaring exaggeration. I seemed a
+traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was filled with remorse. I
+resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to
+his drink and gluttony, and to go on into London. There, it seemed to
+me, I had the best chance of learning what the Martians and my
+fellowmen were doing. I was still upon the roof when the late moon
+rose.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+DEAD LONDON.
+
+
+After I had parted from the artilleryman, I went down the hill, and by
+the High Street across the bridge to Fulham. The red weed was
+tumultuous at that time, and nearly choked the bridge roadway; but its
+fronds were already whitened in patches by the spreading disease that
+presently removed it so swiftly.
+
+At the corner of the lane that runs to Putney Bridge station I found a
+man lying. He was as black as a sweep with the black dust, alive, but
+helplessly and speechlessly drunk. I could get nothing from him but
+curses and furious lunges at my head. I think I should have stayed by
+him but for the brutal expression of his face.
+
+There was black dust along the roadway from the bridge onwards, and it
+grew thicker in Fulham. The streets were horribly quiet. I got
+food—sour, hard, and mouldy, but quite eatable—in a baker’s shop here.
+Some way towards Walham Green the streets became clear of powder, and I
+passed a white terrace of houses on fire; the noise of the burning was
+an absolute relief. Going on towards Brompton, the streets were quiet
+again.
+
+Here I came once more upon the black powder in the streets and upon
+dead bodies. I saw altogether about a dozen in the length of the Fulham
+Road. They had been dead many days, so that I hurried quickly past
+them. The black powder covered them over, and softened their outlines.
+One or two had been disturbed by dogs.
+
+Where there was no black powder, it was curiously like a Sunday in the
+City, with the closed shops, the houses locked up and the blinds drawn,
+the desertion, and the stillness. In some places plunderers had been at
+work, but rarely at other than the provision and wine shops. A
+jeweller’s window had been broken open in one place, but apparently the
+thief had been disturbed, and a number of gold chains and a watch lay
+scattered on the pavement. I did not trouble to touch them. Farther on
+was a tattered woman in a heap on a doorstep; the hand that hung over
+her knee was gashed and bled down her rusty brown dress, and a smashed
+magnum of champagne formed a pool across the pavement. She seemed
+asleep, but she was dead.
+
+The farther I penetrated into London, the profounder grew the
+stillness. But it was not so much the stillness of death—it was the
+stillness of suspense, of expectation. At any time the destruction that
+had already singed the northwestern borders of the metropolis, and had
+annihilated Ealing and Kilburn, might strike among these houses and
+leave them smoking ruins. It was a city condemned and derelict. . . .
+
+In South Kensington the streets were clear of dead and of black powder.
+It was near South Kensington that I first heard the howling. It crept
+almost imperceptibly upon my senses. It was a sobbing alternation of
+two notes, “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” keeping on perpetually. When I
+passed streets that ran northward it grew in volume, and houses and
+buildings seemed to deaden and cut it off again. It came in a full tide
+down Exhibition Road. I stopped, staring towards Kensington Gardens,
+wondering at this strange, remote wailing. It was as if that mighty
+desert of houses had found a voice for its fear and solitude.
+
+“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” wailed that superhuman note—great waves of
+sound sweeping down the broad, sunlit roadway, between the tall
+buildings on each side. I turned northwards, marvelling, towards the
+iron gates of Hyde Park. I had half a mind to break into the Natural
+History Museum and find my way up to the summits of the towers, in
+order to see across the park. But I decided to keep to the ground,
+where quick hiding was possible, and so went on up the Exhibition Road.
+All the large mansions on each side of the road were empty and still,
+and my footsteps echoed against the sides of the houses. At the top,
+near the park gate, I came upon a strange sight—a bus overturned, and
+the skeleton of a horse picked clean. I puzzled over this for a time,
+and then went on to the bridge over the Serpentine. The voice grew
+stronger and stronger, though I could see nothing above the housetops
+on the north side of the park, save a haze of smoke to the northwest.
+
+“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” cried the voice, coming, as it seemed to me,
+from the district about Regent’s Park. The desolating cry worked upon
+my mind. The mood that had sustained me passed. The wailing took
+possession of me. I found I was intensely weary, footsore, and now
+again hungry and thirsty.
+
+It was already past noon. Why was I wandering alone in this city of the
+dead? Why was I alone when all London was lying in state, and in its
+black shroud? I felt intolerably lonely. My mind ran on old friends
+that I had forgotten for years. I thought of the poisons in the
+chemists’ shops, of the liquors the wine merchants stored; I recalled
+the two sodden creatures of despair, who so far as I knew, shared the
+city with myself. . . .
+
+I came into Oxford Street by the Marble Arch, and here again were black
+powder and several bodies, and an evil, ominous smell from the gratings
+of the cellars of some of the houses. I grew very thirsty after the
+heat of my long walk. With infinite trouble I managed to break into a
+public-house and get food and drink. I was weary after eating, and went
+into the parlour behind the bar, and slept on a black horsehair sofa I
+found there.
+
+I awoke to find that dismal howling still in my ears, “Ulla, ulla,
+ulla, ulla.” It was now dusk, and after I had routed out some biscuits
+and a cheese in the bar—there was a meat safe, but it contained nothing
+but maggots—I wandered on through the silent residential squares to
+Baker Street—Portman Square is the only one I can name—and so came out
+at last upon Regent’s Park. And as I emerged from the top of Baker
+Street, I saw far away over the trees in the clearness of the sunset
+the hood of the Martian giant from which this howling proceeded. I was
+not terrified. I came upon him as if it were a matter of course. I
+watched him for some time, but he did not move. He appeared to be
+standing and yelling, for no reason that I could discover.
+
+I tried to formulate a plan of action. That perpetual sound of “Ulla,
+ulla, ulla, ulla,” confused my mind. Perhaps I was too tired to be very
+fearful. Certainly I was more curious to know the reason of this
+monotonous crying than afraid. I turned back away from the park and
+struck into Park Road, intending to skirt the park, went along under
+the shelter of the terraces, and got a view of this stationary, howling
+Martian from the direction of St. John’s Wood. A couple of hundred
+yards out of Baker Street I heard a yelping chorus, and saw, first a
+dog with a piece of putrescent red meat in his jaws coming headlong
+towards me, and then a pack of starving mongrels in pursuit of him. He
+made a wide curve to avoid me, as though he feared I might prove a
+fresh competitor. As the yelping died away down the silent road, the
+wailing sound of “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” reasserted itself.
+
+I came upon the wrecked handling-machine halfway to St. John’s Wood
+station. At first I thought a house had fallen across the road. It was
+only as I clambered among the ruins that I saw, with a start, this
+mechanical Samson lying, with its tentacles bent and smashed and
+twisted, among the ruins it had made. The forepart was shattered. It
+seemed as if it had driven blindly straight at the house, and had been
+overwhelmed in its overthrow. It seemed to me then that this might have
+happened by a handling-machine escaping from the guidance of its
+Martian. I could not clamber among the ruins to see it, and the
+twilight was now so far advanced that the blood with which its seat was
+smeared, and the gnawed gristle of the Martian that the dogs had left,
+were invisible to me.
+
+Wondering still more at all that I had seen, I pushed on towards
+Primrose Hill. Far away, through a gap in the trees, I saw a second
+Martian, as motionless as the first, standing in the park towards the
+Zoological Gardens, and silent. A little beyond the ruins about the
+smashed handling-machine I came upon the red weed again, and found the
+Regent’s Canal, a spongy mass of dark-red vegetation.
+
+As I crossed the bridge, the sound of “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” ceased.
+It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came like a thunderclap.
+
+The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the trees
+towards the park were growing black. All about me the red weed
+clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me in the dimness.
+Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. But while
+that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation, had been endurable; by
+virtue of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life about
+me had upheld me. Then suddenly a change, the passing of something—I
+knew not what—and then a stillness that could be felt. Nothing but this
+gaunt quiet.
+
+London about me gazed at me spectrally. The windows in the white houses
+were like the eye sockets of skulls. About me my imagination found a
+thousand noiseless enemies moving. Terror seized me, a horror of my
+temerity. In front of me the road became pitchy black as though it was
+tarred, and I saw a contorted shape lying across the pathway. I could
+not bring myself to go on. I turned down St. John’s Wood Road, and ran
+headlong from this unendurable stillness towards Kilburn. I hid from
+the night and the silence, until long after midnight, in a cabmen’s
+shelter in Harrow Road. But before the dawn my courage returned, and
+while the stars were still in the sky I turned once more towards
+Regent’s Park. I missed my way among the streets, and presently saw
+down a long avenue, in the half-light of the early dawn, the curve of
+Primrose Hill. On the summit, towering up to the fading stars, was a
+third Martian, erect and motionless like the others.
+
+An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it. And I would
+save myself even the trouble of killing myself. I marched on recklessly
+towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the light grew, I
+saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and clustering about
+the hood. At that my heart gave a bound, and I began running along the
+road.
+
+I hurried through the red weed that choked St. Edmund’s Terrace (I
+waded breast-high across a torrent of water that was rushing down from
+the waterworks towards the Albert Road), and emerged upon the grass
+before the rising of the sun. Great mounds had been heaped about the
+crest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of it—it was the final and
+largest place the Martians had made—and from behind these heaps there
+rose a thin smoke against the sky. Against the sky line an eager dog
+ran and disappeared. The thought that had flashed into my mind grew
+real, grew credible. I felt no fear, only a wild, trembling exultation,
+as I ran up the hill towards the motionless monster. Out of the hood
+hung lank shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds pecked and tore.
+
+In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon
+its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space
+it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of
+material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in
+their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines,
+and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the
+Martians—_dead_!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against
+which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being
+slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest
+things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
+
+For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen
+had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease
+have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of
+our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this
+natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no
+germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many—those that cause
+putrefaction in dead matter, for instance—our living frames are
+altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly
+these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic
+allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they
+were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and
+fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought
+his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would
+still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For
+neither do men live nor die in vain.
+
+Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in that
+great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that must have seemed to
+them as incomprehensible as any death could be. To me also at that time
+this death was incomprehensible. All I knew was that these things that
+had been alive and so terrible to men were dead. For a moment I
+believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been repeated, that
+God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain them in the night.
+
+I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even
+as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays. The
+pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful
+in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms,
+rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light.
+A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies that lay
+darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across the pit on its
+farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying-machine
+with which they had been experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when
+decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a day too soon. At
+the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the huge fighting-machine
+that would fight no more for ever, at the tattered red shreds of flesh
+that dripped down upon the overturned seats on the summit of Primrose
+Hill.
+
+I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed now
+in birds, stood those other two Martians that I had seen overnight,
+just as death had overtaken them. The one had died, even as it had been
+crying to its companions; perhaps it was the last to die, and its voice
+had gone on perpetually until the force of its machinery was exhausted.
+They glittered now, harmless tripod towers of shining metal, in the
+brightness of the rising sun.
+
+All about the pit, and saved as by a miracle from everlasting
+destruction, stretched the great Mother of Cities. Those who have only
+seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely imagine
+the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses.
+
+Eastward, over the blackened ruins of the Albert Terrace and the
+splintered spire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling in a clear sky,
+and here and there some facet in the great wilderness of roofs caught
+the light and glared with a white intensity.
+
+Northward were Kilburn and Hampsted, blue and crowded with houses;
+westward the great city was dimmed; and southward, beyond the Martians,
+the green waves of Regent’s Park, the Langham Hotel, the dome of the
+Albert Hall, the Imperial Institute, and the giant mansions of the
+Brompton Road came out clear and little in the sunrise, the jagged
+ruins of Westminster rising hazily beyond. Far away and blue were the
+Surrey hills, and the towers of the Crystal Palace glittered like two
+silver rods. The dome of St. Paul’s was dark against the sunrise, and
+injured, I saw for the first time, by a huge gaping cavity on its
+western side.
+
+And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and
+churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous hopes
+and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this
+human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung
+over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled back, and
+that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast dead city
+of mine be once more alive and powerful, I felt a wave of emotion that
+was near akin to tears.
+
+The torment was over. Even that day the healing would begin. The
+survivors of the people scattered over the country—leaderless, lawless,
+foodless, like sheep without a shepherd—the thousands who had fled by
+sea, would begin to return; the pulse of life, growing stronger and
+stronger, would beat again in the empty streets and pour across the
+vacant squares. Whatever destruction was done, the hand of the
+destroyer was stayed. All the gaunt wrecks, the blackened skeletons of
+houses that stared so dismally at the sunlit grass of the hill, would
+presently be echoing with the hammers of the restorers and ringing with
+the tapping of their trowels. At the thought I extended my hands
+towards the sky and began thanking God. In a year, thought I—in a year.
+. . .
+
+With overwhelming force came the thought of myself, of my wife, and the
+old life of hope and tender helpfulness that had ceased for ever.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+WRECKAGE.
+
+
+And now comes the strangest thing in my story. Yet, perhaps, it is not
+altogether strange. I remember, clearly and coldly and vividly, all
+that I did that day until the time that I stood weeping and praising
+God upon the summit of Primrose Hill. And then I forget.
+
+Of the next three days I know nothing. I have learned since that, so
+far from my being the first discoverer of the Martian overthrow,
+several such wanderers as myself had already discovered this on the
+previous night. One man—the first—had gone to St. Martin’s-le-Grand,
+and, while I sheltered in the cabmen’s hut, had contrived to telegraph
+to Paris. Thence the joyful news had flashed all over the world; a
+thousand cities, chilled by ghastly apprehensions, suddenly flashed
+into frantic illuminations; they knew of it in Dublin, Edinburgh,
+Manchester, Birmingham, at the time when I stood upon the verge of the
+pit. Already men, weeping with joy, as I have heard, shouting and
+staying their work to shake hands and shout, were making up trains,
+even as near as Crewe, to descend upon London. The church bells that
+had ceased a fortnight since suddenly caught the news, until all
+England was bell-ringing. Men on cycles, lean-faced, unkempt, scorched
+along every country lane shouting of unhoped deliverance, shouting to
+gaunt, staring figures of despair. And for the food! Across the
+Channel, across the Irish Sea, across the Atlantic, corn, bread, and
+meat were tearing to our relief. All the shipping in the world seemed
+going Londonward in those days. But of all this I have no memory. I
+drifted—a demented man. I found myself in a house of kindly people, who
+had found me on the third day wandering, weeping, and raving through
+the streets of St. John’s Wood. They have told me since that I was
+singing some insane doggerel about “The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah!
+The Last Man Left Alive!” Troubled as they were with their own affairs,
+these people, whose name, much as I would like to express my gratitude
+to them, I may not even give here, nevertheless cumbered themselves
+with me, sheltered me, and protected me from myself. Apparently they
+had learned something of my story from me during the days of my lapse.
+
+Very gently, when my mind was assured again, did they break to me what
+they had learned of the fate of Leatherhead. Two days after I was
+imprisoned it had been destroyed, with every soul in it, by a Martian.
+He had swept it out of existence, as it seemed, without any
+provocation, as a boy might crush an ant hill, in the mere wantonness
+of power.
+
+I was a lonely man, and they were very kind to me. I was a lonely man
+and a sad one, and they bore with me. I remained with them four days
+after my recovery. All that time I felt a vague, a growing craving to
+look once more on whatever remained of the little life that seemed so
+happy and bright in my past. It was a mere hopeless desire to feast
+upon my misery. They dissuaded me. They did all they could to divert me
+from this morbidity. But at last I could resist the impulse no longer,
+and, promising faithfully to return to them, and parting, as I will
+confess, from these four-day friends with tears, I went out again into
+the streets that had lately been so dark and strange and empty.
+
+Already they were busy with returning people; in places even there were
+shops open, and I saw a drinking fountain running water.
+
+I remember how mockingly bright the day seemed as I went back on my
+melancholy pilgrimage to the little house at Woking, how busy the
+streets and vivid the moving life about me. So many people were abroad
+everywhere, busied in a thousand activities, that it seemed incredible
+that any great proportion of the population could have been slain. But
+then I noticed how yellow were the skins of the people I met, how
+shaggy the hair of the men, how large and bright their eyes, and that
+every other man still wore his dirty rags. Their faces seemed all with
+one of two expressions—a leaping exultation and energy or a grim
+resolution. Save for the expression of the faces, London seemed a city
+of tramps. The vestries were indiscriminately distributing bread sent
+us by the French government. The ribs of the few horses showed
+dismally. Haggard special constables with white badges stood at the
+corners of every street. I saw little of the mischief wrought by the
+Martians until I reached Wellington Street, and there I saw the red
+weed clambering over the buttresses of Waterloo Bridge.
+
+At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts of
+that grotesque time—a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket of the
+red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place. It was the
+placard of the first newspaper to resume publication—the _Daily Mail_.
+I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket. Most of
+it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing had
+amused himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement stereo on
+the back page. The matter he printed was emotional; the news
+organisation had not as yet found its way back. I learned nothing fresh
+except that already in one week the examination of the Martian
+mechanisms had yielded astonishing results. Among other things, the
+article assured me what I did not believe at the time, that the “Secret
+of Flying,” was discovered. At Waterloo I found the free trains that
+were taking people to their homes. The first rush was already over.
+There were few people in the train, and I was in no mood for casual
+conversation. I got a compartment to myself, and sat with folded arms,
+looking greyly at the sunlit devastation that flowed past the windows.
+And just outside the terminus the train jolted over temporary rails,
+and on either side of the railway the houses were blackened ruins. To
+Clapham Junction the face of London was grimy with powder of the Black
+Smoke, in spite of two days of thunderstorms and rain, and at Clapham
+Junction the line had been wrecked again; there were hundreds of
+out-of-work clerks and shopmen working side by side with the customary
+navvies, and we were jolted over a hasty relaying.
+
+All down the line from there the aspect of the country was gaunt and
+unfamiliar; Wimbledon particularly had suffered. Walton, by virtue of
+its unburned pine woods, seemed the least hurt of any place along the
+line. The Wandle, the Mole, every little stream, was a heaped mass of
+red weed, in appearance between butcher’s meat and pickled cabbage. The
+Surrey pine woods were too dry, however, for the festoons of the red
+climber. Beyond Wimbledon, within sight of the line, in certain nursery
+grounds, were the heaped masses of earth about the sixth cylinder. A
+number of people were standing about it, and some sappers were busy in
+the midst of it. Over it flaunted a Union Jack, flapping cheerfully in
+the morning breeze. The nursery grounds were everywhere crimson with
+the weed, a wide expanse of livid colour cut with purple shadows, and
+very painful to the eye. One’s gaze went with infinite relief from the
+scorched greys and sullen reds of the foreground to the blue-green
+softness of the eastward hills.
+
+The line on the London side of Woking station was still undergoing
+repair, so I descended at Byfleet station and took the road to Maybury,
+past the place where I and the artilleryman had talked to the hussars,
+and on by the spot where the Martian had appeared to me in the
+thunderstorm. Here, moved by curiosity, I turned aside to find, among a
+tangle of red fronds, the warped and broken dog cart with the whitened
+bones of the horse scattered and gnawed. For a time I stood regarding
+these vestiges. . . .
+
+Then I returned through the pine wood, neck-high with red weed here and
+there, to find the landlord of the Spotted Dog had already found
+burial, and so came home past the College Arms. A man standing at an
+open cottage door greeted me by name as I passed.
+
+I looked at my house with a quick flash of hope that faded immediately.
+The door had been forced; it was unfast and was opening slowly as I
+approached.
+
+It slammed again. The curtains of my study fluttered out of the open
+window from which I and the artilleryman had watched the dawn. No one
+had closed it since. The smashed bushes were just as I had left them
+nearly four weeks ago. I stumbled into the hall, and the house felt
+empty. The stair carpet was ruffled and discoloured where I had
+crouched, soaked to the skin from the thunderstorm the night of the
+catastrophe. Our muddy footsteps I saw still went up the stairs.
+
+I followed them to my study, and found lying on my writing-table still,
+with the selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet of work I had left on
+the afternoon of the opening of the cylinder. For a space I stood
+reading over my abandoned arguments. It was a paper on the probable
+development of Moral Ideas with the development of the civilising
+process; and the last sentence was the opening of a prophecy: “In about
+two hundred years,” I had written, “we may expect——” The sentence ended
+abruptly. I remembered my inability to fix my mind that morning,
+scarcely a month gone by, and how I had broken off to get my _Daily
+Chronicle_ from the newsboy. I remembered how I went down to the garden
+gate as he came along, and how I had listened to his odd story of “Men
+from Mars.”
+
+I came down and went into the dining room. There were the mutton and
+the bread, both far gone now in decay, and a beer bottle overturned,
+just as I and the artilleryman had left them. My home was desolate. I
+perceived the folly of the faint hope I had cherished so long. And then
+a strange thing occurred. “It is no use,” said a voice. “The house is
+deserted. No one has been here these ten days. Do not stay here to
+torment yourself. No one escaped but you.”
+
+I was startled. Had I spoken my thought aloud? I turned, and the French
+window was open behind me. I made a step to it, and stood looking out.
+
+And there, amazed and afraid, even as I stood amazed and afraid, were
+my cousin and my wife—my wife white and tearless. She gave a faint cry.
+
+“I came,” she said. “I knew—knew——”
+
+She put her hand to her throat—swayed. I made a step forward, and
+caught her in my arms.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+THE EPILOGUE.
+
+
+I cannot but regret, now that I am concluding my story, how little I am
+able to contribute to the discussion of the many debatable questions
+which are still unsettled. In one respect I shall certainly provoke
+criticism. My particular province is speculative philosophy. My
+knowledge of comparative physiology is confined to a book or two, but
+it seems to me that Carver’s suggestions as to the reason of the rapid
+death of the Martians is so probable as to be regarded almost as a
+proven conclusion. I have assumed that in the body of my narrative.
+
+At any rate, in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after
+the war, no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species
+were found. That they did not bury any of their dead, and the reckless
+slaughter they perpetrated, point also to an entire ignorance of the
+putrefactive process. But probable as this seems, it is by no means a
+proven conclusion.
+
+Neither is the composition of the Black Smoke known, which the Martians
+used with such deadly effect, and the generator of the Heat-Rays
+remains a puzzle. The terrible disasters at the Ealing and South
+Kensington laboratories have disinclined analysts for further
+investigations upon the latter. Spectrum analysis of the black powder
+points unmistakably to the presence of an unknown element with a
+brilliant group of three lines in the green, and it is possible that it
+combines with argon to form a compound which acts at once with deadly
+effect upon some constituent in the blood. But such unproven
+speculations will scarcely be of interest to the general reader, to
+whom this story is addressed. None of the brown scum that drifted down
+the Thames after the destruction of Shepperton was examined at the
+time, and now none is forthcoming.
+
+The results of an anatomical examination of the Martians, so far as the
+prowling dogs had left such an examination possible, I have already
+given. But everyone is familiar with the magnificent and almost
+complete specimen in spirits at the Natural History Museum, and the
+countless drawings that have been made from it; and beyond that the
+interest of their physiology and structure is purely scientific.
+
+A question of graver and universal interest is the possibility of
+another attack from the Martians. I do not think that nearly enough
+attention is being given to this aspect of the matter. At present the
+planet Mars is in conjunction, but with every return to opposition I,
+for one, anticipate a renewal of their adventure. In any case, we
+should be prepared. It seems to me that it should be possible to define
+the position of the gun from which the shots are discharged, to keep a
+sustained watch upon this part of the planet, and to anticipate the
+arrival of the next attack.
+
+In that case the cylinder might be destroyed with dynamite or artillery
+before it was sufficiently cool for the Martians to emerge, or they
+might be butchered by means of guns so soon as the screw opened. It
+seems to me that they have lost a vast advantage in the failure of
+their first surprise. Possibly they see it in the same light.
+
+Lessing has advanced excellent reasons for supposing that the Martians
+have actually succeeded in effecting a landing on the planet Venus.
+Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars were in alignment with the sun;
+that is to say, Mars was in opposition from the point of view of an
+observer on Venus. Subsequently a peculiar luminous and sinuous marking
+appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet, and almost
+simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuous character was
+detected upon a photograph of the Martian disk. One needs to see the
+drawings of these appearances in order to appreciate fully their
+remarkable resemblance in character.
+
+At any rate, whether we expect another invasion or not, our views of
+the human future must be greatly modified by these events. We have
+learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a
+secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good
+or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may be that in
+the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not
+without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene
+confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of
+decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and
+it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of
+mankind. It may be that across the immensity of space the Martians have
+watched the fate of these pioneers of theirs and learned their lesson,
+and that on the planet Venus they have found a securer settlement. Be
+that as it may, for many years yet there will certainly be no
+relaxation of the eager scrutiny of the Martian disk, and those fiery
+darts of the sky, the shooting stars, will bring with them as they fall
+an unavoidable apprehension to all the sons of men.
+
+The broadening of men’s views that has resulted can scarcely be
+exaggerated. Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion
+that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty
+surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further. If the Martians can
+reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is impossible
+for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth
+uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life
+that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet
+within its toils.
+
+Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life
+spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system
+throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a
+remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the
+Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the
+future ordained.
+
+I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding
+sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit in my study writing by
+lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing valley below set with
+writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me empty and
+desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a
+butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle,
+children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal,
+and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding
+silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent
+streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise
+upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler,
+uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and
+wretched, in the darkness of the night.
+
+I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the
+Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the
+past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going
+to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a
+galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as
+I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great
+province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and
+mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people
+walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the
+sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear
+the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it
+all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last
+great day. . . .
+
+And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think
+that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.