CHAPTER ELEVEN
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 whiskey, 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 whiskey,"
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 Martians
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.
CHAPTER TWELVE
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 whiskey; 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.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
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 news venders 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; "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 the 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 news vender 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.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
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 facade 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 cars, 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.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
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 large 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
CHAPTER ONE
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
London-ward 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.
CHAPTER TWO
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.
CHAPTER THREE
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,
anaemic, 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.
CHAPTER FOUR
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.
CHAPTER FIVE
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!
CHAPTER SIX
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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
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.
CHAPTER EIGHT
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.
CHAPTER NINE
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.
CHAPTER TEN
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.
