

The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells
1898
English fiction; prose

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                     Book 1: The Coming of the Martians

                                Chapter 1.1

                             The Eve of the War

     No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century
that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences
greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied
themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied,
perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the
transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With
infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little
affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is
possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a
thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought
of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or
improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those
departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men
upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary
enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as
ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and
unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely
drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the
great disillusionment.

     The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the
sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it
receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It
must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and
long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have
begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of
the earth must have accelerated
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its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and
water and all that necessary for the support of animated existence.

     Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up
to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that
intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond
its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older
than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter
from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from
life's beginning but nearer its end.

     The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already
gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely
a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday
temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much
more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a
third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather
and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones.
That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has
become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate
pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their
powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with
instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they
see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a
morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey
with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses
through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and
narrow, navy-crowded seas.

     And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at
least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The
intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle
for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds
upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still
crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior
animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their
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only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps
upon them.

     And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless
and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals,
such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The
Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of
existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the
space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the
Martians warred in the same spirit?

     The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing
subtlety -- their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours
-- and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect
unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the
gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli
watched the red planet -- it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless
centuries Mars has been the star of war -- but failed to interpret the
fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time
the Martians; must have been getting ready.

     During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the
illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by
Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it
first in the issue of Nature dated August 2. I am inclined to think that
this have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their
planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as yet
unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two
oppositions.

     The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached
opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange
palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of
incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight of the
twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated
a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity
towards this earth. This jet of fire had
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become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal
puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, "as
flaming gases rushed out of a gun."

     A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was
nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the Daily Telgraph,
and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever
threatened the human race. I might not have heard of the eruption at all
had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was
immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of his feelings invited me
up to take a turn with him that night in a scrutiny of the red planet.

     In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that vigil
very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern
throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of
the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof -- an oblong
profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about,
invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of
deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such
a little thing, so bright and small and still faintly marked with
transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so
little it was, so silvery warm -- a pin's-head of light! It was as if it
quivered, but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of
the clockwork that kept the planet in view.

     As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to
advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty
millions of miles it was from us -- more than forty millions of miles of
void. Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the
material universe swims.

     Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light,
three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the
unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that blackness looks on
a frosty starlight night in a telescope it seems far profounder. And
invisible to me because it was so remote and small, flying swiftly and
steadily towards me across that incredible distance, drawing nearer every
minute
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by so many thousands of miles, came the Thing they were sending us, the
Thing that was to bring so much struggle and calamity and death to the
earth. I never dreamed of it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of
that unerring missile.

     That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from the distant
planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, the slightest projection of
the outline just as the chronometer struck midnight; and at that I told
Ogilvy and he took my place. The night was warm and I was thirsty, and I
went, stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the darkness, to
the little table where the siphon stood, while Ogilvy exclaimed at the
streamer of gas that came out towards us.

     That night another invisible missile started on its way to the earth
from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four hours after the first one.
I remember how I sat on the table there in the blackness, with patches of
green and crimson swimming before my eyes. I wished I had a light to smoke
by, little suspecting the meaning of the minute gleam I had seen and all
that it would presently bring me. Ogilvy watched till one, and then gave it
up; and we lit the lantern and walked over to his house. Down below in the
darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people,
sleeping in peace.

     He was full of speculation that night about the condition of Mars, and
scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who were signalling
us. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy shower upon
the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was in progress. He pointed
out to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken the same
direction in the two adjacent planets.

     "The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one,"
he said.

     Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after
about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a flame
each night. Why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on earth has
attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the firing caused the Martians
inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through
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a powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating patches, spread
through the clearness of the planet's atmosphere and obscured its more
familiar features.

     Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last, and popular
notes appeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the volcanoes upon
Mars. The serio-comic periodical Punch, I remember, made a happy use of it
in the political cartoon. And, all unsuspected, those missiles the Martians
had fired at us drew earthward, rushing now at a pace of many miles a
second through the empty gulf of space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer
and nearer. It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that
swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they
did. I remember how jubilant Markham was at securing a new photograph of
the planet for the illustrated paper he edited in those days. People in
these latter times scarcely realise the abundance and enterprise of our
nineteenth-century papers. For my own part, I was much occupied in learning
to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series of papers discussing the
probable developments of moral ideas as civilisation progressed.

     One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been 10,000,000
miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight, and I
explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a bright
dot of light creeping zenithward, towards which so many telescopes were
pointed. It was a warm night. Coming home, a party of excursionists from
Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing music. There were
lights in the upper windows of the houses as the people went to bed. >From
the railway station in the distance came the sound of shunting trains,
ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. My wife
pointed out to me the brightness of the red, green, and yellow signal
lights hanging in a framework against the sky. It seemed so safe and
tranquil.

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                                Chapter 1.2

                              The Falling Star

     Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in
the morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the
atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary
falling star. Albin described it as leaving a greenish streak behind it
that glowed for some seconds. Denning, our greatest authority on
meteorites, stated that the height of its first appearance was about ninety
or one hundred miles. It seemed to him that it fell to earth about one
hundred miles east of him.

     I was at home at that hour and writing in my study; and although my
French windows face towards Ottershaw and the blind was up (for I loved in
those days to look up at the night sky), I saw nothing of it. Yet this
strangest of all things that ever came to earth from outer space must have
fallen while I was sitting there, visible to me had I only looked up as it
passed. Some of those who saw its flight say it travelled with a hissing
sound. I myself heard nothing of that. Many people in Berkshire, Surrey,
and Middlesex must have seen the fall of it, and, at most, have thought
that another meteorite had descended. No one seems to have troubled to look
for the fallen mass that night.

     But very early in the morning poor Ogilvy, who had seen the shooting
star and who was persuaded that a meteorite lay somewhere on the common
between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, rose early with the idea of finding
it. Find it he did, soon after dawn, and not far from the sand pits. An
enormous hole had been made by the impact of the projectile, and the sand
and gravel had been flung violently in every direction over the heath,
forming heaps visible a mile and a half away. The heather was on fire
eastward, and a thin blue smoke rose against the dawn.

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     The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand, amidst the
scattered splinters of a fir tree it had shivered to fragments in its
descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder, caked
over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured incrustation.
It had a diameter of about thirty yards. He approached the mass, surprised
at the size and more so at the shape, since most meteorites are rounded
more or less completely. It was, however, still so hot from its flight
through the air as to forbid his near approach. A stirring noise within its
cylinder he ascribed to the unequal cooling of its surface; for at that
time it had not occurred to him that it might be hollow.

     He remained standing at the edge of the pit that the Thing had made
for itself, staring at its strange appearance, astonished chiefly at its
unusual shape and colour, and dimly perceiving even then some evidence of
design in its arrival. The early morning was wonderfully still, and the
sun, just clearing the pine trees towards Weybridge, was already warm. He
did not remember hearing any birds that morning, there was certainly no
breeze stirring, and the only sounds were the faint movements from within
the cindery cylinder. He was all alone on the common.

     Then suddenly he noticed with a start that some of the grey clinker,
the ashy incrustation that covered the meteorite, was falling off the
circular edge of the end. It was dropping off in flakes and raining down
upon the sand. A large piece suddenly came off and fell with a sharp noise
that brought his heart into his mouth.

     For a minute he scarcely realised what this meant, and, although the
heat was excessive, he clambered down into the pit close to the bulk to see
the Thing more clearly. He fancied even then that the cooling of the body
might account for this, but what disturbed that idea was the fact that the
ash was failing only from the end of the cylinder.

     And then he perceived that, very slowly, the circular top of the
cylinder was rotating on its body. It was such a gradual movement that he
discovered it only through noticing that a black mark that had been near
him five minutes ago was now at the other side of the circumference. Even
then
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he scarcely understood what this indicated, until he heard a muffled
grating sound and saw the black mark jerk forward an inch or so. Then the
thing came upon him in a flash. The cylinder was artificial -- hollow --
with an end that screwed out! Something within the cylinder was unscrewing
the top!

     "Good heavens!" said Ogilvy. "There's a man in it -- men in it! Half
roasted to death! Trying to escape!"

     At once, with a quick mental leap, he linked the Thing with the flash
upon Mars.

     The thought of the confined creature was so dreadful to him that he
forgot the heat, and went forward to the cylinder to help turn. But luckily
the dull radiation arrested him before he could burn his hands on the still
glowing metal. At that he stood irresolute for a moment, then turned,
scrambled out of the pit, and set off running wildly into Woking. The time
then must have been somewhere about six o'clock. He met a waggoner and
tried to make him understand, but the tale he told and his appearance were
so wild -- his hat had fallen off in the pit -- that the man simply drove
on. He was equally unsuccessful with the pot man who was just unlocking the
doors of the public-house by Horsell Bridge. The fellow thought he was a
lunatic at large and made an unsuccessful attempt to shut him into the
taproom. That sobered him a little; and when he saw Henderson, the London
journalist, in his garden, he called over the palings and made himself
understood.

     "Henderson," he called, "you saw that shooting star last night?"

     "Well?" said Henderson

     "It's out on Horsell Common now."

     "Good Lord!" said Henderson. "Fallen meteorite! That's good."

     "But it's something more than a meteorite. It's a cylinder -- an
artificial cylinder, man! And there's something inside."

     Henderson stood up with his spade in his hand.

     "What's that?" he said. He was deaf in one ear.

     Ogilvy told him all that he had seen. Henderson was a minute or so
taking it in. Then he dropped his spade, snatched up his jacket, and came
out into the road. The two men
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hurried back at once to the common, and found the cylinder still lying in
the same position. But now the sounds inside had ceased, and a thin circle
of bright metal showed between the top and the body of the cylinder. Air
was either entering or escaping at the rim with a thin, sizzling sound.

     They listened, rapped on the scaly burnt metal with a stick, and,
meeting with no response, they both concluded the man or men inside must be
insensible or dead.

     Of course the two were quite unable to do anything. They shouted
consolation and promises, and went off back to the town again to get help.
One can imagine them, covered with sand, excited and disordered, running up
the little street in the bright sunlight just as the shop folks were taking
down their shutters and people were opening their bedroom windows.
Henderson went into the railway station at once, in order to telegraph the
news to London. The newspaper articles had prepared men's minds for the
reception of the idea.

     By eight o'clock a number of boys and unemployed men had already
started for the common to see the "dead men from Mars." That was the form
the story took. I heard of it first from my newspaper boy about a quarter
to nine when I went out to get my Daily Chronicle. I was naturally
startled, and lost no time in going out and across the Ottershaw bridge to
the sand pits.

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                                Chapter 1.3

                             On Horsell Common

     I found a little crowd of perhaps twenty people surrounding the huge
hole in which the cylinder lay. I have already described the appearance of
that colossal bulk, embedded in the ground. The turf and gravel about it
seemed charred as if by a sudden explosion. No doubt its impact had caused
a flash of fire. Henderson and Ogilvy were not there. I think they
perceived that nothing was to be done for the present, and had gone away to
breakfast at Henderson's house.

     There were four or five boys sitting on the edge of the pit, with
their feet dangling, and amusing themselves until I stopped them -- by
throwing stones at the giant mass. After I had spoken to them about it,
they began playing at "touch" in and out of the group of bystanders.

     Among these were a couple of cyclists, a jobbing gardener I employed
sometimes, a girl carrying a baby, Gregg the butcher and his little boy,
and two or three loafers and golf caddies who were accustomed to hang about
the railway station. There was very little talking. Few of the common
people in England had anything but the vaguest astronomical ideas in those
days. Most of them were standing quietly at the big tablelike end of the
cylinder, which was still as Ogilvy and Henderson had left it. I fancy the
popular expectation of a heap of charred corpses was disappointed at this
inanimate bulk. Some went away while I was there, and other people came. I
clambered into the pit and fancied I heard a faint movement under my feet.
The top had certainly ceased to rotate.

     It was only when I got thus close to it that the strangeness of this
object was at all evident to me. At the first glance it was really no more
exciting than an overturned carriage
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or a tree blown across the road. Not so much so, indeed. It looked like a
rusty gas float. It required a certain amount of scientific education to
perceive that the grey scale of the Thing was no common oxide, that the
yellowish-white metal that gleamed in the crack between the lid and the
cylinder had an unfamiliar hue. "Extraterrestrial" had no meaning for most
of the onlookers.

     At that time it was quite clear in my own mind that the Thing had come
from the planet Mars, but I judged it improbable that it contained any
living creature. I thought the unscrewing might be automatic. In spite of
Ogilvy, I still believed that there were men in Mars. My mind ran
fancifully on the possibilities of its containing manuscript, on the
difficulties in translation that might arise, whether we should find coins
and models in it, and so forth. Yet it was a little too large for assurance
on this idea. I felt an impatience to see it opened. About eleven, as
nothing seemed happening, I walked back, full of such thought, to my home
in Maybury. But I found it difficult to get to work upon my abstract
investigations.

     In the afternoon the appearance of the common had altered very much.
The early editions of the evening papers had startled London with enormous
headlines: A MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM MARS
REMARKABLE STORY FROM WOKING
and so forth. In addition, Ogilvy's wire to the Astronomical Exchange had
roused every observatory in the three kingdoms.

     There were half a dozen flies or more from the Woking station standing
in the road by the sand pits, a basket-chaise from Chobham, and a rather
lordly carriage. Besides that, there was quite a heap of bicycles. In
addition, a large number of people must have walked, in spite of the heat
of the day, from Woking and Chertsey, so that there was altogether quite a
considerable crowd -- one or two gaily dressed ladies among the others.

     It was glaringly hot, not a cloud in the sky nor a breath of wind, and
the only shadow was that of the few scattered pine trees. The burning
heather had been extinguished, but
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the level ground towards Ottershaw was blackened as far as one could see,
and still giving off vertical streamers of smoke. An enterprising
sweet-stuff dealer in the Chobham Road had sent up his son with a
barrow-load of green apples and ginger beer.

     Going to the edge of the pit, I found it occupied by a group of about
half a dozen men -- Henderson, Ogilvy, and a tall, fair-haired man that I
afterwards learned was Stent, the Astronomer Royal, with several workmen,
wielding spades and pickaxes. Stent was giving directions in a clear,
high-pitched voice. He was standing on the cylinder, which was now
evidently much cooler; his face was crimson and streaming with
perspiration, and something seemed to have irritated him.

     A large portion of the cylinder had been uncovered, though its lower
end was still embedded. As soon as Ogilvy saw me among the staring crowd on
the edge of the pit he called to me to come down, and asked me if I would
mind going over to see Lord Hilton, the lord of the manor.

     The growing crowd, he said, was becoming a serious impediment to their
excavations, especially the boys. They wanted a light railing put up, and
help to keep the people back. He told me that a faint stirring was
occasionally still audible within the case, but that the workmen had failed
to unscrew the top, as it afforded no grip to them. The case appeared to be
enormously thick, and it was possible that the faint sounds we heard
represented a noisy tumult in the interior.

     I was very glad to do as he asked, and so become one of the privileged
spectators within the contemplated enclosure. I failed to find Lord Hilton
at his house, but I was told he was expected from London by the six o'clock
train from Waterloo; and as it was then about a quarter past five, I went
home, had some tea, and walked up to the station to waylay him.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.4

                             The Cylinder Opens

     When I returned to the common the sun was setting. Scattered groups
were hurrying from the direction of Woking, and one or two persons were
returning. The crowd about the pit had increased, and stood out black
against the lemon yellow of the sky -- a couple of hundred people, perhaps.
There were raised voices, and some sort of struggle appeared to be going on
about the pit. Strange imaginings passed through my mind. As I drew nearer
I heard Stent's voice:

     "Keep back! Keep back!"

     A boy came running towards me.

     "Its a movin'," he said to me as he passed; "a-screwin' and a-screwin'
out. I don't like it. I'm a-goin' home, I am."

     I went on to the crowd. There were really, I should think, two or
three hundred people elbowing and jostling one another, the one or two
ladies there being by no means the least active.

     "He's fallen in the pit!" cried some one.

     "Keep back!" said several.

     The crowd swayed a little, and I elbowed my way through. Every one
seemed greatly excited. I heard a peculiar humming sound from the pit.

     "I say!" said Ogilvy; "help keep these idiots back. We don't know
what's in the confounded thing, you know!"

     I saw a young man, a shop assistant in Woking I believe he was,
standing on the cylinder and trying to scramble out of the hole again. The
crowd had pushed him in.

     The end of the cylinder was being screwed but from within. Nearly two
feet of shining screw projected. Somebody blundered against me, and I
narrowly missed being pitched onto the top of the screw. I turned, and as I
did so the screw must have come out, for the lid of the cylinder fell upon
the gravel
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with a ringing concussion. I stuck my elbow into the person behind me, and
turned my head towards the Thing again. For a moment that circular cavity
seemed perfectly black. I had the sunset in my eyes.

     I think everyone expected to see a man emerge -- possibly something a
little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man. I know I
did. But, looking, I presently saw something stirring within the shadow:
greyish billowy movements, one above another, and then two luminous disks
-- like eyes. Then something resembling a little grey snake, about the
thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the writhing middle, and
wriggled in the air towards me -- and then another.

     A sudden chill came over me. There was a loud shriek from a woman
behind. I half turned, keeping my eyes fixed upon the cylinder still, from
which other tentacles were now projecting, and began pushing my way back
from the edge of the pit. I saw astonishment giving place to horror on the
faces of the people about me. I heard inarticulate exclamations on all
sides. There was a general movement backwards. I saw the shopman struggling
still on the edge of the pit. I found myself alone, and saw the people on
the other side of the pit running off, Stent among them. I looked again at
the cylinder, and ungovernable terror gripped me. I stood petrified and
staring.

     A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising
slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the
light, it glistened like wet leather.

     Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass
that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one might
say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which
quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and
pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the
cylinder, another swayed in the air.

     Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the
strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its
pointed upper lip, the absence of
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brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the
incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the
tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident
heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational
energy of the earth -- above all, the extraordinary intensity of the
immense eye -- were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and
monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in
the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at
this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and
dread.

     Suddenly the monster vanished. It had toppled over the brim of the
cylinder and fallen into the pit, with a thud like the fall of a great mass
of leather. I heard it give a peculiar thick cry, and forthwith another of
these creatures appeared darkly in the deep shadow of the aperture.

     I turned and, running madly, made for the first group of trees,
perhaps a hundred yards away; but I ran slantingly and stumbling, for I
could not avert my face from these things.

     There, among some young pine trees and furze bushes, I stopped,
panting, and waited further developments. The common round the sand pits
was dotted with people, standing like myself in a half-fascinated terror,
staring at these creatures, or rather at the heaped gravel at the edge of
the pit in which they lay. And then, with a renewed horror, I saw a round,
black object bobbing up and down on the edge of the pit. It was the head of
the shopman who had fallen in, but showing as a little black object against
the hot western sky. Now he got his shoulder and knee up, and again he
seemed to slip back until only his head was visible. Suddenly he vanished,
and I could have fancied a faint shriek had reached me. I had a momentary
impulse to go back and help him that my fears overruled.

     Everything was then quite invisible, hidden by the deep pit and the
heap of sand that the fall of the cylinder had made. Anyone coming along
the road from Choban or Woking would have been amazed at the sight -- a
dwindling multitude
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Page 29

of perhaps a hundred people or more standing in a great irregular circle,
in ditches, behind bushes, behind gates and hedges, saying little to one
another and that in short, excited shouts, and staring, staring hard at a
few heaps of sand. The barrow of ginger beer stood, a queer derelict, black
against the burning sky, and in the sand pits was a row of deserted
vehicles with their horses feeding out of nosebags or pawing the ground.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.5

                                The Heat-Ray

     After the glimpse I had had of the Martians emerging from the cylinder
in which they had come to the earth from their planet, a kind of
fascination paralysed my actions. I remained standing knee-deep in the
heather, staring at the mound that hid them. I was a battleground of fear
and curiosity.

     I did not dare to go back towards the pit, but I felt a passionate
longing to peer into it. I began walking, therefore, in a big curve,
seeking some point of vantage and continually looking at the sand heaps
that hid these newcomers to our earth. Once a leash of thin black whips,
like the arms of an octopus, flashed across the sunset and was immediately
withdrawn, and afterwards a thin rod rose up, joint by joint, bearing at
its apex a circular disk that spun with a wobbling motion. What could be
going on there?

     Most of the spectators had gathered in one or two groups -- one a
little crowd towards Woking, the other a knot of people in the direction of
Chobham. Evidently they shared my mental conflict. There were few near me.
One man I approached -- he was, I perceived, a neighbour of mine, though I
did not know his name -- and accosted. But it was scarcely a time for
articulate conversation.

     "What ugly brutes!" he said. "Good God! What ugly brutes!" He repeated
this over and over again.

     "Did you see a man in the pit?" I said; but he made no answer to that.
We became silent, and stood watching for a time side by side, deriving, I
fancy, a certain comfort in one another's company. Then I shifted my
position to a little knoll that gave me the advantage of a yard or more of
elevation, and when I looked for him presently he was walking towards
Woking.

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Page 31

     The sunset faded to twilight before anything further happened. The
crowd far away on the left, towards Woking, seemed to grow, and I heard now
a faint murmur from it. The little knot of people towards Chobham
dispersed. There was scarcely an intimation of movement from the pit.

     It was this, as much as anything, that gave people courage, and I
suppose the new arrivals from Woking also helped to restore confidence. At
any rate, as the dusk came on a slow, intermittent movement upon the sand
pits began, a movement that seemed to gather force as the stillness of the
evening about the cylinder remained unbroken. Vertical black figures in
twos and threes would advance, stop, watch, and advance again, spreading
out as they did so in a thin irregular crescent that promised to enclose
the pit in its attenuated horns. I, too, on my side began to move towards
the pit.

     Then I saw some cabmen and others had walked boldly into the sand
pits, and heard the clatter of hoofs and the gride of wheels. I saw a lad
trundling off the barrow of apples. And then, within thirty yards of the
pit, advancing from the direction of Horsell, I noted a little black knot
of men, the foremost of whom was waving a white flag.

     This was the Deputation. There had been a hasty consultation, and
since the Martians were evidently, in spite of their repulsive forms,
intelligent creatures, it had been resolved to show them, by approaching
them with signals, that we too were intelligent.

     Flutter, flutter, went the flag, first to the right, then to the left.
It was too far for me to recognise anyone there, but afterwards I learned
that Ogilvy, Stent, and Henderson were with others in this attempt at
communication. This little group had in its advance dragged inward, so to
speak, the circumference of the now almost complete circle of people, and a
number of dim black figures followed it at discreet distances.

     Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a quantity of luminous
greenish smoke came out of the pit in three distinct puffs, which drove up,
one after the other, straight into the still air.

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     This smoke (or flame, perhaps, would be the better word for it) was so
bright that the deep blue sky overhead and the hazy stretches of brown
common towards Chertsey, set with black pine trees, seemed to darken
abruptly as these puffs arose, and to remain the darker after their
dispersal. At the same time a faint hissing sound became audible.

     Beyond the pit stood the little wedge of people with the white flag at
its apex, arrested by these phenomena, a little knot of small vertical
black shapes upon the black ground. As the green smoke arose, their faces
flashed out pallid green, and faded again as it vanished. Then slowly the
hissing passed into a humming, into a long, loud, droning noise. Slowly a
humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed
to flicker out from it.

     Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to
another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some
invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if
each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire.

     Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and
falling, and their supporters turning to run.

     I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from
man to man in that little distant crowd. All I felt was that it was
something very strange. An almost noiseless and blinding flash of light,
and a man fell headlong and lay still; and as the unseen shaft of heat
passed over them, pine trees burst into fire and every dry furze bush
became with one dull thud a mass of flames. And far away towards Knaphill I
saw the flashes of trees and hedges and wooden buildings suddenly set
alight.

     It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this
invisible, inevitable sword of heat. I perceived it coming towards me by
the flashing bushes it touched, and was too astounded and stupefied to
stir. I heard the crackle of fire in the sand pits and the sudden squeal of
a horse that was as suddenly stilled. Then it was as if an invisible yet
intensely heated finger were drawn through the heather between me and the
Martians, and all along a curving line
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beyond the sand pits the dark ground smoked and crackled. Something fell
with a crash far away to the left where the road from Woking station opens
out on the common. Forthwith the hissing and humming ceased, and the black,
domelike object sank slowly out of sight into the pit.

     All this had happened with such swiftness that I had stood motionless,
dumbfounded and dazzled by the flashes of light. Had that death swept
through a full circle, it must inevitably have slain me in my surprise. But
it passed and spared me, and left the night about me suddenly dark and
unfamiliar.

     The undulating common seemed now dark almost to blackness, except
where its roadways lay grey and pale under the deep blue sky of the early
night. It was dark, and suddenly void of men. Overhead the stars were
mustering, and in the west the sky was still a pale, bright, almost
greenish blue. The tops of the pine trees and the roofs of Horsell came out
sharp and black against the western afterglow. The Martians and their
appliances were altogether invisible, save for that thin mast upon which
their restless mirror wobbled. Patches of bush and isolated trees here and
there smoked and glowed still, and the houses towards Woking station were
sending up spires of flame into the stillness of the evening air.

     Nothing was changed save for that and a terrible astonishment. The
little group of black specks with the flag of white had been swept out of
existence, and the stillness of the evening, so it seemed to me, had
scarcely been broken.

     It came to me that I was upon this dark common, helpless, unprotected,
and alone. Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came --
fear.

     With an effort I turned and began a stumbling run through the heather.

     The fear I felt was no rational fear, but a panic terror not only of
the Martians, but of the dusk and stillness all about me. Such an
extraordinary effect in unmanning me it had that I ran weeping silently as
a child might do. Once I had turned, I did not dare to look back.

     I remember I felt an extraordinary persuasion that I was
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being played with, that presently, when I was upon the very verge of
safety, this mysterious death -- as swift as the passage of light -- would
leap after me from the pit about the cylinder and strike me down.

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Page 35

                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.6

                        The Heat-Ray in Chobham Road

     It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men
so swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are able to
generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute
non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against
any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown
composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam
of light. But no one has absolutely proved these details. However it is
done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat,
and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes
into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and
melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into
steam.

     That night nearly forty people lay under the starlight about the pit
charred and distorted beyond recognition, and all night long the common
from Horsell to Maybury was deserted and brightly ablaze.

     The news of the massacre probably reached Chobham, Woking, and
Ottershaw about the same time. In Woking the shops had closed when the
tragedy happened, and a number of people, shop people and so forth,
attracted by the stories they had heard, were walking over the Horsell
Bridge and along the road between the hedges that runs out at last upon the
common. You may imagine the young people brushed up after the labours of
the day, and making this novelty, as they would make any novelty, the
excuse for walking together and enjoying a trivial flirtation. You may
figure to yourself the hunt of voices along the road in the gloaming....

     As yet, of course, few people in Woking even knew that the cylinder
had opened, though poor Henderson had sent a
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messenger on a bicycle to the post office with a special wire to an evening
paper.

     As these folks came out by twos and threes upon the open, they found
little knots of people talking excitedly and peering at the spinning mirror
over the sand pits, and the newcomers were, no doubt, soon infected by the
excitement of the occasion.

     By half past eight, when the Deputation was destroyed, there may have
been a crowd of three hundred people or more at this place, besides those
who had left the road to approach the Martians nearer. There were three
policemen too, one of whom was mounted, doing their best, under
instructions from Stent, to keep the people back and deter them from
approaching the cylinder. There was some booing from those more thoughtless
and excitable souls to whom a crowd is always an occasion for noise and
horse-play.

     Stent and Ogilvy, anticipating some possibilities of a collision, had
telegraphed from Horsell to the barracks as soon as the Martians emerged,
for the help of a company of soldiers to protect these strange creatures
from violence. After that they returned to lead that ill-fated advance. The
description of their death, as it was seen by the crowd, tallies very
closely with my own impressions: the three puffs of green smoke, the deep
humming note, and the flashes of flame.

     But that crowd of people had a far narrower escape than mine. Only the
fact that a hummock of heathery sand intercepted the lower part of the
Heat-Ray saved them. Had the elevation of the parabolic mirror been a few
yards higher, none could have lived to tell the tale. They saw the flashes
and the men falling and an invisible hand, as it were, lit the bushes as it
hurried towards them through the twilight. Then, with a whistling note that
rose above the droning of the pit, the beam swung close over their heads,
lighting the tops of the beech trees that line the road, and splitting the
bricks, smashing the windows, firing the window frames, and bringing down
in crumbling rain a portion of the gable of the house nearest the corner.

     In the sudden thud, hiss, and glare of the igniting trees,
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Page 37

the panic-stricken crowd seems to have swayed hesitatingly for some
moments. Sparks and burning twigs began to fall into the road, and single
leaves like puffs of flame. Hats and dresses caught fire. Then came a
crying from the common. There were shrieks and shouts, and suddenly a
mounted policeman came galloping through the confusion with his hands
clasped over his head, screaming.

     "They're coming!" a woman shrieked, and incontinently everyone was
turning and pushing at those behind, in order to clear their way to Woking
again. They must have bolted as blindly as a flock of sheep. Where the road
grows narrow and black between the high banks the crowd jammed, and a
desperate struggle occurred. All that crowd did not escape; three persons
at least, two women and a little boy, were crushed and trampled there, and
left to die amid the terror and the darkness.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.7

                             How I Reached Home

     For my own part, I remember nothing of my flight except the stress of
blundering against trees and stumbling through the heather. All about me
gathered the invisible terrors of the Martians; that pitiless sword of heat
seemed whirling to and fro, flourishing overhead before it descended and
smote me out of life. I came into the road between the crossroads and
Horsell, and ran along this to the crossroads.

     At last I could go no further; I was exhausted with the violence of my
emotion and of my flight, and I staggered and fell by the wayside. That was
near the bridge that crosses the canal by the gasworks. I fell and lay
still.

     I must have remained there some time.

     I sat up, strangely perplexed. For a moment, perhaps, I could not
clearly understand how I came there. My terror had fallen from me like a
garment. My hat had gone, and my collar had burst away from its fastener. A
few minutes before, there had only been three real things before me -- the
immensity of the night and space and nature, my own feebleness and anguish,
and the near approach of death. Now it was as if something turned over, and
the point of view altered abruptly. There was no sensible transition from
one state of mind to the other. I was immediately the self of every day
again -- a decent ordinary citizen. The silent common, the impulse of my
flight, the starting flames, were as if they had been in a dream. I asked
myself had these latter things indeed happened? I could not credit it.

     I rose and walked unsteadily up the steep incline of the bridge. My
mind was blank wonder. My muscles and nerves seemed drained of their
strength. I dare say I staggered drunkenly. A head rose over the arch, and
the figure of a workman carrying a basket appeared. Beside him ran a little
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boy. He passed me, wishing me good night. I was minded to speak to him, but
did not. I answered his greeting with a meaningless mumble and went on over
the bridge.

     Over the Maybury arch a train, a billowing tumult of white, firelit
smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted windows, went flying south --
clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone. A dim group of people talked
in the gate of one of the houses in the pretty little row of gables that
was called Oriental Terrace. It was all so real and so familiar. And that
behind me! It was frantic, fantastic! Such things, I told myself, could not
be.

     Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my
experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of
detachment from myself and the world about me, I seem to watch it all from
the outsider from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of
space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very
strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.

     But the trouble was the blank incongruity of this serenity and the
swift death flying yonder, not two miles away. There was a noise of
business from the gasworks, and the electric lamps were all alight. I
stopped at the group of people.

     "What news from the common?" said I.

     There were two men and a woman at the gate.

     "Eh?" said one of the men, turning.

     "What news from the common?" I said.

     "Ain't yer just been there?" asked the men.

     "People seem fair silly about the common," said the woman over the
gate. "What's it all abart?"

     "Haven't you heard of the men from Mars?" said I; "the creatures from
Mars?"

     "Quite enough," said the woman over the gate. "Thenks"; and all three
of them laughed.

     I felt foolish, and angry. I tried and found I could not tell them
what I had seen. They laughed again at my broken sentences.

     "You'll hear more yet," I said, and went on to my home.

     I startled my wife at the doorway, so haggard was I. I went
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into the dining room, sat down, drank some wine, and so soon as I could
collect myself sufficiently I told her the things I had seen. The dinner,
which was a cold one, had already been served, and remained neglected on
the table while I told my story.

     "There is one thing," I said, to allay the fears I had aroused; "they
are the most sluggish things I ever saw crawl. They may keep the pit and
kill people who come near them, but they cannot get out of it.... But the
horror of them!"

     "Don't, dear!" said my wife, knitting her brows and putting her hand
on mine.

     "Poor Ogilvy!" I said. "To think he may be lying dead there!"

     My wife at least did not find my experience incredible. When I saw how
deadly white her face was, I ceased abruptly.

     "They may come here," she said again and again.

     I pressed her to take wine, and tried to reassure her.

     "They can scarcely move," I said.

     I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that Ogilvy had
told me of the impossibility of the Martians establishing themselves on the
earth. In particular I laid stress on the gravitational difficulty. On the
surface of the earth the force of gravity is three times what it is on the
surface of Mars. A Martian, therefore, would weigh three times more on
Mars, albeit his muscular strength would be the same. His own body would be
a cope of lead to him. That, indeed, was the general opinion. Both The
Times and the Daily Telegraph, for instance, insisted on it the next
morning, and both overlooked, just as I did, two obvious modifying
influences.

     The atmosphere of the earth, we now know, contains far more oxygen or
far less argon (whichever way one likes to put it) than does Mars. The
invigorating influences of this excess of oxygen upon the Martians
indisputably did much to counterbalance the increased weight of their
bodies. And, in the second place, we all overlooked the fact that such
mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed was quite able to dispense
with muscular exertion at a pinch.

     But I did not consider these points at the time, and so my
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reasoning was dead against the chances of the invaders. With wine and food,
the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I
grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.

     "They have done a foolish thing," said I, fingering my wineglass.
"They are dangerous because, no doubt, they are mad with terror. Perhaps
they expected to find no living things -- certainly no intelligent living
things.

     "A shell in the pit," said I, "if the worst comes to the worst, will
kill them all."

     The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive
powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with
extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet anxious face peering
at me from under the pink lamp shade, the white cloth with its silver and
glass table furniture -- for in those days even philosophical writers had
many little luxuries -- the crimson purple wine in my glass, are
photographically distinct. At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts with a
cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted
timidity of the Martians.

     So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his
nest and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want
of animal food. "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear."

     I did not know it, but that was the last civilised dinner I was to eat
for very many strange and terrible days.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.8

                                Friday Night

     The most extraordinary thing to my mind, of all the strange and
wonderful things that happened upon that Friday, was the dovetailing of the
commonplace habits of our social order with the first beginnings of the
series of events that was to topple that social order headlong. If on
Friday night you had taken a pair of compasses and drawn a circle with a
radius of five miles round the Woking sand pits, I doubt if you would have
had one human being outside it, unless it were some relation of Stent or of
the three or four cyclists or London people lying dead on the common, whose
emotions or habits were at all affected by the new-comers. Many people had
heard of the cylinder, of course, and talked about it in their leisure, but
it certainly did not make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would
have done.

     In London that night poor Henderson's telegram describing the gradual
unscrewing of the shot was judged to be a canard, and his evening paper,
after wiring for authentication from him and receiving no reply -- the man
was killed -- decided not to print a special edition.

     Even within the five-mile circle the great majority of people were
inert. I have already described the behaviour of the men and women to whom
I spoke. All over the district people were dining and supping; working men
were gardening after the labours of the day, children were being put to
bed, young people were wandering through the lanes love-making, students
sat over their books.

     Maybe there was a murmur in the village streets, a novel and dominant
topic in the public-houses, and here and there a messenger, or even an
eye-witness of the later occurrences, caused a whirl of excitement, a
shouting, and a running to and fro; but for the most part the daily routine
of working,
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eating, drinking, sleeping, went on as it had done for countless years --
as though no planet Mars existed in the sky. Even at Woking station and
Horsell and Chobham that was the case.

     In Woking junction, until a late hour, trains were stopping and going
on, others were shunting on the sidings, passengers were alighting and
waiting, and everything was proceeding in the most ordinary way. A boy from
the town, trenching on Smith's monopoly, was selling papers with the
afternoon's news. The ringing impact of trucks, the sharp whistle of the
engines from the junction, mingled with their shouts of "Men from Mars!"
Excited men came into the station about nine o'clock with incredible
tidings, and caused no more disturbance than drunkards might have done.
People rattling Londonwards peered into the darkness outside the carriage
windows, and saw only a rare, flickering, vanishing spark dance up from the
direction of Horsell, a red glow and a thin veil of smoke driving across
the stars, and thought that nothing more serious than a heath fire was
happening. It was only round the edge of the common that any disturbance
was perceptible. There were half a dozen villas burning on the Woking
border. There were lights in all the houses on the common side of the three
villages, and the people there kept awake till dawn.

     A curious crowd lingered restlessly, people coming and going but the
crowd remaining, both on the Chobham and Horsell bridges. One or two
adventurous souls, it was afterwards found, went into the darkness and
crawled quite near the Martians; but they never returned, for now and again
a light-ray, like the beam of a warships' searchlight, swept the common,
and the Heat-Ray was ready to follow. Save for such, that big area of
common was silent and desolate, and the charred bodies lay about on it all
night under the stars, and all the next day. A noise of hammering from the
pit was heard by many people.

     So you have the state of things on Friday night. In the centre,
sticking into the skin of our old planet Earth like a poisoned dart, was
this cylinder. But the poison was scarcely working yet. Around it was a
patch of silent common,
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smouldering in places, and with a few dark, dimly seen objects lying in
contorted attitudes here and there. Here and there was a burning bush or
tree. Beyond was a fringe of excitement, and farther than that fringe the
inflammation had not crept as yet. In the rest of the world the stream of
life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years. The fever of war
that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve and destroy brain,
had still to develop.

     All night long the Martians were hammering and stirring, sleepless,
indefatigable, at work upon the machines they were making ready, and ever
and again a puff of greenish-white smoke whirled up to the starlit sky.

     About eleven a company of soldiers came through Horsell, and deployed
along the edge of the common to form a cordon. Later a second company
marched through Chobham to deploy on the north side of the common. Several
officers from the Inkerman barracks had been on the common earlier in the
day, and one, Major Eden, was reported to be missing. The colonel of the
regiment came to the Chobham bridge and was busy questioning the crowd at
midnight. The military authorities were certainly alive to the seriousness
of the business. About eleven, the next morning's papers were able to say,
a squadron of hussars, two Maxims, and about four hundred men of the
Cardigan regiment started from Aldershot.

     A few seconds after midnight the crowd in the Chertsey road, Woking,
saw a star fall from heaven into the pine woods to the northwest. It had a
greenish colour, and caused a silent brightness like summer lightning. This
was the second cylinder.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.9

                            The Fighting Begins

     Saturday lives in my memory as a day of suspense. It was a day of
lassitude too, hot and close, with, I am told, a rapidly fluctuating
barometer. I had slept but little, though my wife had succeeded in
sleeping, and I rose early. I went into my garden before breakfast and
stood listening, but towards the common there was nothing stirring but a
lark.

     The milkman came as usual. I heard the rattle of his chariot, and I
went round to the side gate to ask the latest news. He told me that during
the night the Martians had been surrounded by troops, and that guns were
expected.

     Then -- a familiar, reassuring note -- I heard a train running towards
Woking.

     "They aren't to be killed," said the milkman, "if that can possibly be
avoided."

     I saw my neighbour gardening, chatted with him for a time, and then
strolled in to breakfast. It was a most unexceptional morning. My neighbour
was of opinion that the troops would be able to capture or to destroy the
Martians during the day.

     "Its a pity they make themselves so unapproachable," he said. "It
would be curious to know how they live on another planet; we might learn a
thing or two."

     He came up to the fence and extended a handful of strawberries, for
his gardening was as generous as it was enthusiastic. At the same time he
told me of the burning of the pine woods about the Byfleet Golf Links.

     "They say," said he, "that there's another of those blessed things
fallen there -- number two. But one's enough, surely. This lot'll cost the
insurance people a pretty penny before everything's settled." He laughed
with an air of the greatest good humour as he said this. The woods, he
said, were still
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burning, and pointed out a haze of smoke to me. "They will be hot under
foot for days, on account of the thick soil of pine needles and turf," he
said, and then grew serious over "poor Ogilvy."

     After breakfast, instead of working, I decided to walk down towards
the common. Under the railway bridge I found a group of soldiers --
sappers, I think, men in small round caps, dirty red Jackets unbuttoned,
and showing their blue shirts, dark trousers, and boots coming to the calf.
They told me no one was allowed over the canal, and, looking along the road
towards the bridge, I saw one of the Gardigan men standing sentinel there.
I talked with these soldiers for a time; I told them of my sight of the
Martians on the previous evening. None of them had seen the Martians, and
they had but the vaguest ideas of them, so that they plied me with
questions. They said that they did not know who had authorised the
movements of the troops; their idea was that a dispute had arisen at the
Horse Guards. The ordinary sapper is a great deal better educated than the
common soldier, and they discussed the peculiar conditions of the possible
fight with some acuteness. I described the Heat-Ray to them, and they began
to argue among themselves.

     "Crawl up under cover and rush 'em, say I," said one.

     "Get aht!" said another. "What's cover against this 'ere 'eat? Sticks
to cook yer! What we got to do is to go as near as the ground'll let us,
and then drive a trench."

     "Blow yer trenches! You always want trenches; you ought to ha' been
born a rabbit, Snippy."

     " 'Ain't they got any necks, then?" said a third, abruptly -- a
little, contemplative, dark man, smoking a pipe.

     I repeated my description.

     "Octopuses," said he, "that's what I calls `em. Talk about fishers of
men -- fighters of fish it is this time!"

     "It ain't no murder killing beasts like that," said the first speaker.

     "Why not shell the darned things strite off and finish 'em?" said the
little dark man. "You carn tell what they might do."

     "Where's your shells?" said the first speaker. "There ain't no time.
Do it in a rush, that's my tip, and do it at once."

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     So they discussed it. After a while I left them, and went on to the
railway station to get as many morning papers as I could.

     But I will not weary the reader with a description of that long
morning and of the longer afternoon. I did not succeed in getting a glimpse
of the common, for even Horsell and Chobham church towers were in the hands
of the military authorities. The soldiers I addressed didn't know anything;
the officers were mysterious as well as busy. I found people in the town
quite secure again in the presence of the military, and I heard for the
first time from Marshall, the tobacconist, that his son was among the dead
on the common. The soldiers had made the people on the outskirts of Horsell
lock up and leave their houses.

     I got back to lunch about two, very tired, for, as I have said, the
day was extremely hot and dull; and in order to refresh myself I took a
cold bath in the afternoon. About half past four I went up to the railway
station to get an evening paper, for the morning papers had contained only
a very inaccurate description of the killing of Scent, Henderson, Ogilvy,
and the others. But there was little I didn't know. The Martians did not
show an inch of themselves. They seemed busy in their pit, and there was a
sound of hammering and an almost continuous streamer of smoke. Apparently
they were busy getting ready for a struggle. "Fresh attempts have been made
to signal, but without success," was the stereotyped formula of the papers.
A sapper told me it was done by a man in a ditch with a flag on a long
pole. The Martians took as much notice of such advances as we should of the
lowing of a cow.

     I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this preparation,
greatly excited me. My imagination became belligerent, and defeated the
invaders in a dozen striking ways; something of my schoolboy dreams of
battle and heroism came back. It hardly seemed a fair fight to me at that
time. They seemed very helpless in that pit of theirs.

     About three o'clock there began the thud of a gun at measured
intervals from Chertsey or Addlestone. I learned that the smouldering pine
wood into which the second cylinder
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had fallen was being shelled, in the hope of destroying that object before
it opened. It was only about five, however, that a field gun reached
Chobham for use against the first body of Martians.

     About six in the evening, as I sat at tea with my wife in the
summerhouse talking vigorously about the battle that was lowering upon us,
I heard a muffled detonation from the common, and immediately after a gust
of firing. Close on the heels of that came a violent, rattling crash, quite
close to us, that shook the ground; and, starting out upon the lawn, I saw
the tops of the trees about the Oriental College burst into smoky red
flame, and the tower of the little church beside it slide down into ruin.
The pinnacle of the mosque had vanished, and the roof line of the college
itself looked as if a hundred-ton gun had been at work upon it. One of our
chimneys cracked as if a shot had hit it, flew, and a piece of it came
clattering down the tiles and made a heap of broken red fragments upon the
flower bed by my study window.

     I and my wife stood amazed. Then I realised that the crest of Maybury
Hill must be within range of the Martians' Heat-Ray now that the college
was cleared out of the way.

     At that I gripped my wife's arm, and without ceremony ran her out into
the road. Then I fetched out the servant, telling her I would go upstairs
myself for the box she was clamouring for.

     "We can't possibly stay here," I said; and as I spoke the firing
reopened for a moment upon the common.

     "But where are we to go?" said my wife in terror.

     I thought, perplexed. Then I remembered her cousins at Leatherhead.

     "Leatherhead!" I shouted above the sudden noise.

     She looked away from me downhill. The people were coming out of their
houses, astonished.

     "How are we to get to Leatherhead?" she said.

     Down the hill I saw a bevy of hussars ride under the railway bridge;
three galloped through the open gates of the Oriental college; two others
dismounted, and began running from house to house. The sun, shining through
the
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smoke that drove up from the tops of the trees, seemed blood red, and threw
an unfamiliar lurid light upon everything.

     "Stop here," said I; "you are safe here"; and I started off at once
for the Spotted Dog, for I knew the landlord had a horse and dog cart. I
ran, for I perceived that in a moment everyone upon this side of the hill
would be moving. I found him in his bar, quite unaware of what was going on
behind his house. A man stood with his back to me, talking to him.

     "I must have a pound," said the landlord, "and I've no one to drive
it."

     "I'll give you two," said I, over the stranger's shoulder.

     "What for?"

     "And I'll bring it back by midnight," I said.

     "Lord!" said the landlord; "what's the hurry? I'm selling my bit of a
pig. Two pounds, and you bring it back? What's going on now?"

     I explained hastily that I had to leave my home, and so secured the
dog cart. At the time it did not seem to me nearly so urgent that the
landlord should leave his. I took care to have the cart there and then,
drove it off down the road, and, leaving it in charge of my wife and
servant, rushed into my house and packed a few valuables, such plate as we
had, and so forth. The beech trees below the house were burning while I did
this, and the palings up the road glowed red. While I was occupied in this
way, one of the dismounted hussars came running up. He was going from house
to house, warning people to leave. He was going on as I came out of my
front door, lugging my treasures, done up in a tablecloth. I shouted after
him:

     "What news?"

     He turned, stared, bawled something about "crawling out in a thing
like a dish cover," and ran on to the gate of the house at the crest. A
sudden whirl of black smoke driving across the road hid him for a moment. I
ran to my neighbour's door and rapped to satisfy myself of what I already
knew, that his wife had gone to London with him and had locked up their
house. I went in again, according to my promise, to get my servant's box,
lugged it out, clapped it beside her on the tail of the dog cart, and then
caught the reins and jumped
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up into the driver's seat beside my wife. In another moment we were clear
of the smoke and noise, and spanking down the opposite slope of Maybury
Hill towards Old Woking.

     In front was a quiet, sunny landscape, a wheat field ahead on either
side of the road, and the Maybury Inn with its swinging sign. I saw the
doctor's cart ahead of me. At the bottom of the hill I turned my head to
look at the hillside I was leaving. Thick streamers of black smoke shot
with threads of red fire were driving up into the still air, and throwing
dark shadows upon the green treetops eastward. The smoke already extended
far away to the east and west -- to the Byfleet pine woods eastward, and to
Woking on the west. The road was dotted with people running towards us. And
very faint now, but very distinct through the hot, quiet air, one heard the
whirr of a machine-gun that, was presently stilled, and an intermittent
cracking of rifles. Apparently the Martians were setting fire to everything
within range of their Heat-Ray.

     I am not an expert driver, and I had immediately to turn my attention
to the horse. When I looked back again the second hill had hidden the black
smoke. I slashed the horse with the whip, and gave him a loose rein until
Woking and Send lay between us and that quivering tumult. I overtook and
passed the doctor between Woking and Send.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.10

                                In the Storm

     Leatherhead is about twelve miles from Maybury Hill. The scent of hay
was in the air through the lush meadows beyond Pyrford, and the hedges on
either side were sweet and gay with multitudes of dog-roses. The heavy
firing that had broken out while we were driving down Maybury Hill ceased
as abruptly as it began, leaving the evening very peaceful and still. We
got to Leatherhead without misadventure about nine o'clock, and the horse
had an hour's rest while I took supper with my cousins and commended my
wife to their care.

     My wife was curiously silent throughout the drive, and seemed
oppressed with forebodings of evil. I talked to her reassuringly, pointing
out that the Martians were tied to the pit by sheer heaviness, and at the
utmost could but crawl a little out of it; but she answered only in
monosyllables. Had it not been for my promise to the innkeeper, she would,
I think, have urged me to stay in Leatherhead that night. Would that I had!
Her face, I remember, was very white as we parted.

     For my own part, I had been feverishly excited all day. Something very
like the war fever that occasionally runs through a civilised community had
got into my blood and in my heart I was not so very sorry that I had to
return to Maybury that night. I was even afraid that that last fusillade I
had heard might mean the extermination of our invaders from Mars. I can
best express my state of mind by saying that I wanted to be in at the
death.

     It was nearly eleven when I started to return. The night was
unexpectedly dark; to me, walking out of the lighted passage of my cousins'
house, it seemed indeed black, and it was as hot and close as the day.
Overhead the clouds were
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driving fast, albeit not a breath stirred the shrubs about us. My cousins'
man lit both lamps. Happily, I knew the road intimately. My wife stood in
the light of the doorway, and watched me until I jumped up into the dog
cart. Then abruptly she turned and went in, leaving my cousins side by side
wishing me good hap.

     I was a little depressed at first, with the contagion of my wife's
fears, but very soon my thoughts reverted to the Martians. At that time I
was absolutely in the dark as to the course of the evening's fighting. I
did not know even the circumstances that had precipitated the conflict. As
I came through Ockham (for that was the way I returned, and not through
Send and Old Woking) I saw along the western horizon a blood-red glow,
which, as I drew nearer, crept slowly up the sky. The driving clouds of the
gathering thunderstorm mingled there with masses of black and red smoke.

     Ripley Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window or so the
village showed not a sign of life; but I narrowly escaped an accident at
the corner of the road to Pyrford, where a knot of people stood with their
backs to me. They said nothing to me as I passed. I do not know what they
knew of the things happening beyond the hill, nor do I know if the silent
houses I passed on my way were sleeping securely, or deserted and empty, or
harassed and watching against the terror of the night.

     From Ripley until I came through Pyrford I was in the valley of the
Wey, and the red glare was hidden from me. As I ascended the little hill
beyond Pyrford Church the glare came into view again, and the trees about
me shivered with the first intimation of the storm that was upon me. Then I
heard midnight pealing out from Pyrford Church behind me, and then came the
silhouette of Maybury Hill, with its treetops and roofs black and sharp
against the red.

     Even as I beheld this a lurid green glare lit the road about me and
showed the distant woods towards Addlestone. I felt a tug at the reins. I
saw that the driving clouds had been pierced as it were by a thread of
green fire, suddenly lighting their confusion and falling into the field to
my left. It was the third falling star!

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     Close on its apparition, and blindingly violet by contrast, danced out
the first lightning of the gathering storm, and the thunder burst like a
rocket overhead. The horse took the bit between his teeth and bolted.

     A moderate incline runs towards the foot of Maybury Hill, and down
this we clattered. Once the lightning had begun, it went on in as rapid a
succession of flashes as I have ever seen. The thunderclaps, treading one
on the heels of another and with a strange crackling accompaniment, sounded
more like the working of a gigantic electric machine than the usual
detonating reverberations. The flickering light was blinding and confusing,
and a thin hail smote gustily at my face as I drove down the slope.

     At first I regarded little but the road before me, and then abruptly
my attention was arrested by something that was moving rapidly down the
opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At first I took it for the wet roof of a
house, but one flash following another showed it to be in swift rolling
movement. It was an elusive vision -- a moment of bewildering darkness, and
then, in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the Orphanage near the
crest of the hill, the green tops of the pine trees, and this problematical
object came out clear and sharp and bright.

     And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod,
higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing
them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding
now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the
clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A
flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the
air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next
flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and
bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant
flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of
machinery on a tripod stand.

     Then suddenly the trees in the pine wood ahead of me were parted, as
brittle reeds are parted by a man thrusting through them; they were snapped
off and driven headlong,
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and a second huge tripod appeared, rushing, as it seemed, headlong towards
me. And I was galloping hard to meet it! At the sight of the second monster
my nerve went altogether. Not stopping to look again, I wrenched the
horse's head hard round to the right, and in another moment the dog cart
had heeled over upon the horse; the shafts smashed noisily, and I was flung
sideways and fell heavily into a shallow pool of water.

     I crawled out almost immediately, and crouched, my feet still in the
water, under a clump of furze. The horse lay motionless (his neck was
broken, poor brute!) and by the lightning flashes I saw the black bulk of
the overturned dog cart and the silhouette of the wheel still spinning
slowly. In another moment the colossal mechanism went striding by me, and
passed uphill towards Pyrford.

     Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere
insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing
metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which
gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It
picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that
surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head
looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a
gigantic fisherman's basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the
joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an instant it was
gone.

     So much I saw then, all vaguely for the flickering of the lightning,
in blinding highlights and dense black shadows.

     As it passed it set up an exultant deafening howl that drowned the
thunder -- "Aloo! Aloo!" -- and in another minute it was with its
companion, half a mile away, stooping over something in the field. I have
no doubt this Thing in the field was the third of the ten cylinders they
had fired at us from Mars.

     For some minutes I lay there in the rain and darkness watching, by the
intermittent light, these monstrous beings of metal moving about in the
distance over the hedge tops. A thin hail was now beginning, and as it came
and went their figures grew misty and then flashed into clearness again.
Now
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and then came a gap in the lightning, and the night swallowed them up.

     I was soaked with hail above and puddle water below. It was some time
before my blank astonishment would let me struggle up the bank to a drier
position, or think at all of my imminent peril.

     Not far from me was a little one-roomed squatter's hut of wood,
surrounded by a patch of potato garden. I struggled to my feet at last,
and, crouching and making use of every chance of cover, I made a run for
this. I hammered at the door, but I could not make the people hear (if
there were any people inside), and after a time I desisted, and, availing
myself of a ditch for the greater part of the way, succeeded in crawling,
unobserved by these monstrous machines, into the pine wood towards Maybury.

     Under cover of this I pushed on, wet and shivering now, towards my own
house. I walked among the trees trying to find the footpath. It was very
dark indeed in the wood, for the lightning was now becoming infrequent, and
the hail, which was pouring down in a torrent, fell in columns through the
gaps in the heavy foliage.

     If I had fully realised the meaning of all the things I had seen I
should have immediately worked my way round through Byfleet to Street
Cobham, and so gone back to rejoin my wife at Leatherhead. But that night
the strangeness of things about me, and my physical wretchedness, prevented
me, for I was bruised, weary, wet to the skin, deafened and blinded by the
storm.

     I had a vague idea of going on to my own house, and that was as much
motive as I had. I staggered through the trees, fell into a ditch and
bruised my knees against a plant, and finally splashed out into the lane
that ran down from the College Arms. I say splashed, for the storm water
was sweeping the sand down the hill in a muddy torrent. There in the
darkness a man blundered into me and sent me reeling back.

     He gave a cry of terror, sprang sideways, and rushed on before I could
gather my wits sufficiently to speak to him. So heavy was the stress of the
storm just at this place that
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I had the hardest task to win my way up the hill. I went close up to the
fence on the left and worked my way along its palings.

     Near the top I stumbled upon something soft, and, by a flash of
lightning, saw between my feet a heap of black broadcloth and a pair of
boots. Before I could distinguish clearly how the man lay, the flicker of
light had passed. I stood over him waiting for the next flash. When it
came, I saw that he was a sturdy man, cheaply but not shabbily dressed; his
head was bent under his body, and he lay crumpled up close to the fence, as
though he had been flung violently against it.

     Overcoming the repugnance natural to one who had never before touched
a dead body, I stooped and turned him over to feel for his heart. He was
quite dead. Apparently his neck had been broken. The lightning flashed for
a third time, and his face leaped upon me. I sprang to my feet. It was the
landlord of the Spotted Dog, whose conveyance I had taken.

     I stepped over him gingerly and pushed on up the hill. I made my way
by the police station and the College Arms towards my own house. Nothing
was burning on the hillside, though from the common there still came a red
glare and a rolling tumult of ruddy smoke beating up against the drenching
hail. So far as I could see by the flashes, the houses about me were mostly
uninjured. By the College Arms a dark heap lay in the road.

     Down the bad towards Maybury Bridge there were voices and the sound of
feet, but I had not the courage to shout or to go to them. I let myself in
with my latchkey, closed, locked and bolted the door, staggered to the foot
of the staircase, and sat down. My imagination was full of those striding
metallic monsters, and of the dead body smashed against the fence.

     I crouched at the foot of the staircase with my back to the wall,
shivering violently.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.11

                               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, vent 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
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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 country 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, directing, 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
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burning land the little fading pin point 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
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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 Lord!
Like burnt meat! I was hurt across the back by the fall of the horse, and
there I had to lie until I felt better. Just like parade it had been a
minute before -- then stumble, bang, swish!

     "Wiped out!" he said.

     He had hid under the dead horse for a long time, peeping out furtively
across the common. The Cardigan men had tried a rush, in skirmishing order,
at the pit, simply to be swept out of existence. Then the monster had risen
to its feet, and had begun to walk leisurely to and fro across the common
among the few fugitives, with its headlike hood turning about exactly like
the head of a cowled human being. A kind of arm carried a complicated
metallic case, about which green flashes scintillated, and out of the
funnel of this there smoked the Heat-Ray.

     In a few minutes there was, so far as the soldier could see, not a
living thing left upon the common, and every bush and tree upon it that was
not already a blackened skeleton was burning. The hussars had been on the
road beyond the curvature of the ground, and he saw nothing of them. He
heard the Maxims rattle for a time and then become silent. 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,
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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
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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 escaped -- 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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.12

         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: "Its 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 Chobham 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
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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?"

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     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 aluminium, 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,
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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 nearly 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.

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     "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 artilleryman. 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
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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.

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     "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
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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
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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
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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
hundreds 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
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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
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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.13

                       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 reinforcements.
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 rained
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
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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 to escape should
these giants return.

     The hot water from the Martians overthrow drifted down-stream 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.

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     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.

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     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!"

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     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.

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     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."

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.14

                                 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
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night to me, in order, as he says, to see the Things before they were
killed. He despatched 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 every 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
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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 eye-witness 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.

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     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 before 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.

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     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 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 spider like 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 despatch 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
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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.

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     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 oldfashioned 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 --
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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.

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     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?" be 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:

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     "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 despatch 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.

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     "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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.15

                        What Had Happened in Surrey

     It was while the curate had sat and talked so wildly to me under the
hedge in the flat meadow's near Halliford, and while my brother was
catching 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
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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 bad 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
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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
organised, 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
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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
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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 became 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
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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
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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 front 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
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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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.16

                           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
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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
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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
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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 blood-stained 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
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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,
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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, be 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 highroad, 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 mangling 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
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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,
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"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 horse; 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 voice "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 potters, 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:

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     "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 front 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 hack 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.

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     "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 wheel 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
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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 realized 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
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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; the 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 hill 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 engine -- 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 near by their stopping place, fleeing from unknown dangers before
them, and going in the direction from which my brother had come.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 1.17

                            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
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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
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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 went 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, an 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
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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
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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 frees 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
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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 paddleboat,
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,
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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
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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
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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.

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                    Book 2: The Earth Under the Martians

                                Chapter 2.1

                                 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 though of how I was cut off from
her, of all that might happen to her in my absence. My cousin I knew was
brave enough for any emergency, but he was not the sort of man to realise
danger quickly, to rise promptly. What was needed now was not bravery, but
circumspection. My only consolation was to believe that the Martians were
moving Londonward and away from her. Such vague anxieties keep the mind
sensitive and painful. I grew very weary and irritable with the curate's
perpetual ejaculations; I tired of the sight of his selfish despair. After
some ineffectual remonstrance I kept away from him, staying in a room --
evidently a children's schoolroom -- containing globes, forms, and
copybooks. When he followed me thither, I went to a box room at the top of
the house and, in order to be alone with my aching miseries, locked myself
in.

     We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day and the
morning of the next. There were signs of people in the next house on Sunday
evening -- a face at a window and moving lights, and later the slamming of
a door.
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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 situation, 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
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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
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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.

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     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 lettaces. 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.
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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
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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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 2.2

                     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
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-- 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.
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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 realization 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.
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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
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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
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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
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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 then, 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, an 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 to 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
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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
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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
embarking 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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 2.3

                          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 dale 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
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long patience a time might presently come when we should need food. He ate
an 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,
matched 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
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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,
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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
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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
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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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 2.4

                          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
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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!
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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;
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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, scrutinising 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.

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     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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 2.5

                               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
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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
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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!

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 2.6

                          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
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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, hut 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 Twickerham. 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
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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.
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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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 2.7

                           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
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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 flowed 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
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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 Maiden, 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 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
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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
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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
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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?"

     "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.
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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 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 its 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!"

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     "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
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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 it is? -- 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.

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     "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, richblooded, 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 -- hundred 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
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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 hooks. 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 one 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
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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 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?"

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     "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 bear 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 arborvitae:, 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
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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
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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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 2.8

                                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
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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 north-western 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
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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. Who 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.

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     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.

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     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 runs, 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
other.

     An insane resolve posed 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
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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.

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     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.

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     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 Hampstead, 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
troweIs. At the thought I extended my hands towards the
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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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 2.9

                                  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 aprehensions, 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
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some inane 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
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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
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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
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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.

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                   --------------------------------------

                                Chapter 2.10

                                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
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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
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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
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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 sightseers 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.

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