The war of the worlds

I gave a cry of astonishment. I saw and thought nothing of the other
four Martian monsters; my attention was riveted upon the nearer
incident. Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the
body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to
dodge, the fourth shell.

The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged,
flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh and
glittering metal.

“Hit!” shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.

I heard answering shouts from the people in the water about me. I could
have leaped out of the water with that momentary exultation.

The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did not
fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer
heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now
rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living
intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to
the four winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate
device of metal whirling to destruction. It drove along in a straight
line, incapable of guidance. It struck the tower of Shepperton Church,
smashing it down as the impact of a battering ram might have done,
swerved aside, blundered on and collapsed with tremendous force into
the river out of my sight.

A violent explosion shook the air, and a spout of water, steam, mud,
and shattered metal shot far up into the sky. As the camera of the
Heat-Ray hit the water, the latter had immediately flashed into steam.
In another moment a huge wave, like a muddy tidal bore but almost
scaldingly hot, came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw people
struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and shouting faintly
above the seething and roar of the Martian’s collapse.

For a moment I heeded nothing of the heat, forgot the patent need of
self-preservation. I splashed through the tumultuous water, pushing
aside a man in black to do so, until I could see round the bend. Half a
dozen deserted boats pitched aimlessly upon the confusion of the waves.
The fallen Martian came into sight downstream, lying across the river,
and for the most part submerged.

Thick clouds of steam were pouring off the wreckage, and through the
tumultuously whirling wisps I could see, intermittently and vaguely,
the gigantic limbs churning the water and flinging a splash and spray
of mud and froth into the air. The tentacles swayed and struck like
living arms, and, save for the helpless purposelessness of these
movements, it was as if some wounded thing were struggling for its life
amid the waves. Enormous quantities of a ruddy-brown fluid were
spurting up in noisy jets out of the machine.

My attention was diverted from this death flurry by a furious yelling,
like that of the thing called a siren in our manufacturing towns. A
man, knee-deep near the towing path, shouted inaudibly to me and
pointed. Looking back, I saw the other Martians advancing with gigantic
strides down the riverbank from the direction of Chertsey. The
Shepperton guns spoke this time unavailingly.

At that I ducked at once under water, and, holding my breath until
movement was an agony, blundered painfully ahead under the surface as
long as I could. The water was in a tumult about me, and rapidly
growing hotter.

When for a moment I raised my head to take breath and throw the hair
and water from my eyes, the steam was rising in a whirling white fog
that at first hid the Martians altogether. The noise was deafening.
Then I saw them dimly, colossal figures of grey, magnified by the mist.
They had passed by me, and two were stooping over the frothing,
tumultuous ruins of their comrade.

The third and fourth stood beside him in the water, one perhaps two
hundred yards from me, the other towards Laleham. The generators of the
Heat-Rays waved high, and the hissing beams smote down this way and
that.

The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing conflict of
noises—the clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of falling houses,
the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into flame, and the crackling
and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up to mingle with
the steam from the river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and fro over
Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent white, that
gave place at once to a smoky dance of lurid flames. The nearer houses
still stood intact, awaiting their fate, shadowy, faint and pallid in
the steam, with the fire behind them going to and fro.

For a moment perhaps I stood there, breast-high in the almost boiling
water, dumbfounded at my position, hopeless of escape. Through the reek
I could see the people who had been with me in the river scrambling out
of the water through the reeds, like little frogs hurrying through
grass from the advance of a man, or running to and fro in utter dismay
on the towing path.

Then suddenly the white flashes of the Heat-Ray came leaping towards
me. The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and darted out
flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar. The Ray flickered up and
down the towing path, licking off the people who ran this way and that,
and came down to the water’s edge not fifty yards from where I stood.
It swept across the river to Shepperton, and the water in its track
rose in a boiling weal crested with steam. I turned shoreward.

In another moment the huge wave, well-nigh at the boiling-point had
rushed upon me. I screamed aloud, and scalded, half blinded, agonised,
I staggered through the leaping, hissing water towards the shore. Had
my foot stumbled, it would have been the end. I fell helplessly, in
full sight of the Martians, upon the broad, bare gravelly spit that
runs down to mark the angle of the Wey and Thames. I expected nothing
but death.

I have a dim memory of the foot of a Martian coming down within a score
of yards of my head, driving straight into the loose gravel, whirling
it this way and that and lifting again; of a long suspense, and then of
the four carrying the debris of their comrade between them, now clear
and then presently faint through a veil of smoke, receding
interminably, as it seemed to me, across a vast space of river and
meadow. And then, very slowly, I realised that by a miracle I had
escaped.

XIII.
HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CURATE.

After getting this sudden lesson in the power of terrestrial weapons,
the Martians retreated to their original position upon Horsell Common;
and in their haste, and encumbered with the debris of their smashed
companion, they no doubt overlooked many such a stray and negligible
victim as myself. Had they left their comrade and pushed on forthwith,
there was nothing at that time between them and London but batteries of
twelve-pounder guns, and they would certainly have reached the capital
in advance of the tidings of their approach; as sudden, dreadful, and
destructive their advent would have been as the earthquake that
destroyed Lisbon a century ago.

But they were in no hurry. Cylinder followed cylinder on its
interplanetary flight; every twenty-four hours brought them
reinforcement. And meanwhile the military and naval authorities, now
fully alive to the tremendous power of their antagonists, worked with
furious energy. Every minute a fresh gun came into position until,
before twilight, every copse, every row of suburban villas on the hilly
slopes about Kingston and Richmond, masked an expectant black muzzle.
And through the charred and desolated area—perhaps twenty square miles
altogether—that encircled the Martian encampment on Horsell Common,
through charred and ruined villages among the green trees, through the
blackened and smoking arcades that had been but a day ago pine
spinneys, crawled the devoted scouts with the heliographs that were
presently to warn the gunners of the Martian approach. But the Martians
now understood our command of artillery and the danger of human
proximity, and not a man ventured within a mile of either cylinder,
save at the price of his life.

It would seem that these giants spent the earlier part of the afternoon
in going to and fro, transferring everything from the second and third
cylinders—the second in Addlestone Golf Links and the third at
Pyrford—to their original pit on Horsell Common. Over that, above the
blackened heather and ruined buildings that stretched far and wide,
stood one as sentinel, while the rest abandoned their vast
fighting-machines and descended into the pit. They were hard at work
there far into the night, and the towering pillar of dense green smoke
that rose therefrom could be seen from the hills about Merrow, and
even, it is said, from Banstead and Epsom Downs.

And while the Martians behind me were thus preparing for their next
sally, and in front of me Humanity gathered for the battle, I made my
way with infinite pains and labour from the fire and smoke of burning
Weybridge towards London.

I saw an abandoned boat, very small and remote, drifting down-stream;
and throwing off the most of my sodden clothes, I went after it, gained
it, and so escaped out of that destruction. There were no oars in the
boat, but I contrived to paddle, as well as my parboiled hands would
allow, down the river towards Halliford and Walton, going very
tediously and continually looking behind me, as you may well
understand. I followed the river, because I considered that the water
gave me my best chance of escape should these giants return.

The hot water from the Martian’s overthrow drifted downstream with me,
so that for the best part of a mile I could see little of either bank.
Once, however, I made out a string of black figures hurrying across the
meadows from the direction of Weybridge. Halliford, it seemed, was
deserted, and several of the houses facing the river were on fire. It
was strange to see the place quite tranquil, quite desolate under the
hot blue sky, with the smoke and little threads of flame going straight
up into the heat of the afternoon. Never before had I seen houses
burning without the accompaniment of an obstructive crowd. A little
farther on the dry reeds up the bank were smoking and glowing, and a
line of fire inland was marching steadily across a late field of hay.

For a long time I drifted, so painful and weary was I after the
violence I had been through, and so intense the heat upon the water.
Then my fears got the better of me again, and I resumed my paddling.
The sun scorched my bare back. At last, as the bridge at Walton was
coming into sight round the bend, my fever and faintness overcame my
fears, and I landed on the Middlesex bank and lay down, deadly sick,
amid the long grass. I suppose the time was then about four or five
o’clock. I got up presently, walked perhaps half a mile without meeting
a soul, and then lay down again in the shadow of a hedge. I seem to
remember talking, wanderingly, to myself during that last spurt. I was
also very thirsty, and bitterly regretful I had drunk no more water. It
is a curious thing that I felt angry with my wife; I cannot account for
it, but my impotent desire to reach Leatherhead worried me excessively.

I do not clearly remember the arrival of the curate, so that probably I
dozed. I became aware of him as a seated figure in soot-smudged shirt
sleeves, and with his upturned, clean-shaven face staring at a faint
flickering that danced over the sky. The sky was what is called a
mackerel sky—rows and rows of faint down-plumes of cloud, just tinted
with the midsummer sunset.

I sat up, and at the rustle of my motion he looked at me quickly.

“Have you any water?” I asked abruptly.

He shook his head.

“You have been asking for water for the last hour,” he said.

For a moment we were silent, taking stock of each other. I dare say he
found me a strange enough figure, naked, save for my water-soaked
trousers and socks, scalded, and my face and shoulders blackened by the
smoke. His face was a fair weakness, his chin retreated, and his hair
lay in crisp, almost flaxen curls on his low forehead; his eyes were
rather large, pale blue, and blankly staring. He spoke abruptly,
looking vacantly away from me.

“What does it mean?” he said. “What do these things mean?”

I stared at him and made no answer.

He extended a thin white hand and spoke in almost a complaining tone.

“Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning
service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for
the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom
and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work—— What are these
Martians?”

“What are we?” I answered, clearing my throat.

He gripped his knees and turned to look at me again. For half a minute,
perhaps, he stared silently.

“I was walking through the roads to clear my brain,” he said. “And
suddenly—fire, earthquake, death!”

He relapsed into silence, with his chin now sunken almost to his knees.

Presently he began waving his hand.

“All the work—all the Sunday schools—What have we done—what has
Weybridge done? Everything gone—everything destroyed. The church! We
rebuilt it only three years ago. Gone! Swept out of existence! Why?”

Another pause, and he broke out again like one demented.

“The smoke of her burning goeth up for ever and ever!” he shouted.

His eyes flamed, and he pointed a lean finger in the direction of
Weybridge.

By this time I was beginning to take his measure. The tremendous
tragedy in which he had been involved—it was evident he was a fugitive
from Weybridge—had driven him to the very verge of his reason.

“Are we far from Sunbury?” I said, in a matter-of-fact tone.

“What are we to do?” he asked. “Are these creatures everywhere? Has the
earth been given over to them?”

“Are we far from Sunbury?”

“Only this morning I officiated at early celebration——”

“Things have changed,” I said, quietly. “You must keep your head. There
is still hope.”

“Hope!”

“Yes. Plentiful hope—for all this destruction!”

I began to explain my view of our position. He listened at first, but
as I went on the interest dawning in his eyes gave place to their
former stare, and his regard wandered from me.

“This must be the beginning of the end,” he said, interrupting me. “The
end! The great and terrible day of the Lord! When men shall call upon
the mountains and the rocks to fall upon them and hide them—hide them
from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne!”

I began to understand the position. I ceased my laboured reasoning,
struggled to my feet, and, standing over him, laid my hand on his
shoulder.

“Be a man!” said I. “You are scared out of your wits! What good is
religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and
floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God
had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.”

For a time he sat in blank silence.

“But how can we escape?” he asked, suddenly. “They are invulnerable,
they are pitiless.”

“Neither the one nor, perhaps, the other,” I answered. “And the
mightier they are the more sane and wary should we be. One of them was
killed yonder not three hours ago.”

“Killed!” he said, staring about him. “How can God’s ministers be
killed?”

“I saw it happen.” I proceeded to tell him. “We have chanced to come in
for the thick of it,” said I, “and that is all.”

“What is that flicker in the sky?” he asked abruptly.

I told him it was the heliograph signalling—that it was the sign of
human help and effort in the sky.

“We are in the midst of it,” I said, “quiet as it is. That flicker in
the sky tells of the gathering storm. Yonder, I take it are the
Martians, and Londonward, where those hills rise about Richmond and
Kingston and the trees give cover, earthworks are being thrown up and
guns are being placed. Presently the Martians will be coming this way
again.”

And even as I spoke he sprang to his feet and stopped me by a gesture.

“Listen!” he said.

From beyond the low hills across the water came the dull resonance of
distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A
cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the west
the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and
Shepperton and the hot, still splendour of the sunset.

“We had better follow this path,” I said, “northward.”

XIV.
IN LONDON.

My younger brother was in London when the Martians fell at Woking. He
was a medical student working for an imminent examination, and he heard
nothing of the arrival until Saturday morning. The morning papers on
Saturday contained, in addition to lengthy special articles on the
planet Mars, on life in the planets, and so forth, a brief and vaguely
worded telegram, all the more striking for its brevity.

The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd, had killed a number
of people with a quick-firing gun, so the story ran. The telegram
concluded with the words: “Formidable as they seem to be, the Martians
have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen, and, indeed,
seem incapable of doing so. Probably this is due to the relative
strength of the earth’s gravitational energy.” On that last text their
leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.

Of course all the students in the crammer’s biology class, to which my
brother went that day, were intensely interested, but there were no
signs of any unusual excitement in the streets. The afternoon papers
puffed scraps of news under big headlines. They had nothing to tell
beyond the movements of troops about the common, and the burning of the
pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, until eight. Then the _St.
James’s Gazette_, in an extra-special edition, announced the bare fact
of the interruption of telegraphic communication. This was thought to
be due to the falling of burning pine trees across the line. Nothing
more of the fighting was known that night, the night of my drive to
Leatherhead and back.

My brother felt no anxiety about us, as he knew from the description in
the papers that the cylinder was a good two miles from my house. He
made up his mind to run down that night to me, in order, as he says, to
see the Things before they were killed. He dispatched a telegram, which
never reached me, about four o’clock, and spent the evening at a music
hall.

In London, also, on Saturday night there was a thunderstorm, and my
brother reached Waterloo in a cab. On the platform from which the
midnight train usually starts he learned, after some waiting, that an
accident prevented trains from reaching Woking that night. The nature
of the accident he could not ascertain; indeed, the railway authorities
did not clearly know at that time. There was very little excitement in
the station, as the officials, failing to realise that anything further
than a breakdown between Byfleet and Woking junction had occurred, were
running the theatre trains which usually passed through Woking round by
Virginia Water or Guildford. They were busy making the necessary
arrangements to alter the route of the Southampton and Portsmouth
Sunday League excursions. A nocturnal newspaper reporter, mistaking my
brother for the traffic manager, to whom he bears a slight resemblance,
waylaid and tried to interview him. Few people, excepting the railway
officials, connected the breakdown with the Martians.

I have read, in another account of these events, that on Sunday morning
“all London was electrified by the news from Woking.” As a matter of
fact, there was nothing to justify that very extravagant phrase. Plenty
of Londoners did not hear of the Martians until the panic of Monday
morning. Those who did took some time to realise all that the hastily
worded telegrams in the Sunday papers conveyed. The majority of people
in London do not read Sunday papers.

The habit of personal security, moreover, is so deeply fixed in the
Londoner’s mind, and startling intelligence so much a matter of course
in the papers, that they could read without any personal tremors:
“About seven o’clock last night the Martians came out of the cylinder,
and, moving about under an armour of metallic shields, have completely
wrecked Woking station with the adjacent houses, and massacred an
entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment. No details are known. Maxims
have been absolutely useless against their armour; the field guns have
been disabled by them. Flying hussars have been galloping into
Chertsey. The Martians appear to be moving slowly towards Chertsey or
Windsor. Great anxiety prevails in West Surrey, and earthworks are
being thrown up to check the advance Londonward.” That was how the
_Sunday Sun_ put it, and a clever and remarkably prompt “handbook”
article in the _Referee_ compared the affair to a menagerie suddenly
let loose in a village.

No one in London knew positively of the nature of the armoured
Martians, and there was still a fixed idea that these monsters must be
sluggish: “crawling,” “creeping painfully”—such expressions occurred in
almost all the earlier reports. None of the telegrams could have been
written by an eyewitness of their advance. The Sunday papers printed
separate editions as further news came to hand, some even in default of
it. But there was practically nothing more to tell people until late in
the afternoon, when the authorities gave the press agencies the news in
their possession. It was stated that the people of Walton and
Weybridge, and all the district were pouring along the roads
Londonward, and that was all.

My brother went to church at the Foundling Hospital in the morning,
still in ignorance of what had happened on the previous night. There he
heard allusions made to the invasion, and a special prayer for peace.
Coming out, he bought a _Referee_. He became alarmed at the news in
this, and went again to Waterloo station to find out if communication
were restored. The omnibuses, carriages, cyclists, and innumerable
people walking in their best clothes seemed scarcely affected by the
strange intelligence that the newsvendors were disseminating. People
were interested, or, if alarmed, alarmed only on account of the local
residents. At the station he heard for the first time that the Windsor
and Chertsey lines were now interrupted. The porters told him that
several remarkable telegrams had been received in the morning from
Byfleet and Chertsey stations, but that these had abruptly ceased. My
brother could get very little precise detail out of them.

“There’s fighting going on about Weybridge” was the extent of their
information.

The train service was now very much disorganised. Quite a number of
people who had been expecting friends from places on the South-Western
network were standing about the station. One grey-headed old gentleman
came and abused the South-Western Company bitterly to my brother. “It
wants showing up,” he said.

One or two trains came in from Richmond, Putney, and Kingston,
containing people who had gone out for a day’s boating and found the
locks closed and a feeling of panic in the air. A man in a blue and
white blazer addressed my brother, full of strange tidings.

“There’s hosts of people driving into Kingston in traps and carts and
things, with boxes of valuables and all that,” he said. “They come from
Molesey and Weybridge and Walton, and they say there’s been guns heard
at Chertsey, heavy firing, and that mounted soldiers have told them to
get off at once because the Martians are coming. We heard guns firing
at Hampton Court station, but we thought it was thunder. What the
dickens does it all mean? The Martians can’t get out of their pit, can
they?”

My brother could not tell him.

Afterwards he found that the vague feeling of alarm had spread to the
clients of the underground railway, and that the Sunday excursionists
began to return from all over the South-Western “lung”—Barnes,
Wimbledon, Richmond Park, Kew, and so forth—at unnaturally early hours;
but not a soul had anything more than vague hearsay to tell of.
Everyone connected with the terminus seemed ill-tempered.

About five o’clock the gathering crowd in the station was immensely
excited by the opening of the line of communication, which is almost
invariably closed, between the South-Eastern and the South-Western
stations, and the passage of carriage trucks bearing huge guns and
carriages crammed with soldiers. These were the guns that were brought
up from Woolwich and Chatham to cover Kingston. There was an exchange
of pleasantries: “You’ll get eaten!” “We’re the beast-tamers!” and so
forth. A little while after that a squad of police came into the
station and began to clear the public off the platforms, and my brother
went out into the street again.

The church bells were ringing for evensong, and a squad of Salvation
Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road. On the bridge a number of
loafers were watching a curious brown scum that came drifting down the
stream in patches. The sun was just setting, and the Clock Tower and
the Houses of Parliament rose against one of the most peaceful skies it
is possible to imagine, a sky of gold, barred with long transverse
stripes of reddish-purple cloud. There was talk of a floating body. One
of the men there, a reservist he said he was, told my brother he had
seen the heliograph flickering in the west.

In Wellington Street my brother met a couple of sturdy roughs who had
just been rushed out of Fleet Street with still-wet newspapers and
staring placards. “Dreadful catastrophe!” they bawled one to the other
down Wellington Street. “Fighting at Weybridge! Full description!
Repulse of the Martians! London in Danger!” He had to give threepence
for a copy of that paper.

Then it was, and then only, that he realised something of the full
power and terror of these monsters. He learned that they were not
merely a handful of small sluggish creatures, but that they were minds
swaying vast mechanical bodies; and that they could move swiftly and
smite with such power that even the mightiest guns could not stand
against them.

They were described as “vast spiderlike machines, nearly a hundred feet
high, capable of the speed of an express train, and able to shoot out a
beam of intense heat.” Masked batteries, chiefly of field guns, had
been planted in the country about Horsell Common, and especially
between the Woking district and London. Five of the machines had been
seen moving towards the Thames, and one, by a happy chance, had been
destroyed. In the other cases the shells had missed, and the batteries
had been at once annihilated by the Heat-Rays. Heavy losses of soldiers
were mentioned, but the tone of the dispatch was optimistic.

The Martians had been repulsed; they were not invulnerable. They had
retreated to their triangle of cylinders again, in the circle about
Woking. Signallers with heliographs were pushing forward upon them from
all sides. Guns were in rapid transit from Windsor, Portsmouth,
Aldershot, Woolwich—even from the north; among others, long wire-guns
of ninety-five tons from Woolwich. Altogether one hundred and sixteen
were in position or being hastily placed, chiefly covering London.
Never before in England had there been such a vast or rapid
concentration of military material.

Any further cylinders that fell, it was hoped, could be destroyed at
once by high explosives, which were being rapidly manufactured and
distributed. No doubt, ran the report, the situation was of the
strangest and gravest description, but the public was exhorted to avoid
and discourage panic. No doubt the Martians were strange and terrible
in the extreme, but at the outside there could not be more than twenty
of them against our millions.

The authorities had reason to suppose, from the size of the cylinders,
that at the outside there could not be more than five in each
cylinder—fifteen altogether. And one at least was disposed of—perhaps
more. The public would be fairly warned of the approach of danger, and
elaborate measures were being taken for the protection of the people in
the threatened southwestern suburbs. And so, with reiterated assurances
of the safety of London and the ability of the authorities to cope with
the difficulty, this quasi-proclamation closed.

This was printed in enormous type on paper so fresh that it was still
wet, and there had been no time to add a word of comment. It was
curious, my brother said, to see how ruthlessly the usual contents of
the paper had been hacked and taken out to give this place.

All down Wellington Street people could be seen fluttering out the pink
sheets and reading, and the Strand was suddenly noisy with the voices
of an army of hawkers following these pioneers. Men came scrambling off
buses to secure copies. Certainly this news excited people intensely,
whatever their previous apathy. The shutters of a map shop in the
Strand were being taken down, my brother said, and a man in his Sunday
raiment, lemon-yellow gloves even, was visible inside the window
hastily fastening maps of Surrey to the glass.

Going on along the Strand to Trafalgar Square, the paper in his hand,
my brother saw some of the fugitives from West Surrey. There was a man
with his wife and two boys and some articles of furniture in a cart
such as greengrocers use. He was driving from the direction of
Westminster Bridge; and close behind him came a hay waggon with five or
six respectable-looking people in it, and some boxes and bundles. The
faces of these people were haggard, and their entire appearance
contrasted conspicuously with the Sabbath-best appearance of the people
on the omnibuses. People in fashionable clothing peeped at them out of
cabs. They stopped at the Square as if undecided which way to take, and
finally turned eastward along the Strand. Some way behind these came a
man in workday clothes, riding one of those old-fashioned tricycles
with a small front wheel. He was dirty and white in the face.

My brother turned down towards Victoria, and met a number of such
people. He had a vague idea that he might see something of me. He
noticed an unusual number of police regulating the traffic. Some of the
refugees were exchanging news with the people on the omnibuses. One was
professing to have seen the Martians. “Boilers on stilts, I tell you,
striding along like men.” Most of them were excited and animated by
their strange experience.

Beyond Victoria the public-houses were doing a lively trade with these
arrivals. At all the street corners groups of people were reading
papers, talking excitedly, or staring at these unusual Sunday visitors.
They seemed to increase as night drew on, until at last the roads, my
brother said, were like Epsom High Street on a Derby Day. My brother
addressed several of these fugitives and got unsatisfactory answers
from most.

None of them could tell him any news of Woking except one man, who
assured him that Woking had been entirely destroyed on the previous
night.

“I come from Byfleet,” he said; “a man on a bicycle came through the
place in the early morning, and ran from door to door warning us to
come away. Then came soldiers. We went out to look, and there were
clouds of smoke to the south—nothing but smoke, and not a soul coming
that way. Then we heard the guns at Chertsey, and folks coming from
Weybridge. So I’ve locked up my house and come on.”

At that time there was a strong feeling in the streets that the
authorities were to blame for their incapacity to dispose of the
invaders without all this inconvenience.

About eight o’clock a noise of heavy firing was distinctly audible all
over the south of London. My brother could not hear it for the traffic
in the main thoroughfares, but by striking through the quiet back
streets to the river he was able to distinguish it quite plainly.

He walked from Westminster to his apartments near Regent’s Park, about
two. He was now very anxious on my account, and disturbed at the
evident magnitude of the trouble. His mind was inclined to run, even as
mine had run on Saturday, on military details. He thought of all those
silent, expectant guns, of the suddenly nomadic countryside; he tried
to imagine “boilers on stilts” a hundred feet high.

There were one or two cartloads of refugees passing along Oxford
Street, and several in the Marylebone Road, but so slowly was the news
spreading that Regent Street and Portland Place were full of their
usual Sunday-night promenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and along
the edge of Regent’s Park there were as many silent couples “walking
out” together under the scattered gas lamps as ever there had been. The
night was warm and still, and a little oppressive; the sound of guns
continued intermittently, and after midnight there seemed to be sheet
lightning in the south.

He read and re-read the paper, fearing the worst had happened to me. He
was restless, and after supper prowled out again aimlessly. He returned
and tried in vain to divert his attention to his examination notes. He
went to bed a little after midnight, and was awakened from lurid dreams
in the small hours of Monday by the sound of door knockers, feet
running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour of bells. Red
reflections danced on the ceiling. For a moment he lay astonished,
wondering whether day had come or the world gone mad. Then he jumped
out of bed and ran to the window.

His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up and down the
street there were a dozen echoes to the noise of his window sash, and
heads in every kind of night disarray appeared. Enquiries were being
shouted. “They are coming!” bawled a policeman, hammering at the door;
“the Martians are coming!” and hurried to the next door.

The sound of drumming and trumpeting came from the Albany Street
Barracks, and every church within earshot was hard at work killing
sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin. There was a noise of doors
opening, and window after window in the houses opposite flashed from
darkness into yellow illumination.

Up the street came galloping a closed carriage, bursting abruptly into
noise at the corner, rising to a clattering climax under the window,
and dying away slowly in the distance. Close on the rear of this came a
couple of cabs, the forerunners of a long procession of flying
vehicles, going for the most part to Chalk Farm station, where the
North-Western special trains were loading up, instead of coming down
the gradient into Euston.

For a long time my brother stared out of the window in blank
astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after door, and
delivering their incomprehensible message. Then the door behind him
opened, and the man who lodged across the landing came in, dressed only
in shirt, trousers, and slippers, his braces loose about his waist, his
hair disordered from his pillow.

“What the devil is it?” he asked. “A fire? What a devil of a row!”

They both craned their heads out of the window, straining to hear what
the policemen were shouting. People were coming out of the side
streets, and standing in groups at the corners talking.

“What the devil is it all about?” said my brother’s fellow lodger.

My brother answered him vaguely and began to dress, running with each
garment to the window in order to miss nothing of the growing
excitement. And presently men selling unnaturally early newspapers came
bawling into the street:

“London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond defences
forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!”

And all about him—in the rooms below, in the houses on each side and
across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the hundred
other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the Westbourne Park
district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kilburn and St.
John’s Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and Highbury and
Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the vastness of London
from Ealing to East Ham—people were rubbing their eyes, and opening
windows to stare out and ask aimless questions, dressing hastily as the
first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It
was the dawn of the great panic. London, which had gone to bed on
Sunday night oblivious and inert, was awakened, in the small hours of
Monday morning, to a vivid sense of danger.

Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother went
down and out into the street, just as the sky between the parapets of
the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying people on foot and
in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. “Black Smoke!” he heard
people crying, and again “Black Smoke!” The contagion of such a
unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on the
door-step, he saw another newsvendor approaching, and got a paper
forthwith. The man was running away with the rest, and selling his
papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and
panic.

And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic dispatch of the
Commander-in-Chief:

“The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a black and
poisonous vapour by means of rockets. They have smothered our
batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are
advancing slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way. It
is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Black Smoke but
in instant flight.”

That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the great
six-million city was stirring, slipping, running; presently it would be
pouring _en masse_ northward.

“Black Smoke!” the voices cried. “Fire!”

The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, a cart
carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks and curses, against the water
trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights went to and fro in the
houses, and some of the passing cabs flaunted unextinguished lamps. And
overhead the dawn was growing brighter, clear and steady and calm.

He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down
stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in
dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed, ejaculating.

As my brother began to realise the import of all these things, he
turned hastily to his own room, put all his available money—some ten
pounds altogether—into his pockets, and went out again into the
streets.

XV.
WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY.

It was while the curate had sat and talked so wildly to me under the
hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford, and while my brother was
watching the fugitives stream over Westminster Bridge, that the
Martians had resumed the offensive. So far as one can ascertain from
the conflicting accounts that have been put forth, the majority of them
remained busied with preparations in the Horsell pit until nine that
night, hurrying on some operation that disengaged huge volumes of green
smoke.

But three certainly came out about eight o’clock and, advancing slowly
and cautiously, made their way through Byfleet and Pyrford towards
Ripley and Weybridge, and so came in sight of the expectant batteries
against the setting sun. These Martians did not advance in a body, but
in a line, each perhaps a mile and a half from his nearest fellow. They
communicated with one another by means of sirenlike howls, running up
and down the scale from one note to another.

It was this howling and firing of the guns at Ripley and St. George’s
Hill that we had heard at Upper Halliford. The Ripley gunners,
unseasoned artillery volunteers who ought never to have been placed in
such a position, fired one wild, premature, ineffectual volley, and
bolted on horse and foot through the deserted village, while the
Martian, without using his Heat-Ray, walked serenely over their guns,
stepped gingerly among them, passed in front of them, and so came
unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, which he destroyed.

The St. George’s Hill men, however, were better led or of a better
mettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they were, they seem to have been
quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to them. They laid their guns
as deliberately as if they had been on parade, and fired at about a
thousand yards’ range.

The shells flashed all round him, and he was seen to advance a few
paces, stagger, and go down. Everybody yelled together, and the guns
were reloaded in frantic haste. The overthrown Martian set up a
prolonged ululation, and immediately a second glittering giant,
answering him, appeared over the trees to the south. It would seem that
a leg of the tripod had been smashed by one of the shells. The whole of
the second volley flew wide of the Martian on the ground, and,
simultaneously, both his companions brought their Heat-Rays to bear on
the battery. The ammunition blew up, the pine trees all about the guns
flashed into fire, and only one or two of the men who were already
running over the crest of the hill escaped.

After this it would seem that the three took counsel together and
halted, and the scouts who were watching them report that they remained
absolutely stationary for the next half hour. The Martian who had been
overthrown crawled tediously out of his hood, a small brown figure,
oddly suggestive from that distance of a speck of blight, and
apparently engaged in the repair of his support. About nine he had
finished, for his cowl was then seen above the trees again.

It was a few minutes past nine that night when these three sentinels
were joined by four other Martians, each carrying a thick black tube. A
similar tube was handed to each of the three, and the seven proceeded
to distribute themselves at equal distances along a curved line between
St. George’s Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of
Ripley.

A dozen rockets sprang out of the hills before them so soon as they
began to move, and warned the waiting batteries about Ditton and Esher.
At the same time four of their fighting machines, similarly armed with
tubes, crossed the river, and two of them, black against the western
sky, came into sight of myself and the curate as we hurried wearily and
painfully along the road that runs northward out of Halliford. They
moved, as it seemed to us, upon a cloud, for a milky mist covered the
fields and rose to a third of their height.

At this sight the curate cried faintly in his throat, and began
running; but I knew it was no good running from a Martian, and I turned
aside and crawled through dewy nettles and brambles into the broad
ditch by the side of the road. He looked back, saw what I was doing,
and turned to join me.

The two halted, the nearer to us standing and facing Sunbury, the
remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the evening star, away
towards Staines.

The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took up their
positions in the huge crescent about their cylinders in absolute
silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never
since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still.
To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the
same effect—the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling
night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the stars, the afterglow
of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St. George’s Hill and the
woods of Painshill.

But facing that crescent everywhere—at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton,
Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and across
the flat grass meadows to the north of it, wherever a cluster of trees
or village houses gave sufficient cover—the guns were waiting. The
signal rockets burst and rained their sparks through the night and
vanished, and the spirit of all those watching batteries rose to a
tense expectation. The Martians had but to advance into the line of
fire, and instantly those motionless black forms of men, those guns
glittering so darkly in the early night, would explode into a
thunderous fury of battle.

No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant
minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle—how much they
understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions were
organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret our
spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady
investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of
onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might
exterminate us? (At that time no one knew what food they needed.) A
hundred such questions struggled together in my mind as I watched that
vast sentinel shape. And in the back of my mind was the sense of all
the huge unknown and hidden forces Londonward. Had they prepared
pitfalls? Were the powder mills at Hounslow ready as a snare? Would the
Londoners have the heart and courage to make a greater Moscow of their
mighty province of houses?

Then, after an interminable time, as it seemed to us, crouching and
peering through the hedge, came a sound like the distant concussion of
a gun. Another nearer, and then another. And then the Martian beside us
raised his tube on high and discharged it, gunwise, with a heavy report
that made the ground heave. The one towards Staines answered him. There
was no flash, no smoke, simply that loaded detonation.

I was so excited by these heavy minute-guns following one another that
I so far forgot my personal safety and my scalded hands as to clamber
up into the hedge and stare towards Sunbury. As I did so a second
report followed, and a big projectile hurtled overhead towards
Hounslow. I expected at least to see smoke or fire, or some such
evidence of its work. But all I saw was the deep blue sky above, with
one solitary star, and the white mist spreading wide and low beneath.
And there had been no crash, no answering explosion. The silence was
restored; the minute lengthened to three.

“What has happened?” said the curate, standing up beside me.

“Heaven knows!” said I.

A bat flickered by and vanished. A distant tumult of shouting began and
ceased. I looked again at the Martian, and saw he was now moving
eastward along the riverbank, with a swift, rolling motion.

Every moment I expected the fire of some hidden battery to spring upon
him; but the evening calm was unbroken. The figure of the Martian grew
smaller as he receded, and presently the mist and the gathering night
had swallowed him up. By a common impulse we clambered higher. Towards
Sunbury was a dark appearance, as though a conical hill had suddenly
come into being there, hiding our view of the farther country; and
then, remoter across the river, over Walton, we saw another such
summit. These hill-like forms grew lower and broader even as we stared.

Moved by a sudden thought, I looked northward, and there I perceived a
third of these cloudy black kopjes had risen.

Everything had suddenly become very still. Far away to the southeast,
marking the quiet, we heard the Martians hooting to one another, and
then the air quivered again with the distant thud of their guns. But
the earthly artillery made no reply.

Now at the time we could not understand these things, but later I was
to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes that gathered in the
twilight. Each of the Martians, standing in the great crescent I have
described, had discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he carried, a
huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other
possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of him. Some fired only
one of these, some two—as in the case of the one we had seen; the one
at Ripley is said to have discharged no fewer than five at that time.
These canisters smashed on striking the ground—they did not explode—and
incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour,
coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous
hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country.
And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was
death to all that breathes.

It was heavy, this vapour, heavier than the densest smoke, so that,
after the first tumultuous uprush and outflow of its impact, it sank
down through the air and poured over the ground in a manner rather
liquid than gaseous, abandoning the hills, and streaming into the
valleys and ditches and watercourses even as I have heard the
carbonic-acid gas that pours from volcanic clefts is wont to do. And
where it came upon water some chemical action occurred, and the surface
would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank slowly and
made way for more. The scum was absolutely insoluble, and it is a
strange thing, seeing the instant effect of the gas, that one could
drink without hurt the water from which it had been strained. The
vapour did not diffuse as a true gas would do. It hung together in
banks, flowing sluggishly down the slope of the land and driving
reluctantly before the wind, and very slowly it combined with the mist
and moisture of the air, and sank to the earth in the form of dust.
Save that an unknown element giving a group of four lines in the blue
of the spectrum is concerned, we are still entirely ignorant of the
nature of this substance.

Once the tumultuous upheaval of its dispersion was over, the black
smoke clung so closely to the ground, even before its precipitation,
that fifty feet up in the air, on the roofs and upper stories of high
houses and on great trees, there was a chance of escaping its poison
altogether, as was proved even that night at Street Cobham and Ditton.

The man who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful story of the
strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he looked down from the church
spire and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts out of its
inky nothingness. For a day and a half he remained there, weary,
starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and against the
prospect of the distant hills a velvet-black expanse, with red roofs,
green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns,
outhouses, and walls, rising here and there into the sunlight.

But that was at Street Cobham, where the black vapour was allowed to
remain until it sank of its own accord into the ground. As a rule the
Martians, when it had served its purpose, cleared the air of it again
by wading into it and directing a jet of steam upon it.

This they did with the vapour banks near us, as we saw in the starlight
from the window of a deserted house at Upper Halliford, whither we had
returned. From there we could see the searchlights on Richmond Hill and
Kingston Hill going to and fro, and about eleven the windows rattled,
and we heard the sound of the huge siege guns that had been put in
position there. These continued intermittently for the space of a
quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the invisible Martians at
Hampton and Ditton, and then the pale beams of the electric light
vanished, and were replaced by a bright red glow.

Then the fourth cylinder fell—a brilliant green meteor—as I learned
afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the Richmond and
Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful cannonade far away in
the southwest, due, I believe, to guns being fired haphazard before the
black vapour could overwhelm the gunners.

So, setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out a wasps’
nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling vapour over the
Londonward country. The horns of the crescent slowly moved apart, until
at last they formed a line from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden. All night
through their destructive tubes advanced. Never once, after the Martian
at St. George’s Hill was brought down, did they give the artillery the
ghost of a chance against them. Wherever there was a possibility of
guns being laid for them unseen, a fresh canister of the black vapour
was discharged, and where the guns were openly displayed the Heat-Ray
was brought to bear.

By midnight the blazing trees along the slopes of Richmond Park and the
glare of Kingston Hill threw their light upon a network of black smoke,
blotting out the whole valley of the Thames and extending as far as the
eye could reach. And through this two Martians slowly waded, and turned
their hissing steam jets this way and that.

They were sparing of the Heat-Ray that night, either because they had
but a limited supply of material for its production or because they did
not wish to destroy the country but only to crush and overawe the
opposition they had aroused. In the latter aim they certainly
succeeded. Sunday night was the end of the organised opposition to
their movements. After that no body of men would stand against them, so
hopeless was the enterprise. Even the crews of the torpedo-boats and
destroyers that had brought their quick-firers up the Thames refused to
stop, mutinied, and went down again. The only offensive operation men
ventured upon after that night was the preparation of mines and
pitfalls, and even in that their energies were frantic and spasmodic.

One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those batteries
towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the twilight. Survivors there were
none. One may picture the orderly expectation, the officers alert and
watchful, the gunners ready, the ammunition piled to hand, the limber
gunners with their horses and waggons, the groups of civilian
spectators standing as near as they were permitted, the evening
stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents with the burned and
wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of the shots the
Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling over the trees and
houses and smashing amid the neighbouring fields.

One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly
spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong,
towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a
strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims,
men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling
headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking
and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque
cone of smoke. And then night and extinction—nothing but a silent mass
of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.

Before dawn the black vapour was pouring through the streets of
Richmond, and the disintegrating organism of government was, with a
last expiring effort, rousing the population of London to the necessity
of flight.

XVI.
THE EXODUS FROM LONDON.

So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the
greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning—the stream of
flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round
the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the
shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel
northward and eastward. By ten o’clock the police organisation, and by
midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing
shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that
swift liquefaction of the social body.

All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern people
at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and trains were
being filled. People were fighting savagely for standing-room in the
carriages even at two o’clock. By three, people were being trampled and
crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards or more
from Liverpool Street station; revolvers were fired, people stabbed,
and the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted
and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the people they were called
out to protect.

And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers refused to
return to London, the pressure of the flight drove the people in an
ever-thickening multitude away from the stations and along the
northward-running roads. By midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes,
and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thames and
across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the bridges in
its sluggish advance. Another bank drove over Ealing, and surrounded a
little island of survivors on Castle Hill, alive, but unable to escape.

After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North-Western train at Chalk
Farm—the engines of the trains that had loaded in the goods yard there
_ploughed_ through shrieking people, and a dozen stalwart men fought to
keep the crowd from crushing the driver against his furnace—my brother
emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across through a hurrying
swarm of vehicles, and had the luck to be foremost in the sack of a
cycle shop. The front tire of the machine he got was punctured in
dragging it through the window, but he got up and off, notwithstanding,
with no further injury than a cut wrist. The steep foot of Haverstock
Hill was impassable owing to several overturned horses, and my brother
struck into Belsize Road.

So he got out of the fury of the panic, and, skirting the Edgware Road,
reached Edgware about seven, fasting and wearied, but well ahead of the
crowd. Along the road people were standing in the roadway, curious,
wondering. He was passed by a number of cyclists, some horsemen, and
two motor cars. A mile from Edgware the rim of the wheel broke, and the
machine became unridable. He left it by the roadside and trudged
through the village. There were shops half opened in the main street of
the place, and people crowded on the pavement and in the doorways and
windows, staring astonished at this extraordinary procession of
fugitives that was beginning. He succeeded in getting some food at an
inn.

For a time he remained in Edgware not knowing what next to do. The
flying people increased in number. Many of them, like my brother,
seemed inclined to loiter in the place. There was no fresh news of the
invaders from Mars.

At that time the road was crowded, but as yet far from congested. Most
of the fugitives at that hour were mounted on cycles, but there were
soon motor cars, hansom cabs, and carriages hurrying along, and the
dust hung in heavy clouds along the road to St. Albans.

It was perhaps a vague idea of making his way to Chelmsford, where some
friends of his lived, that at last induced my brother to strike into a
quiet lane running eastward. Presently he came upon a stile, and,
crossing it, followed a footpath northeastward. He passed near several
farmhouses and some little places whose names he did not learn. He saw
few fugitives until, in a grass lane towards High Barnet, he happened
upon two ladies who became his fellow travellers. He came upon them
just in time to save them.

He heard their screams, and, hurrying round the corner, saw a couple of
men struggling to drag them out of the little pony-chaise in which they
had been driving, while a third with difficulty held the frightened
pony’s head. One of the ladies, a short woman dressed in white, was
simply screaming; the other, a dark, slender figure, slashed at the man
who gripped her arm with a whip she held in her disengaged hand.

My brother immediately grasped the situation, shouted, and hurried
towards the struggle. One of the men desisted and turned towards him,
and my brother, realising from his antagonist’s face that a fight was
unavoidable, and being an expert boxer, went into him forthwith and
sent him down against the wheel of the chaise.

It was no time for pugilistic chivalry and my brother laid him quiet
with a kick, and gripped the collar of the man who pulled at the
slender lady’s arm. He heard the clatter of hoofs, the whip stung
across his face, a third antagonist struck him between the eyes, and
the man he held wrenched himself free and made off down the lane in the
direction from which he had come.

Partly stunned, he found himself facing the man who had held the
horse’s head, and became aware of the chaise receding from him down the
lane, swaying from side to side, and with the women in it looking back.
The man before him, a burly rough, tried to close, and he stopped him
with a blow in the face. Then, realising that he was deserted, he
dodged round and made off down the lane after the chaise, with the
sturdy man close behind him, and the fugitive, who had turned now,
following remotely.

Suddenly he stumbled and fell; his immediate pursuer went headlong, and
he rose to his feet to find himself with a couple of antagonists again.
He would have had little chance against them had not the slender lady
very pluckily pulled up and returned to his help. It seems she had had
a revolver all this time, but it had been under the seat when she and
her companion were attacked. She fired at six yards’ distance, narrowly
missing my brother. The less courageous of the robbers made off, and
his companion followed him, cursing his cowardice. They both stopped in
sight down the lane, where the third man lay insensible.

“Take this!” said the slender lady, and she gave my brother her
revolver.

“Go back to the chaise,” said my brother, wiping the blood from his
split lip.

She turned without a word—they were both panting—and they went back to
where the lady in white struggled to hold back the frightened pony.

The robbers had evidently had enough of it. When my brother looked
again they were retreating.

“I’ll sit here,” said my brother, “if I may”; and he got upon the empty
front seat. The lady looked over her shoulder.

“Give me the reins,” she said, and laid the whip along the pony’s side.
In another moment a bend in the road hid the three men from my
brother’s eyes.

So, quite unexpectedly, my brother found himself, panting, with a cut
mouth, a bruised jaw, and bloodstained knuckles, driving along an
unknown lane with these two women.

He learned they were the wife and the younger sister of a surgeon
living at Stanmore, who had come in the small hours from a dangerous
case at Pinner, and heard at some railway station on his way of the
Martian advance. He had hurried home, roused the women—their servant
had left them two days before—packed some provisions, put his revolver
under the seat—luckily for my brother—and told them to drive on to
Edgware, with the idea of getting a train there. He stopped behind to
tell the neighbours. He would overtake them, he said, at about half
past four in the morning, and now it was nearly nine and they had seen
nothing of him. They could not stop in Edgware because of the growing
traffic through the place, and so they had come into this side lane.

That was the story they told my brother in fragments when presently
they stopped again, nearer to New Barnet. He promised to stay with
them, at least until they could determine what to do, or until the
missing man arrived, and professed to be an expert shot with the
revolver—a weapon strange to him—in order to give them confidence.

They made a sort of encampment by the wayside, and the pony became
happy in the hedge. He told them of his own escape out of London, and
all that he knew of these Martians and their ways. The sun crept higher
in the sky, and after a time their talk died out and gave place to an
uneasy state of anticipation. Several wayfarers came along the lane,
and of these my brother gathered such news as he could. Every broken
answer he had deepened his impression of the great disaster that had
come on humanity, deepened his persuasion of the immediate necessity
for prosecuting this flight. He urged the matter upon them.

“We have money,” said the slender woman, and hesitated.

Her eyes met my brother’s, and her hesitation ended.

“So have I,” said my brother.

She explained that they had as much as thirty pounds in gold, besides a
five-pound note, and suggested that with that they might get upon a
train at St. Albans or New Barnet. My brother thought that was
hopeless, seeing the fury of the Londoners to crowd upon the trains,
and broached his own idea of striking across Essex towards Harwich and
thence escaping from the country altogether.

Mrs. Elphinstone—that was the name of the woman in white—would listen
to no reasoning, and kept calling upon “George”; but her sister-in-law
was astonishingly quiet and deliberate, and at last agreed to my
brother’s suggestion. So, designing to cross the Great North Road, they
went on towards Barnet, my brother leading the pony to save it as much
as possible. As the sun crept up the sky the day became excessively
hot, and under foot a thick, whitish sand grew burning and blinding, so
that they travelled only very slowly. The hedges were grey with dust.
And as they advanced towards Barnet a tumultuous murmuring grew
stronger.

They began to meet more people. For the most part these were staring
before them, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard, unclean.
One man in evening dress passed them on foot, his eyes on the ground.
They heard his voice, and, looking back at him, saw one hand clutched
in his hair and the other beating invisible things. His paroxysm of
rage over, he went on his way without once looking back.

As my brother’s party went on towards the crossroads to the south of
Barnet they saw a woman approaching the road across some fields on
their left, carrying a child and with two other children; and then
passed a man in dirty black, with a thick stick in one hand and a small
portmanteau in the other. Then round the corner of the lane, from
between the villas that guarded it at its confluence with the high
road, came a little cart drawn by a sweating black pony and driven by a
sallow youth in a bowler hat, grey with dust. There were three girls,
East End factory girls, and a couple of little children crowded in the
cart.

“This’ll tike us rahnd Edgware?” asked the driver, wild-eyed,
white-faced; and when my brother told him it would if he turned to the
left, he whipped up at once without the formality of thanks.

My brother noticed a pale grey smoke or haze rising among the houses in
front of them, and veiling the white façade of a terrace beyond the
road that appeared between the backs of the villas. Mrs. Elphinstone
suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky red flame leaping up
above the houses in front of them against the hot, blue sky. The
tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of
many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of waggons, and the
staccato of hoofs. The lane came round sharply not fifty yards from the
crossroads.

“Good heavens!” cried Mrs. Elphinstone. “What is this you are driving
us into?”

My brother stopped.

For the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of human
beings rushing northward, one pressing on another. A great bank of
dust, white and luminous in the blaze of the sun, made everything
within twenty feet of the ground grey and indistinct and was
perpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense crowd of horses and
of men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every
description.

“Way!” my brother heard voices crying. “Make way!”

It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to approach the meeting
point of the lane and road; the crowd roared like a fire, and the dust
was hot and pungent. And, indeed, a little way up the road a villa was
burning and sending rolling masses of black smoke across the road to
add to the confusion.

Two men came past them. Then a dirty woman, carrying a heavy bundle and
weeping. A lost retriever dog, with hanging tongue, circled dubiously
round them, scared and wretched, and fled at my brother’s threat.

So much as they could see of the road Londonward between the houses to
the right was a tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying people, pent in
between the villas on either side; the black heads, the crowded forms,
grew into distinctness as they rushed towards the corner, hurried past,
and merged their individuality again in a receding multitude that was
swallowed up at last in a cloud of dust.

“Go on! Go on!” cried the voices. “Way! Way!”

One man’s hands pressed on the back of another. My brother stood at the
pony’s head. Irresistibly attracted, he advanced slowly, pace by pace,
down the lane.

Edgware had been a scene of confusion, Chalk Farm a riotous tumult, but
this was a whole population in movement. It is hard to imagine that
host. It had no character of its own. The figures poured out past the
corner, and receded with their backs to the group in the lane. Along
the margin came those who were on foot threatened by the wheels,
stumbling in the ditches, blundering into one another.

The carts and carriages crowded close upon one another, making little
way for those swifter and more impatient vehicles that darted forward
every now and then when an opportunity showed itself of doing so,
sending the people scattering against the fences and gates of the
villas.

“Push on!” was the cry. “Push on! They are coming!”

In one cart stood a blind man in the uniform of the Salvation Army,
gesticulating with his crooked fingers and bawling, “Eternity!
Eternity!” His voice was hoarse and very loud so that my brother could
hear him long after he was lost to sight in the dust. Some of the
people who crowded in the carts whipped stupidly at their horses and
quarrelled with other drivers; some sat motionless, staring at nothing
with miserable eyes; some gnawed their hands with thirst, or lay
prostrate in the bottoms of their conveyances. The horses’ bits were
covered with foam, their eyes bloodshot.

There were cabs, carriages, shop-carts, waggons, beyond counting; a
mail cart, a road-cleaner’s cart marked “Vestry of St. Pancras,” a huge
timber waggon crowded with roughs. A brewer’s dray rumbled by with its
two near wheels splashed with fresh blood.

“Clear the way!” cried the voices. “Clear the way!”

“Eter-nity! Eter-nity!” came echoing down the road.

There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, with children
that cried and stumbled, their dainty clothes smothered in dust, their
weary faces smeared with tears. With many of these came men, sometimes
helpful, sometimes lowering and savage. Fighting side by side with them
pushed some weary street outcast in faded black rags, wide-eyed,
loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. There were sturdy workmen thrusting
their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothed like clerks or shopmen,
struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier my brother noticed, men
dressed in the clothes of railway porters, one wretched creature in a
nightshirt with a coat thrown over it.

But varied as its composition was, certain things all that host had in
common. There were fear and pain on their faces, and fear behind them.
A tumult up the road, a quarrel for a place in a waggon, sent the whole
host of them quickening their pace; even a man so scared and broken
that his knees bent under him was galvanised for a moment into renewed
activity. The heat and dust had already been at work upon this
multitude. Their skins were dry, their lips black and cracked. They
were all thirsty, weary, and footsore. And amid the various cries one
heard disputes, reproaches, groans of weariness and fatigue; the voices
of most of them were hoarse and weak. Through it all ran a refrain:

“Way! Way! The Martians are coming!”

Few stopped and came aside from that flood. The lane opened slantingly
into the main road with a narrow opening, and had a delusive appearance
of coming from the direction of London. Yet a kind of eddy of people
drove into its mouth; weaklings elbowed out of the stream, who for the
most part rested but a moment before plunging into it again. A little
way down the lane, with two friends bending over him, lay a man with a
bare leg, wrapped about with bloody rags. He was a lucky man to have
friends.

A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a filthy black
frock coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed his
boot—his sock was blood-stained—shook out a pebble, and hobbled on
again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw
herself under the hedge close by my brother, weeping.

“I can’t go on! I can’t go on!”

My brother woke from his torpor of astonishment and lifted her up,
speaking gently to her, and carried her to Miss Elphinstone. So soon as
my brother touched her she became quite still, as if frightened.

“Ellen!” shrieked a woman in the crowd, with tears in her
voice—“Ellen!” And the child suddenly darted away from my brother,
crying “Mother!”

“They are coming,” said a man on horseback, riding past along the lane.

“Out of the way, there!” bawled a coachman, towering high; and my
brother saw a closed carriage turning into the lane.

The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. My brother
pushed the pony and chaise back into the hedge, and the man drove by
and stopped at the turn of the way. It was a carriage, with a pole for
a pair of horses, but only one was in the traces. My brother saw dimly
through the dust that two men lifted out something on a white stretcher
and put it gently on the grass beneath the privet hedge.

One of the men came running to my brother.

“Where is there any water?” he said. “He is dying fast, and very
thirsty. It is Lord Garrick.”

“Lord Garrick!” said my brother; “the Chief Justice?”

“The water?” he said.

“There may be a tap,” said my brother, “in some of the houses. We have
no water. I dare not leave my people.”

The man pushed against the crowd towards the gate of the corner house.

“Go on!” said the people, thrusting at him. “They are coming! Go on!”

Then my brother’s attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced
man lugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother’s eyes
rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed to break up
into separate coins as it struck the ground. They rolled hither and
thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. The man stopped
and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his
shoulder and sent him reeling. He gave a shriek and dodged back, and a
cartwheel shaved him narrowly.

“Way!” cried the men all about him. “Make way!”

So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both hands open,
upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in his pocket. A
horse rose close upon him, and in another moment, half rising, he had
been borne down under the horse’s hoofs.

“Stop!” screamed my brother, and pushing a woman out of his way, tried
to clutch the bit of the horse.

Before he could get to it, he heard a scream under the wheels, and saw
through the dust the rim passing over the poor wretch’s back. The
driver of the cart slashed his whip at my brother, who ran round behind
the cart. The multitudinous shouting confused his ears. The man was
writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to rise, for the
wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp and dead. My
brother stood up and yelled at the next driver, and a man on a black
horse came to his assistance.

“Get him out of the road,” said he; and, clutching the man’s collar
with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. But he still
clutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammering
at his arm with a handful of gold. “Go on! Go on!” shouted angry voices
behind. “Way! Way!”

There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the cart that
the man on horseback stopped. My brother looked up, and the man with
the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist that held his collar.
There was a concussion, and the black horse came staggering sideways,
and the carthorse pushed beside it. A hoof missed my brother’s foot by
a hair’s breadth. He released his grip on the fallen man and jumped
back. He saw anger change to terror on the face of the poor wretch on
the ground, and in a moment he was hidden and my brother was borne
backward and carried past the entrance of the lane, and had to fight
hard in the torrent to recover it.

He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little child, with all
a child’s want of sympathetic imagination, staring with dilated eyes at
a dusty something that lay black and still, ground and crushed under
the rolling wheels. “Let us go back!” he shouted, and began turning the
pony round. “We cannot cross this—hell,” he said and they went back a
hundred yards the way they had come, until the fighting crowd was
hidden. As they passed the bend in the lane my brother saw the face of
the dying man in the ditch under the privet, deadly white and drawn,
and shining with perspiration. The two women sat silent, crouching in
their seat and shivering.

Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again. Miss Elphinstone was
white and pale, and her sister-in-law sat weeping, too wretched even to
call upon “George.” My brother was horrified and perplexed. So soon as
they had retreated he realised how urgent and unavoidable it was to
attempt this crossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone, suddenly
resolute.

“We must go that way,” he said, and led the pony round again.

For the second time that day this girl proved her quality. To force
their way into the torrent of people, my brother plunged into the
traffic and held back a cab horse, while she drove the pony across its
head. A waggon locked wheels for a moment and ripped a long splinter
from the chaise. In another moment they were caught and swept forward
by the stream. My brother, with the cabman’s whip marks red across his
face and hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the reins from her.

“Point the revolver at the man behind,” he said, giving it to her, “if
he presses us too hard. No!—point it at his horse.”

Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the right across
the road. But once in the stream he seemed to lose volition, to become
a part of that dusty rout. They swept through Chipping Barnet with the
torrent; they were nearly a mile beyond the centre of the town before
they had fought across to the opposite side of the way. It was din and
confusion indescribable; but in and beyond the town the road forks
repeatedly, and this to some extent relieved the stress.

They struck eastward through Hadley, and there on either side of the
road, and at another place farther on they came upon a great multitude
of people drinking at the stream, some fighting to come at the water.
And farther on, from a lull near East Barnet, they saw two trains
running slowly one after the other without signal or order—trains
swarming with people, with men even among the coals behind the
engines—going northward along the Great Northern Railway. My brother
supposes they must have filled outside London, for at that time the
furious terror of the people had rendered the central termini
impossible.

Near this place they halted for the rest of the afternoon, for the
violence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three of them.
They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger; the night was cold, and
none of them dared to sleep. And in the evening many people came
hurrying along the road nearby their stopping place, fleeing from
unknown dangers before them, and going in the direction from which my
brother had come.

XVII.
THE “THUNDER CHILD”.

Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday have
annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself slowly
through the home counties. Not only along the road through Barnet, but
also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the roads eastward to
Southend and Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames to Deal and
Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one could have hung that
June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London every
northward and eastward road running out of the tangled maze of streets
would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot
a human agony of terror and physical distress. I have set forth at
length in the last chapter my brother’s account of the road through
Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise how that swarming
of black dots appeared to one of those concerned. Never before in the
history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered
together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia
has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. And this was
no disciplined march; it was a stampede—a stampede gigantic and
terrible—without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed
and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout
of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.

Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network of
streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents,
gardens—already derelict—spread out like a huge map, and in the
southward _blotted_. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would have
seemed as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart. Steadily,
incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting out
ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising
ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found valley,
exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting paper.

And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the river, the
glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and methodically spreading
their poison cloud over this patch of country and then over that,
laying it again with their steam jets when it had served its purpose,
and taking possession of the conquered country. They do not seem to
have aimed at extermination so much as at complete demoralisation and
the destruction of any opposition. They exploded any stores of powder
they came upon, cut every telegraph, and wrecked the railways here and
there. They were hamstringing mankind. They seemed in no hurry to
extend the field of their operations, and did not come beyond the
central part of London all that day. It is possible that a very
considerable number of people in London stuck to their houses through
Monday morning. Certain it is that many died at home suffocated by the
Black Smoke.

Until about midday the Pool of London was an astonishing scene.
Steamboats and shipping of all sorts lay there, tempted by the enormous
sums of money offered by fugitives, and it is said that many who swam
out to these vessels were thrust off with boathooks and drowned. About
one o’clock in the afternoon the thinning remnant of a cloud of the
black vapour appeared between the arches of Blackfriars Bridge. At that
the Pool became a scene of mad confusion, fighting, and collision, and
for some time a multitude of boats and barges jammed in the northern
arch of the Tower Bridge, and the sailors and lightermen had to fight
savagely against the people who swarmed upon them from the riverfront.
People were actually clambering down the piers of the bridge from
above.

When, an hour later, a Martian appeared beyond the Clock Tower and
waded down the river, nothing but wreckage floated above Limehouse.

Of the falling of the fifth cylinder I have presently to tell. The
sixth star fell at Wimbledon. My brother, keeping watch beside the
women in the chaise in a meadow, saw the green flash of it far beyond
the hills. On Tuesday the little party, still set upon getting across
the sea, made its way through the swarming country towards Colchester.
The news that the Martians were now in possession of the whole of
London was confirmed. They had been seen at Highgate, and even, it was
said, at Neasden. But they did not come into my brother’s view until
the morrow.

That day the scattered multitudes began to realise the urgent need of
provisions. As they grew hungry the rights of property ceased to be
regarded. Farmers were out to defend their cattle-sheds, granaries, and
ripening root crops with arms in their hands. A number of people now,
like my brother, had their faces eastward, and there were some
desperate souls even going back towards London to get food. These were
chiefly people from the northern suburbs, whose knowledge of the Black
Smoke came by hearsay. He heard that about half the members of the
government had gathered at Birmingham, and that enormous quantities of
high explosives were being prepared to be used in automatic mines
across the Midland counties.

He was also told that the Midland Railway Company had replaced the
desertions of the first day’s panic, had resumed traffic, and was
running northward trains from St. Albans to relieve the congestion of
the home counties. There was also a placard in Chipping Ongar
announcing that large stores of flour were available in the northern
towns and that within twenty-four hours bread would be distributed
among the starving people in the neighbourhood. But this intelligence
did not deter him from the plan of escape he had formed, and the three
pressed eastward all day, and heard no more of the bread distribution
than this promise. Nor, as a matter of fact, did anyone else hear more
of it. That night fell the seventh star, falling upon Primrose Hill. It
fell while Miss Elphinstone was watching, for she took that duty
alternately with my brother. She saw it.

On Wednesday the three fugitives—they had passed the night in a field
of unripe wheat—reached Chelmsford, and there a body of the
inhabitants, calling itself the Committee of Public Supply, seized the
pony as provisions, and would give nothing in exchange for it but the
promise of a share in it the next day. Here there were rumours of
Martians at Epping, and news of the destruction of Waltham Abbey Powder
Mills in a vain attempt to blow up one of the invaders.

People were watching for Martians here from the church towers. My
brother, very luckily for him as it chanced, preferred to push on at
once to the coast rather than wait for food, although all three of them
were very hungry. By midday they passed through Tillingham, which,
strangely enough, seemed to be quite silent and deserted, save for a
few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham they suddenly
came in sight of the sea, and the most amazing crowd of shipping of all
sorts that it is possible to imagine.

For after the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they came on
to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and afterwards
to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They lay in a huge
sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last towards the Naze.
Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks—English, Scotch,
French, Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts,
electric boats; and beyond were ships of larger burden, a multitude of
filthy colliers, trim merchantmen, cattle ships, passenger boats,
petroleum tanks, ocean tramps, an old white transport even, neat white
and grey liners from Southampton and Hamburg; and along the blue coast
across the Blackwater my brother could make out dimly a dense swarm of
boats chaffering with the people on the beach, a swarm which also
extended up the Blackwater almost to Maldon.

About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water,
almost, to my brother’s perception, like a water-logged ship. This was
the ram _Thunder Child_. It was the only warship in sight, but far away
to the right over the smooth surface of the sea—for that day there was
a dead calm—lay a serpent of black smoke to mark the next ironclads of
the Channel Fleet, which hovered in an extended line, steam up and
ready for action, across the Thames estuary during the course of the
Martian conquest, vigilant and yet powerless to prevent it.

At the sight of the sea, Mrs. Elphinstone, in spite of the assurances
of her sister-in-law, gave way to panic. She had never been out of
England before, she would rather die than trust herself friendless in a
foreign country, and so forth. She seemed, poor woman, to imagine that
the French and the Martians might prove very similar. She had been
growing increasingly hysterical, fearful, and depressed during the two
days’ journeyings. Her great idea was to return to Stanmore. Things had
been always well and safe at Stanmore. They would find George at
Stanmore….

It was with the greatest difficulty they could get her down to the
beach, where presently my brother succeeded in attracting the attention
of some men on a paddle steamer from the Thames. They sent a boat and
drove a bargain for thirty-six pounds for the three. The steamer was
going, these men said, to Ostend.

It was about two o’clock when my brother, having paid their fares at
the gangway, found himself safely aboard the steamboat with his
charges. There was food aboard, albeit at exorbitant prices, and the
three of them contrived to eat a meal on one of the seats forward.

There were already a couple of score of passengers aboard, some of whom
had expended their last money in securing a passage, but the captain
lay off the Blackwater until five in the afternoon, picking up
passengers until the seated decks were even dangerously crowded. He
would probably have remained longer had it not been for the sound of
guns that began about that hour in the south. As if in answer, the
ironclad seaward fired a small gun and hoisted a string of flags. A jet
of smoke sprang out of her funnels.

Some of the passengers were of opinion that this firing came from
Shoeburyness, until it was noticed that it was growing louder. At the
same time, far away in the southeast the masts and upperworks of three
ironclads rose one after the other out of the sea, beneath clouds of
black smoke. But my brother’s attention speedily reverted to the
distant firing in the south. He fancied he saw a column of smoke rising
out of the distant grey haze.

The little steamer was already flapping her way eastward of the big
crescent of shipping, and the low Essex coast was growing blue and
hazy, when a Martian appeared, small and faint in the remote distance,
advancing along the muddy coast from the direction of Foulness. At that
the captain on the bridge swore at the top of his voice with fear and
anger at his own delay, and the paddles seemed infected with his
terror. Every soul aboard stood at the bulwarks or on the seats of the
steamer and stared at that distant shape, higher than the trees or
church towers inland, and advancing with a leisurely parody of a human
stride.

It was the first Martian my brother had seen, and he stood, more amazed
than terrified, watching this Titan advancing deliberately towards the
shipping, wading farther and farther into the water as the coast fell
away. Then, far away beyond the Crouch, came another, striding over
some stunted trees, and then yet another, still farther off, wading
deeply through a shiny mudflat that seemed to hang halfway up between
sea and sky. They were all stalking seaward, as if to intercept the
escape of the multitudinous vessels that were crowded between Foulness
and the Naze. In spite of the throbbing exertions of the engines of the
little paddle-boat, and the pouring foam that her wheels flung behind
her, she receded with terrifying slowness from this ominous advance.

Glancing northwestward, my brother saw the large crescent of shipping
already writhing with the approaching terror; one ship passing behind
another, another coming round from broadside to end on, steamships
whistling and giving off volumes of steam, sails being let out,
launches rushing hither and thither. He was so fascinated by this and
by the creeping danger away to the left that he had no eyes for
anything seaward. And then a swift movement of the steamboat (she had
suddenly come round to avoid being run down) flung him headlong from
the seat upon which he was standing. There was a shouting all about
him, a trampling of feet, and a cheer that seemed to be answered
faintly. The steamboat lurched and rolled him over upon his hands.

He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards
from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the blade of a
plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either side in huge
waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her paddles
helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the
waterline.

A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes were
clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing landward. Big
iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin
funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the
torpedo ram, _Thunder Child_, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue
of the threatened shipping.

Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my
brother looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again, and
he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far out to
sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus
sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less
formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was
pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new
antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the
giant was even such another as themselves. The _Thunder Child_ fired no
gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not
firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did
not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her
to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.

She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway
between the steamboat and the Martians—a diminishing black bulk against
the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.

Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a
canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and
glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding
torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear. To the
watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their
eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the Martians.

They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as
they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like
generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and
a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have driven
through the iron of the ship’s side like a white-hot iron rod through
paper.

A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the
Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and a
great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the
_Thunder Child_ sounded through the reek, going off one after the
other, and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer,
ricocheted towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a
smack to matchwood.

But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian’s
collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the
crowding passengers on the steamer’s stern shouted together. And then
they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove
something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts,
its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.

She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and her
engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and was
within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then with
a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped
upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her explosion, and
in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward with the
impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing of
cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of steam
hid everything again.

“Two!” yelled the captain.

Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end rang with
frantic cheering that was taken up first by one and then by all in the
crowding multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to sea.

The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the third
Martian and the coast altogether. And all this time the boat was
paddling steadily out to sea and away from the fight; and when at last
the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour intervened,
and nothing of the _Thunder Child_ could be made out, nor could the
third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to seaward were now quite
close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.

The little vessel continued to beat its way seaward, and the ironclads
receded slowly towards the coast, which was hidden still by a marbled
bank of vapour, part steam, part black gas, eddying and combining in
the strangest way. The fleet of refugees was scattering to the
northeast; several smacks were sailing between the ironclads and the
steamboat. After a time, and before they reached the sinking cloud
bank, the warships turned northward, and then abruptly went about and
passed into the thickening haze of evening southward. The coast grew
faint, and at last indistinguishable amid the low banks of clouds that
were gathering about the sinking sun.

Then suddenly out of the golden haze of the sunset came the vibration
of guns, and a form of black shadows moving. Everyone struggled to the
rail of the steamer and peered into the blinding furnace of the west,
but nothing was to be distinguished clearly. A mass of smoke rose
slanting and barred the face of the sun. The steamboat throbbed on its
way through an interminable suspense.

The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the
evening star trembled into sight. It was deep twilight when the captain
cried out and pointed. My brother strained his eyes. Something rushed
up into the sky out of the greyness—rushed slantingly upward and very
swiftly into the luminous clearness above the clouds in the western
sky; something flat and broad, and very large, that swept round in a
vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly, and vanished again into the grey
mystery of the night. And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the
land.

BOOK TWO
THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS.

I.
UNDER FOOT.

In the first book I have wandered so much from my own adventures to
tell of the experiences of my brother that all through the last two
chapters I and the curate have been lurking in the empty house at
Halliford whither we fled to escape the Black Smoke. There I will
resume. We stopped there all Sunday night and all the next day—the day
of the panic—in a little island of daylight, cut off by the Black Smoke
from the rest of the world. We could do nothing but wait in aching
inactivity during those two weary days.

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

We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day and the
morning of the next. There were signs of people in the next house on
Sunday evening—a face at a window and moving lights, and later the
slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people were, nor what
became of them. We saw nothing of them next day. The Black Smoke
drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer
and nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway outside the house
that hid us.

A Martian came across the fields about midday, laying the stuff with a
jet of superheated steam that hissed against the walls, smashed all the
windows it touched, and scalded the curate’s hand as he fled out of the
front room. When at last we crept across the sodden rooms and looked
out again, the country northward was as though a black snowstorm had
passed over it. Looking towards the river, we were astonished to see an
unaccountable redness mingling with the black of the scorched meadows.

For a time we did not see how this change affected our position, save
that we were relieved of our fear of the Black Smoke. But later I
perceived that we were no longer hemmed in, that now we might get away.
So soon as I realised that the way of escape was open, my dream of
action returned. But the curate was lethargic, unreasonable.

“We are safe here,” he repeated; “safe here.”

I resolved to leave him—would that I had! Wiser now for the
artilleryman’s teaching, I sought out food and drink. I had found oil
and rags for my burns, and I also took a hat and a flannel shirt that I
found in one of the bedrooms. When it was clear to him that I meant to
go alone—had reconciled myself to going alone—he suddenly roused
himself to come. And all being quiet throughout the afternoon, we
started about five o’clock, as I should judge, along the blackened road
to Sunbury.

In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies lying in
contorted attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts and
luggage, all covered thickly with black dust. That pall of cindery
powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of Pompeii.
We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full of strange
and unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were relieved
to find a patch of green that had escaped the suffocating drift. We
went through Bushey Park, with its deer going to and fro under the
chestnuts, and some men and women hurrying in the distance towards
Hampton, and so we came to Twickenham. These were the first people we
saw.

Away across the road the woods beyond Ham and Petersham were still
afire. Twickenham was uninjured by either Heat-Ray or Black Smoke, and
there were more people about here, though none could give us news. For
the most part they were like ourselves, taking advantage of a lull to
shift their quarters. I have an impression that many of the houses here
were still occupied by scared inhabitants, too frightened even for
flight. Here too the evidence of a hasty rout was abundant along the
road. I remember most vividly three smashed bicycles in a heap, pounded
into the road by the wheels of subsequent carts. We crossed Richmond
Bridge about half past eight. We hurried across the exposed bridge, of
course, but I noticed floating down the stream a number of red masses,
some many feet across. I did not know what these were—there was no time
for scrutiny—and I put a more horrible interpretation on them than they
deserved. Here again on the Surrey side were black dust that had once
been smoke, and dead bodies—a heap near the approach to the station;
but we had no glimpse of the Martians until we were some way towards
Barnes.

We saw in the blackened distance a group of three people running down a
side street towards the river, but otherwise it seemed deserted. Up the
hill Richmond town was burning briskly; outside the town of Richmond
there was no trace of the Black Smoke.

Then suddenly, as we approached Kew, came a number of people running,
and the upperworks of a Martian fighting-machine loomed in sight over
the housetops, not a hundred yards away from us. We stood aghast at our
danger, and had the Martian looked down we must immediately have
perished. We were so terrified that we dared not go on, but turned
aside and hid in a shed in a garden. There the curate crouched, weeping
silently, and refusing to stir again.

But my fixed idea of reaching Leatherhead would not let me rest, and in
the twilight I ventured out again. I went through a shrubbery, and
along a passage beside a big house standing in its own grounds, and so
emerged upon the road towards Kew. The curate I left in the shed, but
he came hurrying after me.

That second start was the most foolhardy thing I ever did. For it was
manifest the Martians were about us. No sooner had the curate overtaken
me than we saw either the fighting-machine we had seen before or
another, far away across the meadows in the direction of Kew Lodge.
Four or five little black figures hurried before it across the
green-grey of the field, and in a moment it was evident this Martian
pursued them. In three strides he was among them, and they ran
radiating from his feet in all directions. He used no Heat-Ray to
destroy them, but picked them up one by one. Apparently he tossed them
into the great metallic carrier which projected behind him, much as a
workman’s basket hangs over his shoulder.

It was the first time I realised that the Martians might have any other
purpose than destruction with defeated humanity. We stood for a moment
petrified, then turned and fled through a gate behind us into a walled
garden, fell into, rather than found, a fortunate ditch, and lay there,
scarce daring to whisper to each other until the stars were out.

I suppose it was nearly eleven o’clock before we gathered courage to
start again, no longer venturing into the road, but sneaking along
hedgerows and through plantations, and watching keenly through the
darkness, he on the right and I on the left, for the Martians, who
seemed to be all about us. In one place we blundered upon a scorched
and blackened area, now cooling and ashen, and a number of scattered
dead bodies of men, burned horribly about the heads and trunks but with
their legs and boots mostly intact; and of dead horses, fifty feet,
perhaps, behind a line of four ripped guns and smashed gun carriages.

Sheen, it seemed, had escaped destruction, but the place was silent and
deserted. Here we happened on no dead, though the night was too dark
for us to see into the side roads of the place. In Sheen my companion
suddenly complained of faintness and thirst, and we decided to try one
of the houses.

The first house we entered, after a little difficulty with the window,
was a small semi-detached villa, and I found nothing eatable left in
the place but some mouldy cheese. There was, however, water to drink;
and I took a hatchet, which promised to be useful in our next
house-breaking.

We then crossed to a place where the road turns towards Mortlake. Here
there stood a white house within a walled garden, and in the pantry of
this domicile we found a store of food—two loaves of bread in a pan, an
uncooked steak, and the half of a ham. I give this catalogue so
precisely because, as it happened, we were destined to subsist upon
this store for the next fortnight. Bottled beer stood under a shelf,
and there were two bags of haricot beans and some limp lettuces. This
pantry opened into a kind of wash-up kitchen, and in this was firewood;
there was also a cupboard, in which we found nearly a dozen of
burgundy, tinned soups and salmon, and two tins of biscuits.

We sat in the adjacent kitchen in the dark—for we dared not strike a
light—and ate bread and ham, and drank beer out of the same bottle. The
curate, who was still timorous and restless, was now, oddly enough, for
pushing on, and I was urging him to keep up his strength by eating when
the thing happened that was to imprison us.

“It can’t be midnight yet,” I said, and then came a blinding glare of
vivid green light. Everything in the kitchen leaped out, clearly
visible in green and black, and vanished again. And then followed such
a concussion as I have never heard before or since. So close on the
heels of this as to seem instantaneous came a thud behind me, a clash
of glass, a crash and rattle of falling masonry all about us, and the
plaster of the ceiling came down upon us, smashing into a multitude of
fragments upon our heads. I was knocked headlong across the floor
against the oven handle and stunned. I was insensible for a long time,
the curate told me, and when I came to we were in darkness again, and
he, with a face wet, as I found afterwards, with blood from a cut
forehead, was dabbing water over me.

For some time I could not recollect what had happened. Then things came
to me slowly. A bruise on my temple asserted itself.

“Are you better?” asked the curate in a whisper.

At last I answered him. I sat up.

“Don’t move,” he said. “The floor is covered with smashed crockery from
the dresser. You can’t possibly move without making a noise, and I
fancy _they_ are outside.”

We both sat quite silent, so that we could scarcely hear each other
breathing. Everything seemed deadly still, but once something near us,
some plaster or broken brickwork, slid down with a rumbling sound.
Outside and very near was an intermittent, metallic rattle.