“Leatherhead!” I shouted above the sudden noise.
She looked away from me downhill. The people were coming out of their
houses, astonished.
“How are we to get to Leatherhead?” she said.
Down the hill I saw a bevy of hussars ride under the railway bridge;
three galloped through the open gates of the Oriental College; two
others dismounted, and began running from house to house. The sun,
shining through the smoke that drove up from the tops of the trees,
seemed blood red, and threw an unfamiliar lurid light upon everything.
“Stop here,” said I; “you are safe here;” and I started off at once for
the Spotted Dog, for I knew the landlord had a horse and dog cart. I
ran, for I perceived that in a moment everyone upon this side of the
hill would be moving. I found him in his bar, quite unaware of what was
going on behind his house. A man stood with his back to me, talking to
him.
“I must have a pound,” said the landlord, “and I’ve no one to drive
it.”
“I’ll give you two,” said I, over the stranger’s shoulder.
“What for?”
“And I’ll bring it back by midnight,” I said.
“Lord!” said the landlord; “what’s the hurry? I’m selling my bit of a
pig. Two pounds, and you bring it back? What’s going on now?”
I explained hastily that I had to leave my home, and so secured the dog
cart. At the time it did not seem to me nearly so urgent that the
landlord should leave his. I took care to have the cart there and then,
drove it off down the road, and, leaving it in charge of my wife and
servant, rushed into my house and packed a few valuables, such plate as
we had, and so forth. The beech trees below the house were burning
while I did this, and the palings up the road glowed red. While I was
occupied in this way, one of the dismounted hussars came running up. He
was going from house to house, warning people to leave. He was going on
as I came out of my front door, lugging my treasures, done up in a
tablecloth. I shouted after him:
“What news?”
He turned, stared, bawled something about “crawling out in a thing like
a dish cover,” and ran on to the gate of the house at the crest. A
sudden whirl of black smoke driving across the road hid him for a
moment. I ran to my neighbour’s door and rapped to satisfy myself of
what I already knew, that his wife had gone to London with him and had
locked up their house. I went in again, according to my promise, to get
my servant’s box, lugged it out, clapped it beside her on the tail of
the dog cart, and then caught the reins and jumped up into the driver’s
seat beside my wife. In another moment we were clear of the smoke and
noise, and spanking down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill towards Old
Woking.
In front was a quiet sunny landscape, a wheat field ahead on either
side of the road, and the Maybury Inn with its swinging sign. I saw the
doctor’s cart ahead of me. At the bottom of the hill I turned my head
to look at the hillside I was leaving. Thick streamers of black smoke
shot with threads of red fire were driving up into the still air, and
throwing dark shadows upon the green treetops eastward. The smoke
already extended far away to the east and west—to the Byfleet pine
woods eastward, and to Woking on the west. The road was dotted with
people running towards us. And very faint now, but very distinct
through the hot, quiet air, one heard the whirr of a machine-gun that
was presently stilled, and an intermittent cracking of rifles.
Apparently the Martians were setting fire to everything within range of
their Heat-Ray.
I am not an expert driver, and I had immediately to turn my attention
to the horse. When I looked back again the second hill had hidden the
black smoke. I slashed the horse with the whip, and gave him a loose
rein until Woking and Send lay between us and that quivering tumult. I
overtook and passed the doctor between Woking and Send.
X.
IN THE STORM.
Leatherhead is about twelve miles from Maybury Hill. The scent of hay
was in the air through the lush meadows beyond Pyrford, and the hedges
on either side were sweet and gay with multitudes of dog-roses. The
heavy firing that had broken out while we were driving down Maybury
Hill ceased as abruptly as it began, leaving the evening very peaceful
and still. We got to Leatherhead without misadventure about nine
o’clock, and the horse had an hour’s rest while I took supper with my
cousins and commended my wife to their care.
My wife was curiously silent throughout the drive, and seemed oppressed
with forebodings of evil. I talked to her reassuringly, pointing out
that the Martians were tied to the pit by sheer heaviness, and at the
utmost could but crawl a little out of it; but she answered only in
monosyllables. Had it not been for my promise to the innkeeper, she
would, I think, have urged me to stay in Leatherhead that night. Would
that I had! Her face, I remember, was very white as we parted.
For my own part, I had been feverishly excited all day. Something very
like the war fever that occasionally runs through a civilised community
had got into my blood, and in my heart I was not so very sorry that I
had to return to Maybury that night. I was even afraid that that last
fusillade I had heard might mean the extermination of our invaders from
Mars. I can best express my state of mind by saying that I wanted to be
in at the death.
It was nearly eleven when I started to return. The night was
unexpectedly dark; to me, walking out of the lighted passage of my
cousins’ house, it seemed indeed black, and it was as hot and close as
the day. Overhead the clouds were driving fast, albeit not a breath
stirred the shrubs about us. My cousins’ man lit both lamps. Happily, I
knew the road intimately. My wife stood in the light of the doorway,
and watched me until I jumped up into the dog cart. Then abruptly she
turned and went in, leaving my cousins side by side wishing me good
hap.
I was a little depressed at first with the contagion of my wife’s
fears, but very soon my thoughts reverted to the Martians. At that time
I was absolutely in the dark as to the course of the evening’s
fighting. I did not know even the circumstances that had precipitated
the conflict. As I came through Ockham (for that was the way I
returned, and not through Send and Old Woking) I saw along the western
horizon a blood-red glow, which as I drew nearer, crept slowly up the
sky. The driving clouds of the gathering thunderstorm mingled there
with masses of black and red smoke.
Ripley Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window or so the
village showed not a sign of life; but I narrowly escaped an accident
at the corner of the road to Pyrford, where a knot of people stood with
their backs to me. They said nothing to me as I passed. I do not know
what they knew of the things happening beyond the hill, nor do I know
if the silent houses I passed on my way were sleeping securely, or
deserted and empty, or harassed and watching against the terror of the
night.
From Ripley until I came through Pyrford I was in the valley of the
Wey, and the red glare was hidden from me. As I ascended the little
hill beyond Pyrford Church the glare came into view again, and the
trees about me shivered with the first intimation of the storm that was
upon me. Then I heard midnight pealing out from Pyrford Church behind
me, and then came the silhouette of Maybury Hill, with its tree-tops
and roofs black and sharp against the red.
Even as I beheld this a lurid green glare lit the road about me and
showed the distant woods towards Addlestone. I felt a tug at the reins.
I saw that the driving clouds had been pierced as it were by a thread
of green fire, suddenly lighting their confusion and falling into the
field to my left. It was the third falling star!
Close on its apparition, and blindingly violet by contrast, danced out
the first lightning of the gathering storm, and the thunder burst like
a rocket overhead. The horse took the bit between his teeth and bolted.
A moderate incline runs towards the foot of Maybury Hill, and down this
we clattered. Once the lightning had begun, it went on in as rapid a
succession of flashes as I have ever seen. The thunderclaps, treading
one on the heels of another and with a strange crackling accompaniment,
sounded more like the working of a gigantic electric machine than the
usual detonating reverberations. The flickering light was blinding and
confusing, and a thin hail smote gustily at my face as I drove down the
slope.
At first I regarded little but the road before me, and then abruptly my
attention was arrested by something that was moving rapidly down the
opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At first I took it for the wet roof of
a house, but one flash following another showed it to be in swift
rolling movement. It was an elusive vision—a moment of bewildering
darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the
Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of the pine trees,
and this problematical object came out clear and sharp and bright.
And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher
than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them
aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now
across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the
clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder.
A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in
the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the
next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool
tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression
those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a
great body of machinery on a tripod stand.
Then suddenly the trees in the pine wood ahead of me were parted, as
brittle reeds are parted by a man thrusting through them; they were
snapped off and driven headlong, and a second huge tripod appeared,
rushing, as it seemed, headlong towards me. And I was galloping hard to
meet it! At the sight of the second monster my nerve went altogether.
Not stopping to look again, I wrenched the horse’s head hard round to
the right and in another moment the dog cart had heeled over upon the
horse; the shafts smashed noisily, and I was flung sideways and fell
heavily into a shallow pool of water.
I crawled out almost immediately, and crouched, my feet still in the
water, under a clump of furze. The horse lay motionless (his neck was
broken, poor brute!) and by the lightning flashes I saw the black bulk
of the overturned dog cart and the silhouette of the wheel still
spinning slowly. In another moment the colossal mechanism went striding
by me, and passed uphill towards Pyrford.
Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere
insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing
metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which
gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange
body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood
that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a
head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal
like a gigantic fisherman’s basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted
out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an
instant it was gone.
So much I saw then, all vaguely for the flickering of the lightning, in
blinding highlights and dense black shadows.
As it passed it set up an exultant deafening howl that drowned the
thunder—“Aloo! Aloo!”—and in another minute it was with its companion,
half a mile away, stooping over something in the field. I have no doubt
this Thing in the field was the third of the ten cylinders they had
fired at us from Mars.
For some minutes I lay there in the rain and darkness watching, by the
intermittent light, these monstrous beings of metal moving about in the
distance over the hedge tops. A thin hail was now beginning, and as it
came and went their figures grew misty and then flashed into clearness
again. Now and then came a gap in the lightning, and the night
swallowed them up.
I was soaked with hail above and puddle water below. It was some time
before my blank astonishment would let me struggle up the bank to a
drier position, or think at all of my imminent peril.
Not far from me was a little one-roomed squatter’s hut of wood,
surrounded by a patch of potato garden. I struggled to my feet at last,
and, crouching and making use of every chance of cover, I made a run
for this. I hammered at the door, but I could not make the people hear
(if there were any people inside), and after a time I desisted, and,
availing myself of a ditch for the greater part of the way, succeeded
in crawling, unobserved by these monstrous machines, into the pine
woods towards Maybury.
Under cover of this I pushed on, wet and shivering now, towards my own
house. I walked among the trees trying to find the footpath. It was
very dark indeed in the wood, for the lightning was now becoming
infrequent, and the hail, which was pouring down in a torrent, fell in
columns through the gaps in the heavy foliage.
If I had fully realised the meaning of all the things I had seen I
should have immediately worked my way round through Byfleet to Street
Cobham, and so gone back to rejoin my wife at Leatherhead. But that
night the strangeness of things about me, and my physical wretchedness,
prevented me, for I was bruised, weary, wet to the skin, deafened and
blinded by the storm.
I had a vague idea of going on to my own house, and that was as much
motive as I had. I staggered through the trees, fell into a ditch and
bruised my knees against a plank, and finally splashed out into the
lane that ran down from the College Arms. I say splashed, for the storm
water was sweeping the sand down the hill in a muddy torrent. There in
the darkness a man blundered into me and sent me reeling back.
He gave a cry of terror, sprang sideways, and rushed on before I could
gather my wits sufficiently to speak to him. So heavy was the stress of
the storm just at this place that I had the hardest task to win my way
up the hill. I went close up to the fence on the left and worked my way
along its palings.
Near the top I stumbled upon something soft, and, by a flash of
lightning, saw between my feet a heap of black broadcloth and a pair of
boots. Before I could distinguish clearly how the man lay, the flicker
of light had passed. I stood over him waiting for the next flash. When
it came, I saw that he was a sturdy man, cheaply but not shabbily
dressed; his head was bent under his body, and he lay crumpled up close
to the fence, as though he had been flung violently against it.
Overcoming the repugnance natural to one who had never before touched a
dead body, I stooped and turned him over to feel for his heart. He was
quite dead. Apparently his neck had been broken. The lightning flashed
for a third time, and his face leaped upon me. I sprang to my feet. It
was the landlord of the Spotted Dog, whose conveyance I had taken.
I stepped over him gingerly and pushed on up the hill. I made my way by
the police station and the College Arms towards my own house. Nothing
was burning on the hillside, though from the common there still came a
red glare and a rolling tumult of ruddy smoke beating up against the
drenching hail. So far as I could see by the flashes, the houses about
me were mostly uninjured. By the College Arms a dark heap lay in the
road.
Down the road towards Maybury Bridge there were voices and the sound of
feet, but I had not the courage to shout or to go to them. I let myself
in with my latchkey, closed, locked and bolted the door, staggered to
the foot of the staircase, and sat down. My imagination was full of
those striding metallic monsters, and of the dead body smashed against
the fence.
I crouched at the foot of the staircase with my back to the wall,
shivering violently.
XI.
AT THE WINDOW.
I have already said that my storms of emotion have a trick of
exhausting themselves. After a time I discovered that I was cold and
wet, and with little pools of water about me on the stair carpet. I got
up almost mechanically, went into the dining room and drank some
whisky, and then I was moved to change my clothes.
After I had done that I went upstairs to my study, but why I did so I
do not know. The window of my study looks over the trees and the
railway towards Horsell Common. In the hurry of our departure this
window had been left open. The passage was dark, and, by contrast with
the picture the window frame enclosed, the side of the room seemed
impenetrably dark. I stopped short in the doorway.
The thunderstorm had passed. The towers of the Oriental College and the
pine trees about it had gone, and very far away, lit by a vivid red
glare, the common about the sand-pits was visible. Across the light
huge black shapes, grotesque and strange, moved busily to and fro.
It seemed indeed as if the whole country in that direction was on
fire—a broad hillside set with minute tongues of flame, swaying and
writhing with the gusts of the dying storm, and throwing a red
reflection upon the cloud scud above. Every now and then a haze of
smoke from some nearer conflagration drove across the window and hid
the Martian shapes. I could not see what they were doing, nor the clear
form of them, nor recognise the black objects they were busied upon.
Neither could I see the nearer fire, though the reflections of it
danced on the wall and ceiling of the study. A sharp, resinous tang of
burning was in the air.
I closed the door noiselessly and crept towards the window. As I did
so, the view opened out until, on the one hand, it reached to the
houses about Woking station, and on the other to the charred and
blackened pine woods of Byfleet. There was a light down below the hill,
on the railway, near the arch, and several of the houses along the
Maybury road and the streets near the station were glowing ruins. The
light upon the railway puzzled me at first; there were a black heap and
a vivid glare, and to the right of that a row of yellow oblongs. Then I
perceived this was a wrecked train, the fore part smashed and on fire,
the hinder carriages still upon the rails.
Between these three main centres of light—the houses, the train, and
the burning county towards Chobham—stretched irregular patches of dark
country, broken here and there by intervals of dimly glowing and
smoking ground. It was the strangest spectacle, that black expanse set
with fire. It reminded me, more than anything else, of the Potteries at
night. At first I could distinguish no people at all, though I peered
intently for them. Later I saw against the light of Woking station a
number of black figures hurrying one after the other across the line.
And this was the little world in which I had been living securely for
years, this fiery chaos! What had happened in the last seven hours I
still did not know; nor did I know, though I was beginning to guess,
the relation between these mechanical colossi and the sluggish lumps I
had seen disgorged from the cylinder. With a queer feeling of
impersonal interest I turned my desk chair to the window, sat down, and
stared at the blackened country, and particularly at the three gigantic
black things that were going to and fro in the glare about the
sand-pits.
They seemed amazingly busy. I began to ask myself what they could be.
Were they intelligent mechanisms? Such a thing I felt was impossible.
Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a
man’s brain sits and rules in his body? I began to compare the things
to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an
ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.
The storm had left the sky clear, and over the smoke of the burning
land the little fading pinpoint of Mars was dropping into the west,
when a soldier came into my garden. I heard a slight scraping at the
fence, and rousing myself from the lethargy that had fallen upon me, I
looked down and saw him dimly, clambering over the palings. At the
sight of another human being my torpor passed, and I leaned out of the
window eagerly.
“Hist!” said I, in a whisper.
He stopped astride of the fence in doubt. Then he came over and across
the lawn to the corner of the house. He bent down and stepped softly.
“Who’s there?” he said, also whispering, standing under the window and
peering up.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“God knows.”
“Are you trying to hide?”
“That’s it.”
“Come into the house,” I said.
I went down, unfastened the door, and let him in, and locked the door
again. I could not see his face. He was hatless, and his coat was
unbuttoned.
“My God!” he said, as I drew him in.
“What has happened?” I asked.
“What hasn’t?” In the obscurity I could see he made a gesture of
despair. “They wiped us out—simply wiped us out,” he repeated again and
again.
He followed me, almost mechanically, into the dining room.
“Take some whisky,” I said, pouring out a stiff dose.
He drank it. Then abruptly he sat down before the table, put his head
on his arms, and began to sob and weep like a little boy, in a perfect
passion of emotion, while I, with a curious forgetfulness of my own
recent despair, stood beside him, wondering.
It was a long time before he could steady his nerves to answer my
questions, and then he answered perplexingly and brokenly. He was a
driver in the artillery, and had only come into action about seven. At
that time firing was going on across the common, and it was said the
first party of Martians were crawling slowly towards their second
cylinder under cover of a metal shield.
Later this shield staggered up on tripod legs and became the first of
the fighting-machines I had seen. The gun he drove had been unlimbered
near Horsell, in order to command the sand-pits, and its arrival it was
that had precipitated the action. As the limber gunners went to the
rear, his horse trod in a rabbit hole and came down, throwing him into
a depression of the ground. At the same moment the gun exploded behind
him, the ammunition blew up, there was fire all about him, and he found
himself lying under a heap of charred dead men and dead horses.
“I lay still,” he said, “scared out of my wits, with the fore quarter
of a horse atop of me. We’d been wiped out. And the smell—good God!
Like burnt meat! I was hurt across the back by the fall of the horse,
and there I had to lie until I felt better. Just like parade it had
been a minute before—then stumble, bang, swish!
“Wiped out!” he said.
He had hid under the dead horse for a long time, peeping out furtively
across the common. The Cardigan men had tried a rush, in skirmishing
order, at the pit, simply to be swept out of existence. Then the
monster had risen to its feet and had begun to walk leisurely to and
fro across the common among the few fugitives, with its headlike hood
turning about exactly like the head of a cowled human being. A kind of
arm carried a complicated metallic case, about which green flashes
scintillated, and out of the funnel of this there smoked the Heat-Ray.
In a few minutes there was, so far as the soldier could see, not a
living thing left upon the common, and every bush and tree upon it that
was not already a blackened skeleton was burning. The hussars had been
on the road beyond the curvature of the ground, and he saw nothing of
them. He heard the Maxims rattle for a time and then become still. The
giant saved Woking station and its cluster of houses until the last;
then in a moment the Heat-Ray was brought to bear, and the town became
a heap of fiery ruins. Then the Thing shut off the Heat-Ray, and
turning its back upon the artilleryman, began to waddle away towards
the smouldering pine woods that sheltered the second cylinder. As it
did so a second glittering Titan built itself up out of the pit.
The second monster followed the first, and at that the artilleryman
began to crawl very cautiously across the hot heather ash towards
Horsell. He managed to get alive into the ditch by the side of the
road, and so escaped to Woking. There his story became ejaculatory. The
place was impassable. It seems there were a few people alive there,
frantic for the most part and many burned and scalded. He was turned
aside by the fire, and hid among some almost scorching heaps of broken
wall as one of the Martian giants returned. He saw this one pursue a
man, catch him up in one of its steely tentacles, and knock his head
against the trunk of a pine tree. At last, after nightfall, the
artilleryman made a rush for it and got over the railway embankment.
Since then he had been skulking along towards Maybury, in the hope of
getting out of danger Londonward. People were hiding in trenches and
cellars, and many of the survivors had made off towards Woking village
and Send. He had been consumed with thirst until he found one of the
water mains near the railway arch smashed, and the water bubbling out
like a spring upon the road.
That was the story I got from him, bit by bit. He grew calmer telling
me and trying to make me see the things he had seen. He had eaten no
food since midday, he told me early in his narrative, and I found some
mutton and bread in the pantry and brought it into the room. We lit no
lamp for fear of attracting the Martians, and ever and again our hands
would touch upon bread or meat. As he talked, things about us came
darkly out of the darkness, and the trampled bushes and broken rose
trees outside the window grew distinct. It would seem that a number of
men or animals had rushed across the lawn. I began to see his face,
blackened and haggard, as no doubt mine was also.
When we had finished eating we went softly upstairs to my study, and I
looked again out of the open window. In one night the valley had become
a valley of ashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where flames had been
there were now streamers of smoke; but the countless ruins of shattered
and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees that the night had
hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn.
Yet here and there some object had had the luck to escape—a white
railway signal here, the end of a greenhouse there, white and fresh
amid the wreckage. Never before in the history of warfare had
destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal. And shining with
the growing light of the east, three of the metallic giants stood about
the pit, their cowls rotating as though they were surveying the
desolation they had made.
It seemed to me that the pit had been enlarged, and ever and again
puffs of vivid green vapour streamed up and out of it towards the
brightening dawn—streamed up, whirled, broke, and vanished.
Beyond were the pillars of fire about Chobham. They became pillars of
bloodshot smoke at the first touch of day.
XII.
WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON.
As the dawn grew brighter we withdrew from the window from which we had
watched the Martians, and went very quietly downstairs.
The artilleryman agreed with me that the house was no place to stay in.
He proposed, he said, to make his way Londonward, and thence rejoin his
battery—No. 12, of the Horse Artillery. My plan was to return at once
to Leatherhead; and so greatly had the strength of the Martians
impressed me that I had determined to take my wife to Newhaven, and go
with her out of the country forthwith. For I already perceived clearly
that the country about London must inevitably be the scene of a
disastrous struggle before such creatures as these could be destroyed.
Between us and Leatherhead, however, lay the third cylinder, with its
guarding giants. Had I been alone, I think I should have taken my
chance and struck across country. But the artilleryman dissuaded me:
“It’s no kindness to the right sort of wife,” he said, “to make her a
widow;” and in the end I agreed to go with him, under cover of the
woods, northward as far as Street Cobham before I parted with him.
Thence I would make a big detour by Epsom to reach Leatherhead.
I should have started at once, but my companion had been in active
service and he knew better than that. He made me ransack the house for
a flask, which he filled with whisky; and we lined every available
pocket with packets of biscuits and slices of meat. Then we crept out
of the house, and ran as quickly as we could down the ill-made road by
which I had come overnight. The houses seemed deserted. In the road lay
a group of three charred bodies close together, struck dead by the
Heat-Ray; and here and there were things that people had dropped—a
clock, a slipper, a silver spoon, and the like poor valuables. At the
corner turning up towards the post office a little cart, filled with
boxes and furniture, and horseless, heeled over on a broken wheel. A
cash box had been hastily smashed open and thrown under the debris.
Except the lodge at the Orphanage, which was still on fire, none of the
houses had suffered very greatly here. The Heat-Ray had shaved the
chimney tops and passed. Yet, save ourselves, there did not seem to be
a living soul on Maybury Hill. The majority of the inhabitants had
escaped, I suppose, by way of the Old Woking road—the road I had taken
when I drove to Leatherhead—or they had hidden.
We went down the lane, by the body of the man in black, sodden now from
the overnight hail, and broke into the woods at the foot of the hill.
We pushed through these towards the railway without meeting a soul. The
woods across the line were but the scarred and blackened ruins of
woods; for the most part the trees had fallen, but a certain proportion
still stood, dismal grey stems, with dark brown foliage instead of
green.
On our side the fire had done no more than scorch the nearer trees; it
had failed to secure its footing. In one place the woodmen had been at
work on Saturday; trees, felled and freshly trimmed, lay in a clearing,
with heaps of sawdust by the sawing-machine and its engine. Hard by was
a temporary hut, deserted. There was not a breath of wind this morning,
and everything was strangely still. Even the birds were hushed, and as
we hurried along I and the artilleryman talked in whispers and looked
now and again over our shoulders. Once or twice we stopped to listen.
After a time we drew near the road, and as we did so we heard the
clatter of hoofs and saw through the tree stems three cavalry soldiers
riding slowly towards Woking. We hailed them, and they halted while we
hurried towards them. It was a lieutenant and a couple of privates of
the 8th Hussars, with a stand like a theodolite, which the artilleryman
told me was a heliograph.
“You are the first men I’ve seen coming this way this morning,” said
the lieutenant. “What’s brewing?”
His voice and face were eager. The men behind him stared curiously. The
artilleryman jumped down the bank into the road and saluted.
“Gun destroyed last night, sir. Have been hiding. Trying to rejoin
battery, sir. You’ll come in sight of the Martians, I expect, about
half a mile along this road.”
“What the dickens are they like?” asked the lieutenant.
“Giants in armour, sir. Hundred feet high. Three legs and a body like
’luminium, with a mighty great head in a hood, sir.”
“Get out!” said the lieutenant. “What confounded nonsense!”
“You’ll see, sir. They carry a kind of box, sir, that shoots fire and
strikes you dead.”
“What d’ye mean—a gun?”
“No, sir,” and the artilleryman began a vivid account of the Heat-Ray.
Halfway through, the lieutenant interrupted him and looked up at me. I
was still standing on the bank by the side of the road.
“It’s perfectly true,” I said.
“Well,” said the lieutenant, “I suppose it’s my business to see it too.
Look here”—to the artilleryman—“we’re detailed here clearing people out
of their houses. You’d better go along and report yourself to
Brigadier-General Marvin, and tell him all you know. He’s at Weybridge.
Know the way?”
“I do,” I said; and he turned his horse southward again.
“Half a mile, you say?” said he.
“At most,” I answered, and pointed over the treetops southward. He
thanked me and rode on, and we saw them no more.
Farther along we came upon a group of three women and two children in
the road, busy clearing out a labourer’s cottage. They had got hold of
a little hand truck, and were piling it up with unclean-looking bundles
and shabby furniture. They were all too assiduously engaged to talk to
us as we passed.
By Byfleet station we emerged from the pine trees, and found the
country calm and peaceful under the morning sunlight. We were far
beyond the range of the Heat-Ray there, and had it not been for the
silent desertion of some of the houses, the stirring movement of
packing in others, and the knot of soldiers standing on the bridge over
the railway and staring down the line towards Woking, the day would
have seemed very like any other Sunday.
Several farm waggons and carts were moving creakily along the road to
Addlestone, and suddenly through the gate of a field we saw, across a
stretch of flat meadow, six twelve-pounders standing neatly at equal
distances pointing towards Woking. The gunners stood by the guns
waiting, and the ammunition waggons were at a business-like distance.
The men stood almost as if under inspection.
“That’s good!” said I. “They will get one fair shot, at any rate.”
The artilleryman hesitated at the gate.
“I shall go on,” he said.
Farther on towards Weybridge, just over the bridge, there were a number
of men in white fatigue jackets throwing up a long rampart, and more
guns behind.
“It’s bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow,” said the
artilleryman. “They ’aven’t seen that fire-beam yet.”
The officers who were not actively engaged stood and stared over the
treetops southwestward, and the men digging would stop every now and
again to stare in the same direction.
Byfleet was in a tumult; people packing, and a score of hussars, some
of them dismounted, some on horseback, were hunting them about. Three
or four black government waggons, with crosses in white circles, and an
old omnibus, among other vehicles, were being loaded in the village
street. There were scores of people, most of them sufficiently
sabbatical to have assumed their best clothes. The soldiers were having
the greatest difficulty in making them realise the gravity of their
position. We saw one shrivelled old fellow with a huge box and a score
or more of flower pots containing orchids, angrily expostulating with
the corporal who would leave them behind. I stopped and gripped his
arm.
“Do you know what’s over there?” I said, pointing at the pine tops that
hid the Martians.
“Eh?” said he, turning. “I was explainin’ these is vallyble.”
“Death!” I shouted. “Death is coming! Death!” and leaving him to digest
that if he could, I hurried on after the artillery-man. At the corner I
looked back. The soldier had left him, and he was still standing by his
box, with the pots of orchids on the lid of it, and staring vaguely
over the trees.
No one in Weybridge could tell us where the headquarters were
established; the whole place was in such confusion as I had never seen
in any town before. Carts, carriages everywhere, the most astonishing
miscellany of conveyances and horseflesh. The respectable inhabitants
of the place, men in golf and boating costumes, wives prettily dressed,
were packing, river-side loafers energetically helping, children
excited, and, for the most part, highly delighted at this astonishing
variation of their Sunday experiences. In the midst of it all the
worthy vicar was very pluckily holding an early celebration, and his
bell was jangling out above the excitement.
I and the artilleryman, seated on the step of the drinking fountain,
made a very passable meal upon what we had brought with us. Patrols of
soldiers—here no longer hussars, but grenadiers in white—were warning
people to move now or to take refuge in their cellars as soon as the
firing began. We saw as we crossed the railway bridge that a growing
crowd of people had assembled in and about the railway station, and the
swarming platform was piled with boxes and packages. The ordinary
traffic had been stopped, I believe, in order to allow of the passage
of troops and guns to Chertsey, and I have heard since that a savage
struggle occurred for places in the special trains that were put on at
a later hour.
We remained at Weybridge until midday, and at that hour we found
ourselves at the place near Shepperton Lock where the Wey and Thames
join. Part of the time we spent helping two old women to pack a little
cart. The Wey has a treble mouth, and at this point boats are to be
hired, and there was a ferry across the river. On the Shepperton side
was an inn with a lawn, and beyond that the tower of Shepperton
Church—it has been replaced by a spire—rose above the trees.
Here we found an excited and noisy crowd of fugitives. As yet the
flight had not grown to a panic, but there were already far more people
than all the boats going to and fro could enable to cross. People came
panting along under heavy burdens; one husband and wife were even
carrying a small outhouse door between them, with some of their
household goods piled thereon. One man told us he meant to try to get
away from Shepperton station.
There was a lot of shouting, and one man was even jesting. The idea
people seemed to have here was that the Martians were simply formidable
human beings, who might attack and sack the town, to be certainly
destroyed in the end. Every now and then people would glance nervously
across the Wey, at the meadows towards Chertsey, but everything over
there was still.
Across the Thames, except just where the boats landed, everything was
quiet, in vivid contrast with the Surrey side. The people who landed
there from the boats went tramping off down the lane. The big ferryboat
had just made a journey. Three or four soldiers stood on the lawn of
the inn, staring and jesting at the fugitives, without offering to
help. The inn was closed, as it was now within prohibited hours.
“What’s that?” cried a boatman, and “Shut up, you fool!” said a man
near me to a yelping dog. Then the sound came again, this time from the
direction of Chertsey, a muffled thud—the sound of a gun.
The fighting was beginning. Almost immediately unseen batteries across
the river to our right, unseen because of the trees, took up the
chorus, firing heavily one after the other. A woman screamed. Everyone
stood arrested by the sudden stir of battle, near us and yet invisible
to us. Nothing was to be seen save flat meadows, cows feeding
unconcernedly for the most part, and silvery pollard willows motionless
in the warm sunlight.
“The sojers’ll stop ’em,” said a woman beside me, doubtfully. A
haziness rose over the treetops.
Then suddenly we saw a rush of smoke far away up the river, a puff of
smoke that jerked up into the air and hung; and forthwith the ground
heaved under foot and a heavy explosion shook the air, smashing two or
three windows in the houses near, and leaving us astonished.
“Here they are!” shouted a man in a blue jersey. “Yonder! D’yer see
them? Yonder!”
Quickly, one after the other, one, two, three, four of the armoured
Martians appeared, far away over the little trees, across the flat
meadows that stretched towards Chertsey, and striding hurriedly towards
the river. Little cowled figures they seemed at first, going with a
rolling motion and as fast as flying birds.
Then, advancing obliquely towards us, came a fifth. Their armoured
bodies glittered in the sun as they swept swiftly forward upon the
guns, growing rapidly larger as they drew nearer. One on the extreme
left, the remotest that is, flourished a huge case high in the air, and
the ghostly, terrible Heat-Ray I had already seen on Friday night smote
towards Chertsey, and struck the town.
At sight of these strange, swift, and terrible creatures the crowd near
the water’s edge seemed to me to be for a moment horror-struck. There
was no screaming or shouting, but a silence. Then a hoarse murmur and a
movement of feet—a splashing from the water. A man, too frightened to
drop the portmanteau he carried on his shoulder, swung round and sent
me staggering with a blow from the corner of his burden. A woman thrust
at me with her hand and rushed past me. I turned with the rush of the
people, but I was not too terrified for thought. The terrible Heat-Ray
was in my mind. To get under water! That was it!
“Get under water!” I shouted, unheeded.
I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching Martian, rushed
right down the gravelly beach and headlong into the water. Others did
the same. A boatload of people putting back came leaping out as I
rushed past. The stones under my feet were muddy and slippery, and the
river was so low that I ran perhaps twenty feet scarcely waist-deep.
Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely a couple of hundred
yards away, I flung myself forward under the surface. The splashes of
the people in the boats leaping into the river sounded like
thunderclaps in my ears. People were landing hastily on both sides of
the river. But the Martian machine took no more notice for the moment
of the people running this way and that than a man would of the
confusion of ants in a nest against which his foot has kicked. When,
half suffocated, I raised my head above water, the Martian’s hood
pointed at the batteries that were still firing across the river, and
as it advanced it swung loose what must have been the generator of the
Heat-Ray.
In another moment it was on the bank, and in a stride wading halfway
across. The knees of its foremost legs bent at the farther bank, and in
another moment it had raised itself to its full height again, close to
the village of Shepperton. Forthwith the six guns which, unknown to
anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the outskirts of that
village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near concussion, the last
close upon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was already
raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the first shell burst six
yards above the hood.
I gave a cry of astonishment. I saw and thought nothing of the other
four Martian monsters; my attention was riveted upon the nearer
incident. Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the
body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to
dodge, the fourth shell.
The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged,
flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh and
glittering metal.
“Hit!” shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.
I heard answering shouts from the people in the water about me. I could
have leaped out of the water with that momentary exultation.
The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did not
fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer
heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now
rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living
intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to
the four winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate
device of metal whirling to destruction. It drove along in a straight
line, incapable of guidance. It struck the tower of Shepperton Church,
smashing it down as the impact of a battering ram might have done,
swerved aside, blundered on and collapsed with tremendous force into
the river out of my sight.
A violent explosion shook the air, and a spout of water, steam, mud,
and shattered metal shot far up into the sky. As the camera of the
Heat-Ray hit the water, the latter had immediately flashed into steam.
In another moment a huge wave, like a muddy tidal bore but almost
scaldingly hot, came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw people
struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and shouting faintly
above the seething and roar of the Martian’s collapse.
For a moment I heeded nothing of the heat, forgot the patent need of
self-preservation. I splashed through the tumultuous water, pushing
aside a man in black to do so, until I could see round the bend. Half a
dozen deserted boats pitched aimlessly upon the confusion of the waves.
The fallen Martian came into sight downstream, lying across the river,
and for the most part submerged.
Thick clouds of steam were pouring off the wreckage, and through the
tumultuously whirling wisps I could see, intermittently and vaguely,
the gigantic limbs churning the water and flinging a splash and spray
of mud and froth into the air. The tentacles swayed and struck like
living arms, and, save for the helpless purposelessness of these
movements, it was as if some wounded thing were struggling for its life
amid the waves. Enormous quantities of a ruddy-brown fluid were
spurting up in noisy jets out of the machine.
My attention was diverted from this death flurry by a furious yelling,
like that of the thing called a siren in our manufacturing towns. A
man, knee-deep near the towing path, shouted inaudibly to me and
pointed. Looking back, I saw the other Martians advancing with gigantic
strides down the riverbank from the direction of Chertsey. The
Shepperton guns spoke this time unavailingly.
At that I ducked at once under water, and, holding my breath until
movement was an agony, blundered painfully ahead under the surface as
long as I could. The water was in a tumult about me, and rapidly
growing hotter.
When for a moment I raised my head to take breath and throw the hair
and water from my eyes, the steam was rising in a whirling white fog
that at first hid the Martians altogether. The noise was deafening.
Then I saw them dimly, colossal figures of grey, magnified by the mist.
They had passed by me, and two were stooping over the frothing,
tumultuous ruins of their comrade.
The third and fourth stood beside him in the water, one perhaps two
hundred yards from me, the other towards Laleham. The generators of the
Heat-Rays waved high, and the hissing beams smote down this way and
that.
The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing conflict of
noises—the clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of falling houses,
the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into flame, and the crackling
and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up to mingle with
the steam from the river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and fro over
Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent white, that
gave place at once to a smoky dance of lurid flames. The nearer houses
still stood intact, awaiting their fate, shadowy, faint and pallid in
the steam, with the fire behind them going to and fro.
For a moment perhaps I stood there, breast-high in the almost boiling
water, dumbfounded at my position, hopeless of escape. Through the reek
I could see the people who had been with me in the river scrambling out
of the water through the reeds, like little frogs hurrying through
grass from the advance of a man, or running to and fro in utter dismay
on the towing path.
Then suddenly the white flashes of the Heat-Ray came leaping towards
me. The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and darted out
flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar. The Ray flickered up and
down the towing path, licking off the people who ran this way and that,
and came down to the water’s edge not fifty yards from where I stood.
It swept across the river to Shepperton, and the water in its track
rose in a boiling weal crested with steam. I turned shoreward.
In another moment the huge wave, well-nigh at the boiling-point had
rushed upon me. I screamed aloud, and scalded, half blinded, agonised,
I staggered through the leaping, hissing water towards the shore. Had
my foot stumbled, it would have been the end. I fell helplessly, in
full sight of the Martians, upon the broad, bare gravelly spit that
runs down to mark the angle of the Wey and Thames. I expected nothing
but death.
I have a dim memory of the foot of a Martian coming down within a score
of yards of my head, driving straight into the loose gravel, whirling
it this way and that and lifting again; of a long suspense, and then of
the four carrying the debris of their comrade between them, now clear
and then presently faint through a veil of smoke, receding
interminably, as it seemed to me, across a vast space of river and
meadow. And then, very slowly, I realised that by a miracle I had
escaped.
XIII.
HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CURATE.
After getting this sudden lesson in the power of terrestrial weapons,
the Martians retreated to their original position upon Horsell Common;
and in their haste, and encumbered with the debris of their smashed
companion, they no doubt overlooked many such a stray and negligible
victim as myself. Had they left their comrade and pushed on forthwith,
there was nothing at that time between them and London but batteries of
twelve-pounder guns, and they would certainly have reached the capital
in advance of the tidings of their approach; as sudden, dreadful, and
destructive their advent would have been as the earthquake that
destroyed Lisbon a century ago.
But they were in no hurry. Cylinder followed cylinder on its
interplanetary flight; every twenty-four hours brought them
reinforcement. And meanwhile the military and naval authorities, now
fully alive to the tremendous power of their antagonists, worked with
furious energy. Every minute a fresh gun came into position until,
before twilight, every copse, every row of suburban villas on the hilly
slopes about Kingston and Richmond, masked an expectant black muzzle.
And through the charred and desolated area—perhaps twenty square miles
altogether—that encircled the Martian encampment on Horsell Common,
through charred and ruined villages among the green trees, through the
blackened and smoking arcades that had been but a day ago pine
spinneys, crawled the devoted scouts with the heliographs that were
presently to warn the gunners of the Martian approach. But the Martians
now understood our command of artillery and the danger of human
proximity, and not a man ventured within a mile of either cylinder,
save at the price of his life.
It would seem that these giants spent the earlier part of the afternoon
in going to and fro, transferring everything from the second and third
cylinders—the second in Addlestone Golf Links and the third at
Pyrford—to their original pit on Horsell Common. Over that, above the
blackened heather and ruined buildings that stretched far and wide,
stood one as sentinel, while the rest abandoned their vast
fighting-machines and descended into the pit. They were hard at work
there far into the night, and the towering pillar of dense green smoke
that rose therefrom could be seen from the hills about Merrow, and
even, it is said, from Banstead and Epsom Downs.
And while the Martians behind me were thus preparing for their next
sally, and in front of me Humanity gathered for the battle, I made my
way with infinite pains and labour from the fire and smoke of burning
Weybridge towards London.
I saw an abandoned boat, very small and remote, drifting down-stream;
and throwing off the most of my sodden clothes, I went after it, gained
it, and so escaped out of that destruction. There were no oars in the
boat, but I contrived to paddle, as well as my parboiled hands would
allow, down the river towards Halliford and Walton, going very
tediously and continually looking behind me, as you may well
understand. I followed the river, because I considered that the water
gave me my best chance of escape should these giants return.
The hot water from the Martian’s overthrow drifted downstream with me,
so that for the best part of a mile I could see little of either bank.
Once, however, I made out a string of black figures hurrying across the
meadows from the direction of Weybridge. Halliford, it seemed, was
deserted, and several of the houses facing the river were on fire. It
was strange to see the place quite tranquil, quite desolate under the
hot blue sky, with the smoke and little threads of flame going straight
up into the heat of the afternoon. Never before had I seen houses
burning without the accompaniment of an obstructive crowd. A little
farther on the dry reeds up the bank were smoking and glowing, and a
line of fire inland was marching steadily across a late field of hay.
For a long time I drifted, so painful and weary was I after the
violence I had been through, and so intense the heat upon the water.
Then my fears got the better of me again, and I resumed my paddling.
The sun scorched my bare back. At last, as the bridge at Walton was
coming into sight round the bend, my fever and faintness overcame my
fears, and I landed on the Middlesex bank and lay down, deadly sick,
amid the long grass. I suppose the time was then about four or five
o’clock. I got up presently, walked perhaps half a mile without meeting
a soul, and then lay down again in the shadow of a hedge. I seem to
remember talking, wanderingly, to myself during that last spurt. I was
also very thirsty, and bitterly regretful I had drunk no more water. It
is a curious thing that I felt angry with my wife; I cannot account for
it, but my impotent desire to reach Leatherhead worried me excessively.
I do not clearly remember the arrival of the curate, so that probably I
dozed. I became aware of him as a seated figure in soot-smudged shirt
sleeves, and with his upturned, clean-shaven face staring at a faint
flickering that danced over the sky. The sky was what is called a
mackerel sky—rows and rows of faint down-plumes of cloud, just tinted
with the midsummer sunset.