I stared at him and made no answer.

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

“Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning

service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for

the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom

and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work—— What are these

Martians?”

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

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

perhaps, he stared silently.

“I was walking through the roads to clear my brain,” he said. “And

suddenly—fire, earthquake, death!”

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

Presently he began waving his hand.

“All the work—all the Sunday schools—What have we done—what has

Weybridge done? Everything gone—everything destroyed. The church! We

rebuilt it only three years ago. Gone! Swept out of existence! Why?”

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

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

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

Weybridge.

By this time I was beginning to take his measure. The tremendous

tragedy in which he had been involved—it was evident he was a fugitive

from Weybridge—had driven him to the very verge of his reason.

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

“What are we to do?” he asked. “Are these creatures everywhere? Has the

earth been given over to them?”

“Are we far from Sunbury?”

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

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

is still hope.”

“Hope!”

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

I began to explain my view of our position. He listened at first, but

as I went on the interest dawning in his eyes gave place to their

former stare, and his regard wandered from me.

“This must be the beginning of the end,” he said, interrupting me. “The

end! The great and terrible day of the Lord! When men shall call upon

the mountains and the rocks to fall upon them and hide them—hide them

from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne!”

I began to understand the position. I ceased my laboured reasoning,

struggled to my feet, and, standing over him, laid my hand on his

shoulder.

“Be a man!” said I. “You are scared out of your wits! What good is

religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and

floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God

had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.”

For a time he sat in blank silence.

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

they are pitiless.”

“Neither the one nor, perhaps, the other,” I answered. “And the

mightier they are the more sane and wary should we be. One of them was

killed yonder not three hours ago.”

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

killed?”

“I saw it happen.” I proceeded to tell him. “We have chanced to come in

for the thick of it,” said I, “and that is all.”

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

I told him it was the heliograph signalling—that it was the sign of

human help and effort in the sky.

“We are in the midst of it,” I said, “quiet as it is. That flicker in

the sky tells of the gathering storm. Yonder, I take it are the

Martians, and Londonward, where those hills rise about Richmond and

Kingston and the trees give cover, earthworks are being thrown up and

guns are being placed. Presently the Martians will be coming this way

again.”

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

“Listen!” he said.

From beyond the low hills across the water came the dull resonance of

distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A

cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the west

the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and

Shepperton and the hot, still splendour of the sunset.

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

XIV.

IN LONDON.

My younger brother was in London when the Martians fell at Woking. He

was a medical student working for an imminent examination, and he heard

nothing of the arrival until Saturday morning. The morning papers on

Saturday contained, in addition to lengthy special articles on the

planet Mars, on life in the planets, and so forth, a brief and vaguely

worded telegram, all the more striking for its brevity.

The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd, had killed a number

of people with a quick-firing gun, so the story ran. The telegram

concluded with the words: “Formidable as they seem to be, the Martians

have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen, and, indeed,

seem incapable of doing so. Probably this is due to the relative

strength of the earth’s gravitational energy.” On that last text their

leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.

Of course all the students in the crammer’s biology class, to which my

brother went that day, were intensely interested, but there were no

signs of any unusual excitement in the streets. The afternoon papers

puffed scraps of news under big headlines. They had nothing to tell

beyond the movements of troops about the common, and the burning of the

pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, until eight. Then the _St.

James’s Gazette_, in an extra-special edition, announced the bare fact

of the interruption of telegraphic communication. This was thought to

be due to the falling of burning pine trees across the line. Nothing

more of the fighting was known that night, the night of my drive to

Leatherhead and back.

My brother felt no anxiety about us, as he knew from the description in

the papers that the cylinder was a good two miles from my house. He

made up his mind to run down that night to me, in order, as he says, to

see the Things before they were killed. He dispatched a telegram, which

never reached me, about four o’clock, and spent the evening at a music

hall.

In London, also, on Saturday night there was a thunderstorm, and my

brother reached Waterloo in a cab. On the platform from which the

midnight train usually starts he learned, after some waiting, that an

accident prevented trains from reaching Woking that night. The nature

of the accident he could not ascertain; indeed, the railway authorities

did not clearly know at that time. There was very little excitement in

the station, as the officials, failing to realise that anything further

than a breakdown between Byfleet and Woking junction had occurred, were

running the theatre trains which usually passed through Woking round by

Virginia Water or Guildford. They were busy making the necessary

arrangements to alter the route of the Southampton and Portsmouth

Sunday League excursions. A nocturnal newspaper reporter, mistaking my

brother for the traffic manager, to whom he bears a slight resemblance,

waylaid and tried to interview him. Few people, excepting the railway

officials, connected the breakdown with the Martians.

I have read, in another account of these events, that on Sunday morning

“all London was electrified by the news from Woking.” As a matter of

fact, there was nothing to justify that very extravagant phrase. Plenty

of Londoners did not hear of the Martians until the panic of Monday

morning. Those who did took some time to realise all that the hastily

worded telegrams in the Sunday papers conveyed. The majority of people

in London do not read Sunday papers.

The habit of personal security, moreover, is so deeply fixed in the

Londoner’s mind, and startling intelligence so much a matter of course

in the papers, that they could read without any personal tremors:

“About seven o’clock last night the Martians came out of the cylinder,

and, moving about under an armour of metallic shields, have completely

wrecked Woking station with the adjacent houses, and massacred an

entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment. No details are known. Maxims

have been absolutely useless against their armour; the field guns have

been disabled by them. Flying hussars have been galloping into

Chertsey. The Martians appear to be moving slowly towards Chertsey or

Windsor. Great anxiety prevails in West Surrey, and earthworks are

being thrown up to check the advance Londonward.” That was how the

_Sunday Sun_ put it, and a clever and remarkably prompt “handbook”

article in the _Referee_ compared the affair to a menagerie suddenly

let loose in a village.

No one in London knew positively of the nature of the armoured

Martians, and there was still a fixed idea that these monsters must be

sluggish: “crawling,” “creeping painfully”—such expressions occurred in

almost all the earlier reports. None of the telegrams could have been

written by an eyewitness of their advance. The Sunday papers printed

separate editions as further news came to hand, some even in default of

it. But there was practically nothing more to tell people until late in

the afternoon, when the authorities gave the press agencies the news in

their possession. It was stated that the people of Walton and

Weybridge, and all the district were pouring along the roads

Londonward, and that was all.

My brother went to church at the Foundling Hospital in the morning,

still in ignorance of what had happened on the previous night. There he

heard allusions made to the invasion, and a special prayer for peace.

Coming out, he bought a _Referee_. He became alarmed at the news in

this, and went again to Waterloo station to find out if communication

were restored. The omnibuses, carriages, cyclists, and innumerable

people walking in their best clothes seemed scarcely affected by the

strange intelligence that the newsvendors were disseminating. People

were interested, or, if alarmed, alarmed only on account of the local

residents. At the station he heard for the first time that the Windsor

and Chertsey lines were now interrupted. The porters told him that

several remarkable telegrams had been received in the morning from

Byfleet and Chertsey stations, but that these had abruptly ceased. My

brother could get very little precise detail out of them.

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

information.

The train service was now very much disorganised. Quite a number of

people who had been expecting friends from places on the South-Western

network were standing about the station. One grey-headed old gentleman

came and abused the South-Western Company bitterly to my brother. “It

wants showing up,” he said.

One or two trains came in from Richmond, Putney, and Kingston,

containing people who had gone out for a day’s boating and found the

locks closed and a feeling of panic in the air. A man in a blue and

white blazer addressed my brother, full of strange tidings.

“There’s hosts of people driving into Kingston in traps and carts and

things, with boxes of valuables and all that,” he said. “They come from

Molesey and Weybridge and Walton, and they say there’s been guns heard

at Chertsey, heavy firing, and that mounted soldiers have told them to

get off at once because the Martians are coming. We heard guns firing

at Hampton Court station, but we thought it was thunder. What the

dickens does it all mean? The Martians can’t get out of their pit, can

they?”

My brother could not tell him.

Afterwards he found that the vague feeling of alarm had spread to the

clients of the underground railway, and that the Sunday excursionists

began to return from all over the South-Western “lung”—Barnes,

Wimbledon, Richmond Park, Kew, and so forth—at unnaturally early hours;

but not a soul had anything more than vague hearsay to tell of.

Everyone connected with the terminus seemed ill-tempered.

About five o’clock the gathering crowd in the station was immensely

excited by the opening of the line of communication, which is almost

invariably closed, between the South-Eastern and the South-Western

stations, and the passage of carriage trucks bearing huge guns and

carriages crammed with soldiers. These were the guns that were brought

up from Woolwich and Chatham to cover Kingston. There was an exchange

of pleasantries: “You’ll get eaten!” “We’re the beast-tamers!” and so

forth. A little while after that a squad of police came into the

station and began to clear the public off the platforms, and my brother

went out into the street again.

The church bells were ringing for evensong, and a squad of Salvation

Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road. On the bridge a number of

loafers were watching a curious brown scum that came drifting down the

stream in patches. The sun was just setting, and the Clock Tower and

the Houses of Parliament rose against one of the most peaceful skies it

is possible to imagine, a sky of gold, barred with long transverse

stripes of reddish-purple cloud. There was talk of a floating body. One

of the men there, a reservist he said he was, told my brother he had

seen the heliograph flickering in the west.

In Wellington Street my brother met a couple of sturdy roughs who had

just been rushed out of Fleet Street with still-wet newspapers and

staring placards. “Dreadful catastrophe!” they bawled one to the other

down Wellington Street. “Fighting at Weybridge! Full description!

Repulse of the Martians! London in Danger!” He had to give threepence

for a copy of that paper.

Then it was, and then only, that he realised something of the full

power and terror of these monsters. He learned that they were not

merely a handful of small sluggish creatures, but that they were minds

swaying vast mechanical bodies; and that they could move swiftly and

smite with such power that even the mightiest guns could not stand

against them.

They were described as “vast spiderlike machines, nearly a hundred feet

high, capable of the speed of an express train, and able to shoot out a

beam of intense heat.” Masked batteries, chiefly of field guns, had

been planted in the country about Horsell Common, and especially

between the Woking district and London. Five of the machines had been

seen moving towards the Thames, and one, by a happy chance, had been

destroyed. In the other cases the shells had missed, and the batteries

had been at once annihilated by the Heat-Rays. Heavy losses of soldiers

were mentioned, but the tone of the dispatch was optimistic.

The Martians had been repulsed; they were not invulnerable. They had

retreated to their triangle of cylinders again, in the circle about

Woking. Signallers with heliographs were pushing forward upon them from

all sides. Guns were in rapid transit from Windsor, Portsmouth,

Aldershot, Woolwich—even from the north; among others, long wire-guns

of ninety-five tons from Woolwich. Altogether one hundred and sixteen

were in position or being hastily placed, chiefly covering London.

Never before in England had there been such a vast or rapid

concentration of military material.

Any further cylinders that fell, it was hoped, could be destroyed at

once by high explosives, which were being rapidly manufactured and

distributed. No doubt, ran the report, the situation was of the

strangest and gravest description, but the public was exhorted to avoid

and discourage panic. No doubt the Martians were strange and terrible

in the extreme, but at the outside there could not be more than twenty

of them against our millions.

The authorities had reason to suppose, from the size of the cylinders,

that at the outside there could not be more than five in each

cylinder—fifteen altogether. And one at least was disposed of—perhaps

more. The public would be fairly warned of the approach of danger, and

elaborate measures were being taken for the protection of the people in

the threatened southwestern suburbs. And so, with reiterated assurances

of the safety of London and the ability of the authorities to cope with

the difficulty, this quasi-proclamation closed.

This was printed in enormous type on paper so fresh that it was still

wet, and there had been no time to add a word of comment. It was

curious, my brother said, to see how ruthlessly the usual contents of

the paper had been hacked and taken out to give this place.

All down Wellington Street people could be seen fluttering out the pink

sheets and reading, and the Strand was suddenly noisy with the voices

of an army of hawkers following these pioneers. Men came scrambling off

buses to secure copies. Certainly this news excited people intensely,

whatever their previous apathy. The shutters of a map shop in the

Strand were being taken down, my brother said, and a man in his Sunday

raiment, lemon-yellow gloves even, was visible inside the window

hastily fastening maps of Surrey to the glass.

Going on along the Strand to Trafalgar Square, the paper in his hand,

my brother saw some of the fugitives from West Surrey. There was a man

with his wife and two boys and some articles of furniture in a cart

such as greengrocers use. He was driving from the direction of

Westminster Bridge; and close behind him came a hay waggon with five or

six respectable-looking people in it, and some boxes and bundles. The

faces of these people were haggard, and their entire appearance

contrasted conspicuously with the Sabbath-best appearance of the people

on the omnibuses. People in fashionable clothing peeped at them out of

cabs. They stopped at the Square as if undecided which way to take, and

finally turned eastward along the Strand. Some way behind these came a

man in workday clothes, riding one of those old-fashioned tricycles

with a small front wheel. He was dirty and white in the face.

My brother turned down towards Victoria, and met a number of such

people. He had a vague idea that he might see something of me. He

noticed an unusual number of police regulating the traffic. Some of the

refugees were exchanging news with the people on the omnibuses. One was

professing to have seen the Martians. “Boilers on stilts, I tell you,

striding along like men.” Most of them were excited and animated by

their strange experience.

Beyond Victoria the public-houses were doing a lively trade with these

arrivals. At all the street corners groups of people were reading

papers, talking excitedly, or staring at these unusual Sunday visitors.

They seemed to increase as night drew on, until at last the roads, my

brother said, were like Epsom High Street on a Derby Day. My brother

addressed several of these fugitives and got unsatisfactory answers

from most.

None of them could tell him any news of Woking except one man, who

assured him that Woking had been entirely destroyed on the previous

night.

“I come from Byfleet,” he said; “a man on a bicycle came through the

place in the early morning, and ran from door to door warning us to

come away. Then came soldiers. We went out to look, and there were

clouds of smoke to the south—nothing but smoke, and not a soul coming

that way. Then we heard the guns at Chertsey, and folks coming from

Weybridge. So I’ve locked up my house and come on.”

At that time there was a strong feeling in the streets that the

authorities were to blame for their incapacity to dispose of the

invaders without all this inconvenience.

About eight o’clock a noise of heavy firing was distinctly audible all

over the south of London. My brother could not hear it for the traffic

in the main thoroughfares, but by striking through the quiet back

streets to the river he was able to distinguish it quite plainly.

He walked from Westminster to his apartments near Regent’s Park, about

two. He was now very anxious on my account, and disturbed at the

evident magnitude of the trouble. His mind was inclined to run, even as

mine had run on Saturday, on military details. He thought of all those

silent, expectant guns, of the suddenly nomadic countryside; he tried

to imagine “boilers on stilts” a hundred feet high.

There were one or two cartloads of refugees passing along Oxford

Street, and several in the Marylebone Road, but so slowly was the news

spreading that Regent Street and Portland Place were full of their

usual Sunday-night promenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and along

the edge of Regent’s Park there were as many silent couples “walking

out” together under the scattered gas lamps as ever there had been. The

night was warm and still, and a little oppressive; the sound of guns

continued intermittently, and after midnight there seemed to be sheet

lightning in the south.

He read and re-read the paper, fearing the worst had happened to me. He

was restless, and after supper prowled out again aimlessly. He returned

and tried in vain to divert his attention to his examination notes. He

went to bed a little after midnight, and was awakened from lurid dreams

in the small hours of Monday by the sound of door knockers, feet

running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour of bells. Red

reflections danced on the ceiling. For a moment he lay astonished,

wondering whether day had come or the world gone mad. Then he jumped

out of bed and ran to the window.

His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up and down the

street there were a dozen echoes to the noise of his window sash, and

heads in every kind of night disarray appeared. Enquiries were being

shouted. “They are coming!” bawled a policeman, hammering at the door;

“the Martians are coming!” and hurried to the next door.

The sound of drumming and trumpeting came from the Albany Street

Barracks, and every church within earshot was hard at work killing

sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin. There was a noise of doors

opening, and window after window in the houses opposite flashed from

darkness into yellow illumination.

Up the street came galloping a closed carriage, bursting abruptly into

noise at the corner, rising to a clattering climax under the window,

and dying away slowly in the distance. Close on the rear of this came a

couple of cabs, the forerunners of a long procession of flying

vehicles, going for the most part to Chalk Farm station, where the

North-Western special trains were loading up, instead of coming down

the gradient into Euston.

For a long time my brother stared out of the window in blank

astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after door, and

delivering their incomprehensible message. Then the door behind him

opened, and the man who lodged across the landing came in, dressed only

in shirt, trousers, and slippers, his braces loose about his waist, his

hair disordered from his pillow.

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

They both craned their heads out of the window, straining to hear what

the policemen were shouting. People were coming out of the side

streets, and standing in groups at the corners talking.

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

My brother answered him vaguely and began to dress, running with each

garment to the window in order to miss nothing of the growing

excitement. And presently men selling unnaturally early newspapers came

bawling into the street:

“London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond defences

forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!”

And all about him—in the rooms below, in the houses on each side and

across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the hundred

other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the Westbourne Park

district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kilburn and St.

John’s Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and Highbury and

Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the vastness of London

from Ealing to East Ham—people were rubbing their eyes, and opening

windows to stare out and ask aimless questions, dressing hastily as the

first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It

was the dawn of the great panic. London, which had gone to bed on

Sunday night oblivious and inert, was awakened, in the small hours of

Monday morning, to a vivid sense of danger.

Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother went

down and out into the street, just as the sky between the parapets of

the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying people on foot and

in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. “Black Smoke!” he heard

people crying, and again “Black Smoke!” The contagion of such a

unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on the

door-step, he saw another newsvendor approaching, and got a paper

forthwith. The man was running away with the rest, and selling his

papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and

panic.

And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic dispatch of the

Commander-in-Chief:

“The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a black and

poisonous vapour by means of rockets. They have smothered our

batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are

advancing slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way. It

is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Black Smoke but

in instant flight.”

That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the great

six-million city was stirring, slipping, running; presently it would be

pouring _en masse_ northward.

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

The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, a cart

carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks and curses, against the water

trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights went to and fro in the

houses, and some of the passing cabs flaunted unextinguished lamps. And

overhead the dawn was growing brighter, clear and steady and calm.

He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down

stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in

dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed, ejaculating.

As my brother began to realise the import of all these things, he

turned hastily to his own room, put all his available money—some ten

pounds altogether—into his pockets, and went out again into the

streets.

XV.

WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY.

It was while the curate had sat and talked so wildly to me under the

hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford, and while my brother was

watching the fugitives stream over Westminster Bridge, that the

Martians had resumed the offensive. So far as one can ascertain from

the conflicting accounts that have been put forth, the majority of them

remained busied with preparations in the Horsell pit until nine that

night, hurrying on some operation that disengaged huge volumes of green

smoke.

But three certainly came out about eight o’clock and, advancing slowly

and cautiously, made their way through Byfleet and Pyrford towards

Ripley and Weybridge, and so came in sight of the expectant batteries

against the setting sun. These Martians did not advance in a body, but

in a line, each perhaps a mile and a half from his nearest fellow. They

communicated with one another by means of sirenlike howls, running up

and down the scale from one note to another.

It was this howling and firing of the guns at Ripley and St. George’s

Hill that we had heard at Upper Halliford. The Ripley gunners,

unseasoned artillery volunteers who ought never to have been placed in

such a position, fired one wild, premature, ineffectual volley, and

bolted on horse and foot through the deserted village, while the

Martian, without using his Heat-Ray, walked serenely over their guns,

stepped gingerly among them, passed in front of them, and so came

unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, which he destroyed.

The St. George’s Hill men, however, were better led or of a better

mettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they were, they seem to have been

quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to them. They laid their guns

as deliberately as if they had been on parade, and fired at about a

thousand yards’ range.

The shells flashed all round him, and he was seen to advance a few

paces, stagger, and go down. Everybody yelled together, and the guns

were reloaded in frantic haste. The overthrown Martian set up a

prolonged ululation, and immediately a second glittering giant,

answering him, appeared over the trees to the south. It would seem that

a leg of the tripod had been smashed by one of the shells. The whole of

the second volley flew wide of the Martian on the ground, and,

simultaneously, both his companions brought their Heat-Rays to bear on

the battery. The ammunition blew up, the pine trees all about the guns

flashed into fire, and only one or two of the men who were already

running over the crest of the hill escaped.

After this it would seem that the three took counsel together and

halted, and the scouts who were watching them report that they remained

absolutely stationary for the next half hour. The Martian who had been

overthrown crawled tediously out of his hood, a small brown figure,

oddly suggestive from that distance of a speck of blight, and

apparently engaged in the repair of his support. About nine he had

finished, for his cowl was then seen above the trees again.

It was a few minutes past nine that night when these three sentinels

were joined by four other Martians, each carrying a thick black tube. A

similar tube was handed to each of the three, and the seven proceeded

to distribute themselves at equal distances along a curved line between

St. George’s Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of

Ripley.

A dozen rockets sprang out of the hills before them so soon as they

began to move, and warned the waiting batteries about Ditton and Esher.

At the same time four of their fighting machines, similarly armed with

tubes, crossed the river, and two of them, black against the western

sky, came into sight of myself and the curate as we hurried wearily and

painfully along the road that runs northward out of Halliford. They

moved, as it seemed to us, upon a cloud, for a milky mist covered the

fields and rose to a third of their height.

At this sight the curate cried faintly in his throat, and began

running; but I knew it was no good running from a Martian, and I turned

aside and crawled through dewy nettles and brambles into the broad

ditch by the side of the road. He looked back, saw what I was doing,

and turned to join me.

The two halted, the nearer to us standing and facing Sunbury, the

remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the evening star, away

towards Staines.

The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took up their

positions in the huge crescent about their cylinders in absolute

silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never

since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still.

To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the

same effect—the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling

night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the stars, the afterglow

of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St. George’s Hill and the

woods of Painshill.

But facing that crescent everywhere—at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton,

Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and across

the flat grass meadows to the north of it, wherever a cluster of trees

or village houses gave sufficient cover—the guns were waiting. The

signal rockets burst and rained their sparks through the night and

vanished, and the spirit of all those watching batteries rose to a

tense expectation. The Martians had but to advance into the line of

fire, and instantly those motionless black forms of men, those guns

glittering so darkly in the early night, would explode into a

thunderous fury of battle.

No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant

minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle—how much they

understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions were

organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret our

spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady

investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of

onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might

exterminate us? (At that time no one knew what food they needed.) A

hundred such questions struggled together in my mind as I watched that

vast sentinel shape. And in the back of my mind was the sense of all

the huge unknown and hidden forces Londonward. Had they prepared

pitfalls? Were the powder mills at Hounslow ready as a snare? Would the

Londoners have the heart and courage to make a greater Moscow of their

mighty province of houses?

Then, after an interminable time, as it seemed to us, crouching and

peering through the hedge, came a sound like the distant concussion of

a gun. Another nearer, and then another. And then the Martian beside us

raised his tube on high and discharged it, gunwise, with a heavy report

that made the ground heave. The one towards Staines answered him. There

was no flash, no smoke, simply that loaded detonation.

I was so excited by these heavy minute-guns following one another that

I so far forgot my personal safety and my scalded hands as to clamber

up into the hedge and stare towards Sunbury. As I did so a second

report followed, and a big projectile hurtled overhead towards

Hounslow. I expected at least to see smoke or fire, or some such

evidence of its work. But all I saw was the deep blue sky above, with

one solitary star, and the white mist spreading wide and low beneath.

And there had been no crash, no answering explosion. The silence was

restored; the minute lengthened to three.

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

“Heaven knows!” said I.

A bat flickered by and vanished. A distant tumult of shouting began and

ceased. I looked again at the Martian, and saw he was now moving

eastward along the riverbank, with a swift, rolling motion.

Every moment I expected the fire of some hidden battery to spring upon

him; but the evening calm was unbroken. The figure of the Martian grew

smaller as he receded, and presently the mist and the gathering night

had swallowed him up. By a common impulse we clambered higher. Towards

Sunbury was a dark appearance, as though a conical hill had suddenly

come into being there, hiding our view of the farther country; and

then, remoter across the river, over Walton, we saw another such

summit. These hill-like forms grew lower and broader even as we stared.

Moved by a sudden thought, I looked northward, and there I perceived a

third of these cloudy black kopjes had risen.

Everything had suddenly become very still. Far away to the southeast,

marking the quiet, we heard the Martians hooting to one another, and

then the air quivered again with the distant thud of their guns. But

the earthly artillery made no reply.

Now at the time we could not understand these things, but later I was

to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes that gathered in the

twilight. Each of the Martians, standing in the great crescent I have

described, had discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he carried, a

huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other

possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of him. Some fired only

one of these, some two—as in the case of the one we had seen; the one

at Ripley is said to have discharged no fewer than five at that time.

These canisters smashed on striking the ground—they did not explode—and

incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour,

coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous

hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country.

And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was

death to all that breathes.

It was heavy, this vapour, heavier than the densest smoke, so that,

after the first tumultuous uprush and outflow of its impact, it sank

down through the air and poured over the ground in a manner rather

liquid than gaseous, abandoning the hills, and streaming into the

valleys and ditches and watercourses even as I have heard the

carbonic-acid gas that pours from volcanic clefts is wont to do. And

where it came upon water some chemical action occurred, and the surface

would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank slowly and

made way for more. The scum was absolutely insoluble, and it is a

strange thing, seeing the instant effect of the gas, that one could

drink without hurt the water from which it had been strained. The

vapour did not diffuse as a true gas would do. It hung together in

banks, flowing sluggishly down the slope of the land and driving

reluctantly before the wind, and very slowly it combined with the mist

and moisture of the air, and sank to the earth in the form of dust.

Save that an unknown element giving a group of four lines in the blue

of the spectrum is concerned, we are still entirely ignorant of the

nature of this substance.

Once the tumultuous upheaval of its dispersion was over, the black

smoke clung so closely to the ground, even before its precipitation,

that fifty feet up in the air, on the roofs and upper stories of high

houses and on great trees, there was a chance of escaping its poison

altogether, as was proved even that night at Street Cobham and Ditton.

The man who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful story of the

strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he looked down from the church

spire and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts out of its

inky nothingness. For a day and a half he remained there, weary,

starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and against the

prospect of the distant hills a velvet-black expanse, with red roofs,

green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns,

outhouses, and walls, rising here and there into the sunlight.

But that was at Street Cobham, where the black vapour was allowed to

remain until it sank of its own accord into the ground. As a rule the

Martians, when it had served its purpose, cleared the air of it again

by wading into it and directing a jet of steam upon it.

This they did with the vapour banks near us, as we saw in the starlight

from the window of a deserted house at Upper Halliford, whither we had

returned. From there we could see the searchlights on Richmond Hill and

Kingston Hill going to and fro, and about eleven the windows rattled,

and we heard the sound of the huge siege guns that had been put in

position there. These continued intermittently for the space of a

quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the invisible Martians at

Hampton and Ditton, and then the pale beams of the electric light

vanished, and were replaced by a bright red glow.

Then the fourth cylinder fell—a brilliant green meteor—as I learned

afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the Richmond and

Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful cannonade far away in

the southwest, due, I believe, to guns being fired haphazard before the

black vapour could overwhelm the gunners.

So, setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out a wasps’

nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling vapour over the

Londonward country. The horns of the crescent slowly moved apart, until

at last they formed a line from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden. All night

through their destructive tubes advanced. Never once, after the Martian

at St. George’s Hill was brought down, did they give the artillery the

ghost of a chance against them. Wherever there was a possibility of

guns being laid for them unseen, a fresh canister of the black vapour

was discharged, and where the guns were openly displayed the Heat-Ray

was brought to bear.

By midnight the blazing trees along the slopes of Richmond Park and the

glare of Kingston Hill threw their light upon a network of black smoke,

blotting out the whole valley of the Thames and extending as far as the

eye could reach. And through this two Martians slowly waded, and turned

their hissing steam jets this way and that.

They were sparing of the Heat-Ray that night, either because they had

but a limited supply of material for its production or because they did

not wish to destroy the country but only to crush and overawe the

opposition they had aroused. In the latter aim they certainly

succeeded. Sunday night was the end of the organised opposition to

their movements. After that no body of men would stand against them, so

hopeless was the enterprise. Even the crews of the torpedo-boats and

destroyers that had brought their quick-firers up the Thames refused to

stop, mutinied, and went down again. The only offensive operation men

ventured upon after that night was the preparation of mines and

pitfalls, and even in that their energies were frantic and spasmodic.

One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those batteries

towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the twilight. Survivors there were

none. One may picture the orderly expectation, the officers alert and

watchful, the gunners ready, the ammunition piled to hand, the limber

gunners with their horses and waggons, the groups of civilian

spectators standing as near as they were permitted, the evening

stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents with the burned and

wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of the shots the

Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling over the trees and

houses and smashing amid the neighbouring fields.

One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly

spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong,

towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a

strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims,

men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling

headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking

and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque

cone of smoke. And then night and extinction—nothing but a silent mass

of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.

Before dawn the black vapour was pouring through the streets of

Richmond, and the disintegrating organism of government was, with a

last expiring effort, rousing the population of London to the necessity

of flight.

XVI.

THE EXODUS FROM LONDON.

So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the

greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning—the stream of

flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round

the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the

shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel

northward and eastward. By ten o’clock the police organisation, and by

midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing

shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that

swift liquefaction of the social body.

All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern people

at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and trains were

being filled. People were fighting savagely for standing-room in the

carriages even at two o’clock. By three, people were being trampled and

crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards or more

from Liverpool Street station; revolvers were fired, people stabbed,

and the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted

and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the people they were called

out to protect.

And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers refused to

return to London, the pressure of the flight drove the people in an

ever-thickening multitude away from the stations and along the

northward-running roads. By midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes,

and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thames and

across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the bridges in

its sluggish advance. Another bank drove over Ealing, and surrounded a

little island of survivors on Castle Hill, alive, but unable to escape.

After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North-Western train at Chalk

Farm—the engines of the trains that had loaded in the goods yard there

_ploughed_ through shrieking people, and a dozen stalwart men fought to

keep the crowd from crushing the driver against his furnace—my brother

emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across through a hurrying

swarm of vehicles, and had the luck to be foremost in the sack of a

cycle shop. The front tire of the machine he got was punctured in

dragging it through the window, but he got up and off, notwithstanding,

with no further injury than a cut wrist. The steep foot of Haverstock

Hill was impassable owing to several overturned horses, and my brother

struck into Belsize Road.

So he got out of the fury of the panic, and, skirting the Edgware Road,

reached Edgware about seven, fasting and wearied, but well ahead of the

crowd. Along the road people were standing in the roadway, curious,

wondering. He was passed by a number of cyclists, some horsemen, and

two motor cars. A mile from Edgware the rim of the wheel broke, and the

machine became unridable. He left it by the roadside and trudged

through the village. There were shops half opened in the main street of

the place, and people crowded on the pavement and in the doorways and

windows, staring astonished at this extraordinary procession of

fugitives that was beginning. He succeeded in getting some food at an

inn.

For a time he remained in Edgware not knowing what next to do. The

flying people increased in number. Many of them, like my brother,

seemed inclined to loiter in the place. There was no fresh news of the

invaders from Mars.

At that time the road was crowded, but as yet far from congested. Most

of the fugitives at that hour were mounted on cycles, but there were

soon motor cars, hansom cabs, and carriages hurrying along, and the

dust hung in heavy clouds along the road to St. Albans.

It was perhaps a vague idea of making his way to Chelmsford, where some

friends of his lived, that at last induced my brother to strike into a

quiet lane running eastward. Presently he came upon a stile, and,

crossing it, followed a footpath northeastward. He passed near several

farmhouses and some little places whose names he did not learn. He saw

few fugitives until, in a grass lane towards High Barnet, he happened

upon two ladies who became his fellow travellers. He came upon them

just in time to save them.

He heard their screams, and, hurrying round the corner, saw a couple of

men struggling to drag them out of the little pony-chaise in which they

had been driving, while a third with difficulty held the frightened

pony’s head. One of the ladies, a short woman dressed in white, was

simply screaming; the other, a dark, slender figure, slashed at the man

who gripped her arm with a whip she held in her disengaged hand.

My brother immediately grasped the situation, shouted, and hurried

towards the struggle. One of the men desisted and turned towards him,

and my brother, realising from his antagonist’s face that a fight was

unavoidable, and being an expert boxer, went into him forthwith and

sent him down against the wheel of the chaise.

It was no time for pugilistic chivalry and my brother laid him quiet

with a kick, and gripped the collar of the man who pulled at the

slender lady’s arm. He heard the clatter of hoofs, the whip stung

across his face, a third antagonist struck him between the eyes, and

the man he held wrenched himself free and made off down the lane in the

direction from which he had come.

Partly stunned, he found himself facing the man who had held the

horse’s head, and became aware of the chaise receding from him down the

lane, swaying from side to side, and with the women in it looking back.

The man before him, a burly rough, tried to close, and he stopped him

with a blow in the face. Then, realising that he was deserted, he

dodged round and made off down the lane after the chaise, with the

sturdy man close behind him, and the fugitive, who had turned now,

following remotely.

Suddenly he stumbled and fell; his immediate pursuer went headlong, and

he rose to his feet to find himself with a couple of antagonists again.

He would have had little chance against them had not the slender lady

very pluckily pulled up and returned to his help. It seems she had had

a revolver all this time, but it had been under the seat when she and

her companion were attacked. She fired at six yards’ distance, narrowly

missing my brother. The less courageous of the robbers made off, and

his companion followed him, cursing his cowardice. They both stopped in

sight down the lane, where the third man lay insensible.

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

revolver.

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

split lip.

She turned without a word—they were both panting—and they went back to

where the lady in white struggled to hold back the frightened pony.

The robbers had evidently had enough of it. When my brother looked

again they were retreating.

“I’ll sit here,” said my brother, “if I may”; and he got upon the empty

front seat. The lady looked over her shoulder.

“Give me the reins,” she said, and laid the whip along the pony’s side.

In another moment a bend in the road hid the three men from my

brother’s eyes.

So, quite unexpectedly, my brother found himself, panting, with a cut

mouth, a bruised jaw, and bloodstained knuckles, driving along an

unknown lane with these two women.

He learned they were the wife and the younger sister of a surgeon

living at Stanmore, who had come in the small hours from a dangerous

case at Pinner, and heard at some railway station on his way of the

Martian advance. He had hurried home, roused the women—their servant

had left them two days before—packed some provisions, put his revolver

under the seat—luckily for my brother—and told them to drive on to

Edgware, with the idea of getting a train there. He stopped behind to

tell the neighbours. He would overtake them, he said, at about half

past four in the morning, and now it was nearly nine and they had seen

nothing of him. They could not stop in Edgware because of the growing

traffic through the place, and so they had come into this side lane.

That was the story they told my brother in fragments when presently

they stopped again, nearer to New Barnet. He promised to stay with

them, at least until they could determine what to do, or until the

missing man arrived, and professed to be an expert shot with the

revolver—a weapon strange to him—in order to give them confidence.

They made a sort of encampment by the wayside, and the pony became

happy in the hedge. He told them of his own escape out of London, and

all that he knew of these Martians and their ways. The sun crept higher

in the sky, and after a time their talk died out and gave place to an

uneasy state of anticipation. Several wayfarers came along the lane,

and of these my brother gathered such news as he could. Every broken

answer he had deepened his impression of the great disaster that had

come on humanity, deepened his persuasion of the immediate necessity

for prosecuting this flight. He urged the matter upon them.

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

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

“So have I,” said my brother.

She explained that they had as much as thirty pounds in gold, besides a

five-pound note, and suggested that with that they might get upon a

train at St. Albans or New Barnet. My brother thought that was

hopeless, seeing the fury of the Londoners to crowd upon the trains,

and broached his own idea of striking across Essex towards Harwich and

thence escaping from the country altogether.

Mrs. Elphinstone—that was the name of the woman in white—would listen

to no reasoning, and kept calling upon “George”; but her sister-in-law

was astonishingly quiet and deliberate, and at last agreed to my

brother’s suggestion. So, designing to cross the Great North Road, they

went on towards Barnet, my brother leading the pony to save it as much

as possible. As the sun crept up the sky the day became excessively

hot, and under foot a thick, whitish sand grew burning and blinding, so

that they travelled only very slowly. The hedges were grey with dust.

And as they advanced towards Barnet a tumultuous murmuring grew

stronger.

They began to meet more people. For the most part these were staring

before them, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard, unclean.

One man in evening dress passed them on foot, his eyes on the ground.

They heard his voice, and, looking back at him, saw one hand clutched

in his hair and the other beating invisible things. His paroxysm of

rage over, he went on his way without once looking back.

As my brother’s party went on towards the crossroads to the south of

Barnet they saw a woman approaching the road across some fields on

their left, carrying a child and with two other children; and then

passed a man in dirty black, with a thick stick in one hand and a small

portmanteau in the other. Then round the corner of the lane, from

between the villas that guarded it at its confluence with the high

road, came a little cart drawn by a sweating black pony and driven by a

sallow youth in a bowler hat, grey with dust. There were three girls,

East End factory girls, and a couple of little children crowded in the

cart.

“This’ll tike us rahnd Edgware?” asked the driver, wild-eyed,

white-faced; and when my brother told him it would if he turned to the

left, he whipped up at once without the formality of thanks.

My brother noticed a pale grey smoke or haze rising among the houses in

front of them, and veiling the white façade of a terrace beyond the

road that appeared between the backs of the villas. Mrs. Elphinstone

suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky red flame leaping up

above the houses in front of them against the hot, blue sky. The

tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of

many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of waggons, and the

staccato of hoofs. The lane came round sharply not fifty yards from the

crossroads.

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

us into?”

My brother stopped.

For the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of human

beings rushing northward, one pressing on another. A great bank of

dust, white and luminous in the blaze of the sun, made everything

within twenty feet of the ground grey and indistinct and was

perpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense crowd of horses and

of men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every

description.

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

It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to approach the meeting

point of the lane and road; the crowd roared like a fire, and the dust

was hot and pungent. And, indeed, a little way up the road a villa was

burning and sending rolling masses of black smoke across the road to

add to the confusion.

Two men came past them. Then a dirty woman, carrying a heavy bundle and

weeping. A lost retriever dog, with hanging tongue, circled dubiously

round them, scared and wretched, and fled at my brother’s threat.

So much as they could see of the road Londonward between the houses to

the right was a tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying people, pent in

between the villas on either side; the black heads, the crowded forms,

grew into distinctness as they rushed towards the corner, hurried past,

and merged their individuality again in a receding multitude that was

swallowed up at last in a cloud of dust.

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

One man’s hands pressed on the back of another. My brother stood at the

pony’s head. Irresistibly attracted, he advanced slowly, pace by pace,

down the lane.

Edgware had been a scene of confusion, Chalk Farm a riotous tumult, but

this was a whole population in movement. It is hard to imagine that

host. It had no character of its own. The figures poured out past the

corner, and receded with their backs to the group in the lane. Along

the margin came those who were on foot threatened by the wheels,

stumbling in the ditches, blundering into one another.

The carts and carriages crowded close upon one another, making little

way for those swifter and more impatient vehicles that darted forward

every now and then when an opportunity showed itself of doing so,

sending the people scattering against the fences and gates of the

villas.

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

In one cart stood a blind man in the uniform of the Salvation Army,

gesticulating with his crooked fingers and bawling, “Eternity!

Eternity!” His voice was hoarse and very loud so that my brother could

hear him long after he was lost to sight in the dust. Some of the

people who crowded in the carts whipped stupidly at their horses and

quarrelled with other drivers; some sat motionless, staring at nothing

with miserable eyes; some gnawed their hands with thirst, or lay

prostrate in the bottoms of their conveyances. The horses’ bits were

covered with foam, their eyes bloodshot.

There were cabs, carriages, shop-carts, waggons, beyond counting; a

mail cart, a road-cleaner’s cart marked “Vestry of St. Pancras,” a huge

timber waggon crowded with roughs. A brewer’s dray rumbled by with its

two near wheels splashed with fresh blood.

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

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

There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, with children

that cried and stumbled, their dainty clothes smothered in dust, their

weary faces smeared with tears. With many of these came men, sometimes

helpful, sometimes lowering and savage. Fighting side by side with them

pushed some weary street outcast in faded black rags, wide-eyed,

loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. There were sturdy workmen thrusting

their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothed like clerks or shopmen,

struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier my brother noticed, men

dressed in the clothes of railway porters, one wretched creature in a

nightshirt with a coat thrown over it.

But varied as its composition was, certain things all that host had in

common. There were fear and pain on their faces, and fear behind them.

A tumult up the road, a quarrel for a place in a waggon, sent the whole

host of them quickening their pace; even a man so scared and broken

that his knees bent under him was galvanised for a moment into renewed

activity. The heat and dust had already been at work upon this

multitude. Their skins were dry, their lips black and cracked. They

were all thirsty, weary, and footsore. And amid the various cries one

heard disputes, reproaches, groans of weariness and fatigue; the voices

of most of them were hoarse and weak. Through it all ran a refrain:

“Way! Way! The Martians are coming!”

Few stopped and came aside from that flood. The lane opened slantingly

into the main road with a narrow opening, and had a delusive appearance

of coming from the direction of London. Yet a kind of eddy of people

drove into its mouth; weaklings elbowed out of the stream, who for the

most part rested but a moment before plunging into it again. A little

way down the lane, with two friends bending over him, lay a man with a

bare leg, wrapped about with bloody rags. He was a lucky man to have

friends.

A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a filthy black

frock coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed his

boot—his sock was blood-stained—shook out a pebble, and hobbled on

again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw

herself under the hedge close by my brother, weeping.

“I can’t go on! I can’t go on!”

My brother woke from his torpor of astonishment and lifted her up,

speaking gently to her, and carried her to Miss Elphinstone. So soon as

my brother touched her she became quite still, as if frightened.

“Ellen!” shrieked a woman in the crowd, with tears in her

voice—“Ellen!” And the child suddenly darted away from my brother,

crying “Mother!”

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

“Out of the way, there!” bawled a coachman, towering high; and my

brother saw a closed carriage turning into the lane.

The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. My brother

pushed the pony and chaise back into the hedge, and the man drove by

and stopped at the turn of the way. It was a carriage, with a pole for

a pair of horses, but only one was in the traces. My brother saw dimly

through the dust that two men lifted out something on a white stretcher

and put it gently on the grass beneath the privet hedge.

One of the men came running to my brother.

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

thirsty. It is Lord Garrick.”

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

“The water?” he said.

“There may be a tap,” said my brother, “in some of the houses. We have

no water. I dare not leave my people.”

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

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

Then my brother’s attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced

man lugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother’s eyes

rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed to break up

into separate coins as it struck the ground. They rolled hither and

thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. The man stopped

and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his

shoulder and sent him reeling. He gave a shriek and dodged back, and a

cartwheel shaved him narrowly.

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

So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both hands open,

upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in his pocket. A

horse rose close upon him, and in another moment, half rising, he had

been borne down under the horse’s hoofs.

“Stop!” screamed my brother, and pushing a woman out of his way, tried

to clutch the bit of the horse.

Before he could get to it, he heard a scream under the wheels, and saw

through the dust the rim passing over the poor wretch’s back. The

driver of the cart slashed his whip at my brother, who ran round behind

the cart. The multitudinous shouting confused his ears. The man was

writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to rise, for the

wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp and dead. My

brother stood up and yelled at the next driver, and a man on a black

horse came to his assistance.

“Get him out of the road,” said he; and, clutching the man’s collar

with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. But he still

clutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammering

at his arm with a handful of gold. “Go on! Go on!” shouted angry voices

behind. “Way! Way!”

There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the cart that

the man on horseback stopped. My brother looked up, and the man with

the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist that held his collar.

There was a concussion, and the black horse came staggering sideways,

and the carthorse pushed beside it. A hoof missed my brother’s foot by

a hair’s breadth. He released his grip on the fallen man and jumped

back. He saw anger change to terror on the face of the poor wretch on

the ground, and in a moment he was hidden and my brother was borne

backward and carried past the entrance of the lane, and had to fight

hard in the torrent to recover it.

He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little child, with all

a child’s want of sympathetic imagination, staring with dilated eyes at

a dusty something that lay black and still, ground and crushed under

the rolling wheels. “Let us go back!” he shouted, and began turning the

pony round. “We cannot cross this—hell,” he said and they went back a

hundred yards the way they had come, until the fighting crowd was

hidden. As they passed the bend in the lane my brother saw the face of

the dying man in the ditch under the privet, deadly white and drawn,

and shining with perspiration. The two women sat silent, crouching in

their seat and shivering.

Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again. Miss Elphinstone was

white and pale, and her sister-in-law sat weeping, too wretched even to

call upon “George.” My brother was horrified and perplexed. So soon as

they had retreated he realised how urgent and unavoidable it was to

attempt this crossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone, suddenly

resolute.

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

For the second time that day this girl proved her quality. To force

their way into the torrent of people, my brother plunged into the

traffic and held back a cab horse, while she drove the pony across its

head. A waggon locked wheels for a moment and ripped a long splinter

from the chaise. In another moment they were caught and swept forward

by the stream. My brother, with the cabman’s whip marks red across his

face and hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the reins from her.

“Point the revolver at the man behind,” he said, giving it to her, “if

he presses us too hard. No!—point it at his horse.”

Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the right across

the road. But once in the stream he seemed to lose volition, to become

a part of that dusty rout. They swept through Chipping Barnet with the

torrent; they were nearly a mile beyond the centre of the town before

they had fought across to the opposite side of the way. It was din and

confusion indescribable; but in and beyond the town the road forks

repeatedly, and this to some extent relieved the stress.

They struck eastward through Hadley, and there on either side of the

road, and at another place farther on they came upon a great multitude

of people drinking at the stream, some fighting to come at the water.

And farther on, from a lull near East Barnet, they saw two trains

running slowly one after the other without signal or order—trains

swarming with people, with men even among the coals behind the

engines—going northward along the Great Northern Railway. My brother

supposes they must have filled outside London, for at that time the

furious terror of the people had rendered the central termini

impossible.

Near this place they halted for the rest of the afternoon, for the

violence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three of them.

They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger; the night was cold, and

none of them dared to sleep. And in the evening many people came

hurrying along the road nearby their stopping place, fleeing from

unknown dangers before them, and going in the direction from which my

brother had come.

XVII.

THE “THUNDER CHILD”.

Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday have

annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself slowly

through the home counties. Not only along the road through Barnet, but

also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the roads eastward to

Southend and Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames to Deal and

Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one could have hung that

June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London every

northward and eastward road running out of the tangled maze of streets

would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot

a human agony of terror and physical distress. I have set forth at

length in the last chapter my brother’s account of the road through

Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise how that swarming

of black dots appeared to one of those concerned. Never before in the

history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered

together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia

has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. And this was

no disciplined march; it was a stampede—a stampede gigantic and

terrible—without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed

and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout

of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.

Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network of

streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents,

gardens—already derelict—spread out like a huge map, and in the

southward _blotted_. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would have

seemed as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart. Steadily,

incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting out

ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising

ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found valley,

exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting paper.

And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the river, the

glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and methodically spreading

their poison cloud over this patch of country and then over that,

laying it again with their steam jets when it had served its purpose,

and taking possession of the conquered country. They do not seem to

have aimed at extermination so much as at complete demoralisation and

the destruction of any opposition. They exploded any stores of powder

they came upon, cut every telegraph, and wrecked the railways here and

there. They were hamstringing mankind. They seemed in no hurry to

extend the field of their operations, and did not come beyond the

central part of London all that day. It is possible that a very

considerable number of people in London stuck to their houses through

Monday morning. Certain it is that many died at home suffocated by the

Black Smoke.

Until about midday the Pool of London was an astonishing scene.

Steamboats and shipping of all sorts lay there, tempted by the enormous

sums of money offered by fugitives, and it is said that many who swam

out to these vessels were thrust off with boathooks and drowned. About

one o’clock in the afternoon the thinning remnant of a cloud of the

black vapour appeared between the arches of Blackfriars Bridge. At that

the Pool became a scene of mad confusion, fighting, and collision, and

for some time a multitude of boats and barges jammed in the northern

arch of the Tower Bridge, and the sailors and lightermen had to fight

savagely against the people who swarmed upon them from the riverfront.

People were actually clambering down the piers of the bridge from

above.

When, an hour later, a Martian appeared beyond the Clock Tower and

waded down the river, nothing but wreckage floated above Limehouse.

Of the falling of the fifth cylinder I have presently to tell. The

sixth star fell at Wimbledon. My brother, keeping watch beside the

women in the chaise in a meadow, saw the green flash of it far beyond

the hills. On Tuesday the little party, still set upon getting across

the sea, made its way through the swarming country towards Colchester.

The news that the Martians were now in possession of the whole of

London was confirmed. They had been seen at Highgate, and even, it was

said, at Neasden. But they did not come into my brother’s view until

the morrow.

That day the scattered multitudes began to realise the urgent need of

provisions. As they grew hungry the rights of property ceased to be

regarded. Farmers were out to defend their cattle-sheds, granaries, and

ripening root crops with arms in their hands. A number of people now,

like my brother, had their faces eastward, and there were some

desperate souls even going back towards London to get food. These were

chiefly people from the northern suburbs, whose knowledge of the Black

Smoke came by hearsay. He heard that about half the members of the

government had gathered at Birmingham, and that enormous quantities of

high explosives were being prepared to be used in automatic mines

across the Midland counties.

He was also told that the Midland Railway Company had replaced the

desertions of the first day’s panic, had resumed traffic, and was

running northward trains from St. Albans to relieve the congestion of

the home counties. There was also a placard in Chipping Ongar

announcing that large stores of flour were available in the northern

towns and that within twenty-four hours bread would be distributed

among the starving people in the neighbourhood. But this intelligence

did not deter him from the plan of escape he had formed, and the three

pressed eastward all day, and heard no more of the bread distribution

than this promise. Nor, as a matter of fact, did anyone else hear more

of it. That night fell the seventh star, falling upon Primrose Hill. It

fell while Miss Elphinstone was watching, for she took that duty

alternately with my brother. She saw it.

On Wednesday the three fugitives—they had passed the night in a field

of unripe wheat—reached Chelmsford, and there a body of the

inhabitants, calling itself the Committee of Public Supply, seized the

pony as provisions, and would give nothing in exchange for it but the

promise of a share in it the next day. Here there were rumours of

Martians at Epping, and news of the destruction of Waltham Abbey Powder

Mills in a vain attempt to blow up one of the invaders.

People were watching for Martians here from the church towers. My

brother, very luckily for him as it chanced, preferred to push on at

once to the coast rather than wait for food, although all three of them

were very hungry. By midday they passed through Tillingham, which,

strangely enough, seemed to be quite silent and deserted, save for a

few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham they suddenly

came in sight of the sea, and the most amazing crowd of shipping of all

sorts that it is possible to imagine.

For after the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they came on

to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and afterwards

to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They lay in a huge

sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last towards the Naze.

Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks—English, Scotch,

French, Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts,

electric boats; and beyond were ships of larger burden, a multitude of

filthy colliers, trim merchantmen, cattle ships, passenger boats,

petroleum tanks, ocean tramps, an old white transport even, neat white

and grey liners from Southampton and Hamburg; and along the blue coast

across the Blackwater my brother could make out dimly a dense swarm of

boats chaffering with the people on the beach, a swarm which also

extended up the Blackwater almost to Maldon.

About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water,

almost, to my brother’s perception, like a water-logged ship. This was

the ram _Thunder Child_. It was the only warship in sight, but far away

to the right over the smooth surface of the sea—for that day there was

a dead calm—lay a serpent of black smoke to mark the next ironclads of

the Channel Fleet, which hovered in an extended line, steam up and

ready for action, across the Thames estuary during the course of the

Martian conquest, vigilant and yet powerless to prevent it.

At the sight of the sea, Mrs. Elphinstone, in spite of the assurances

of her sister-in-law, gave way to panic. She had never been out of

England before, she would rather die than trust herself friendless in a

foreign country, and so forth. She seemed, poor woman, to imagine that

the French and the Martians might prove very similar. She had been

growing increasingly hysterical, fearful, and depressed during the two

days’ journeyings. Her great idea was to return to Stanmore. Things had

been always well and safe at Stanmore. They would find George at

Stanmore....

It was with the greatest difficulty they could get her down to the

beach, where presently my brother succeeded in attracting the attention

of some men on a paddle steamer from the Thames. They sent a boat and

drove a bargain for thirty-six pounds for the three. The steamer was

going, these men said, to Ostend.

It was about two o’clock when my brother, having paid their fares at

the gangway, found himself safely aboard the steamboat with his

charges. There was food aboard, albeit at exorbitant prices, and the

three of them contrived to eat a meal on one of the seats forward.

There were already a couple of score of passengers aboard, some of whom

had expended their last money in securing a passage, but the captain

lay off the Blackwater until five in the afternoon, picking up

passengers until the seated decks were even dangerously crowded. He

would probably have remained longer had it not been for the sound of

guns that began about that hour in the south. As if in answer, the

ironclad seaward fired a small gun and hoisted a string of flags. A jet

of smoke sprang out of her funnels.

Some of the passengers were of opinion that this firing came from

Shoeburyness, until it was noticed that it was growing louder. At the

same time, far away in the southeast the masts and upperworks of three

ironclads rose one after the other out of the sea, beneath clouds of

black smoke. But my brother’s attention speedily reverted to the

distant firing in the south. He fancied he saw a column of smoke rising

out of the distant grey haze.

The little steamer was already flapping her way eastward of the big

crescent of shipping, and the low Essex coast was growing blue and

hazy, when a Martian appeared, small and faint in the remote distance,

advancing along the muddy coast from the direction of Foulness. At that

the captain on the bridge swore at the top of his voice with fear and

anger at his own delay, and the paddles seemed infected with his

terror. Every soul aboard stood at the bulwarks or on the seats of the

steamer and stared at that distant shape, higher than the trees or

church towers inland, and advancing with a leisurely parody of a human

stride.

It was the first Martian my brother had seen, and he stood, more amazed

than terrified, watching this Titan advancing deliberately towards the

shipping, wading farther and farther into the water as the coast fell

away. Then, far away beyond the Crouch, came another, striding over

some stunted trees, and then yet another, still farther off, wading

deeply through a shiny mudflat that seemed to hang halfway up between

sea and sky. They were all stalking seaward, as if to intercept the

escape of the multitudinous vessels that were crowded between Foulness

and the Naze. In spite of the throbbing exertions of the engines of the

little paddle-boat, and the pouring foam that her wheels flung behind

her, she receded with terrifying slowness from this ominous advance.

Glancing northwestward, my brother saw the large crescent of shipping

already writhing with the approaching terror; one ship passing behind

another, another coming round from broadside to end on, steamships

whistling and giving off volumes of steam, sails being let out,

launches rushing hither and thither. He was so fascinated by this and

by the creeping danger away to the left that he had no eyes for

anything seaward. And then a swift movement of the steamboat (she had

suddenly come round to avoid being run down) flung him headlong from

the seat upon which he was standing. There was a shouting all about

him, a trampling of feet, and a cheer that seemed to be answered

faintly. The steamboat lurched and rolled him over upon his hands.

He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards

from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the blade of a

plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either side in huge

waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her paddles

helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the

waterline.

A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes were

clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing landward. Big

iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin

funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the

torpedo ram, _Thunder Child_, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue

of the threatened shipping.

Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my

brother looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again, and

he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far out to

sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus

sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less

formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was

pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new

antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the

giant was even such another as themselves. The _Thunder Child_ fired no

gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not

firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did

not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her

to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.

She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway

between the steamboat and the Martians—a diminishing black bulk against

the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.

Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a

canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and

glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding

torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear. To the

watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their

eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the Martians.

They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as

they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like

generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and

a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have driven

through the iron of the ship’s side like a white-hot iron rod through

paper.

A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the

Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and a

great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the

_Thunder Child_ sounded through the reek, going off one after the

other, and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer,

ricocheted towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a

smack to matchwood.

But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian’s

collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the

crowding passengers on the steamer’s stern shouted together. And then

they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove

something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts,

its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.

She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and her

engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and was

within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then with

a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped

upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her explosion, and

in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward with the

impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing of

cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of steam

hid everything again.

“Two!” yelled the captain.

Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end rang with

frantic cheering that was taken up first by one and then by all in the

crowding multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to sea.

The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the third

Martian and the coast altogether. And all this time the boat was

paddling steadily out to sea and away from the fight; and when at last

the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour intervened,

and nothing of the _Thunder Child_ could be made out, nor could the

third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to seaward were now quite

close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.

The little vessel continued to beat its way seaward, and the ironclads

receded slowly towards the coast, which was hidden still by a marbled

bank of vapour, part steam, part black gas, eddying and combining in

the strangest way. The fleet of refugees was scattering to the

northeast; several smacks were sailing between the ironclads and the

steamboat. After a time, and before they reached the sinking cloud

bank, the warships turned northward, and then abruptly went about and

passed into the thickening haze of evening southward. The coast grew

faint, and at last indistinguishable amid the low banks of clouds that

were gathering about the sinking sun.

Then suddenly out of the golden haze of the sunset came the vibration

of guns, and a form of black shadows moving. Everyone struggled to the

rail of the steamer and peered into the blinding furnace of the west,

but nothing was to be distinguished clearly. A mass of smoke rose

slanting and barred the face of the sun. The steamboat throbbed on its

way through an interminable suspense.

The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the

evening star trembled into sight. It was deep twilight when the captain

cried out and pointed. My brother strained his eyes. Something rushed

up into the sky out of the greyness—rushed slantingly upward and very

swiftly into the luminous clearness above the clouds in the western

sky; something flat and broad, and very large, that swept round in a

vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly, and vanished again into the grey

mystery of the night. And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the

land.

BOOK TWO

THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS.

I.

UNDER FOOT.

In the first book I have wandered so much from my own adventures to

tell of the experiences of my brother that all through the last two

chapters I and the curate have been lurking in the empty house at

Halliford whither we fled to escape the Black Smoke. There I will

resume. We stopped there all Sunday night and all the next day—the day

of the panic—in a little island of daylight, cut off by the Black Smoke

from the rest of the world. We could do nothing but wait in aching

inactivity during those two weary days.

My mind was occupied by anxiety for my wife. I figured her at

Leatherhead, terrified, in danger, mourning me already as a dead man. I

paced the rooms and cried aloud when I thought of how I was cut off

from her, of all that might happen to her in my absence. My cousin I

knew was brave enough for any emergency, but he was not the sort of man

to realise danger quickly, to rise promptly. What was needed now was

not bravery, but circumspection. My only consolation was to believe

that the Martians were moving Londonward and away from her. Such vague

anxieties keep the mind sensitive and painful. I grew very weary and

irritable with the curate’s perpetual ejaculations; I tired of the

sight of his selfish despair. After some ineffectual remonstrance I

kept away from him, staying in a room—evidently a children’s

schoolroom—containing globes, forms, and copybooks. When he followed me

thither, I went to a box room at the top of the house and, in order to

be alone with my aching miseries, locked myself in.

We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day and the

morning of the next. There were signs of people in the next house on

Sunday evening—a face at a window and moving lights, and later the

slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people were, nor what

became of them. We saw nothing of them next day. The Black Smoke

drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer

and nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway outside the house

that hid us.

A Martian came across the fields about midday, laying the stuff with a

jet of superheated steam that hissed against the walls, smashed all the

windows it touched, and scalded the curate’s hand as he fled out of the

front room. When at last we crept across the sodden rooms and looked

out again, the country northward was as though a black snowstorm had

passed over it. Looking towards the river, we were astonished to see an

unaccountable redness mingling with the black of the scorched meadows.

For a time we did not see how this change affected our position, save

that we were relieved of our fear of the Black Smoke. But later I

perceived that we were no longer hemmed in, that now we might get away.

So soon as I realised that the way of escape was open, my dream of

action returned. But the curate was lethargic, unreasonable.

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

I resolved to leave him—would that I had! Wiser now for the

artilleryman’s teaching, I sought out food and drink. I had found oil

and rags for my burns, and I also took a hat and a flannel shirt that I

found in one of the bedrooms. When it was clear to him that I meant to

go alone—had reconciled myself to going alone—he suddenly roused

himself to come. And all being quiet throughout the afternoon, we

started about five o’clock, as I should judge, along the blackened road

to Sunbury.

In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies lying in

contorted attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts and

luggage, all covered thickly with black dust. That pall of cindery

powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of Pompeii.

We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full of strange

and unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were relieved

to find a patch of green that had escaped the suffocating drift. We

went through Bushey Park, with its deer going to and fro under the

chestnuts, and some men and women hurrying in the distance towards

Hampton, and so we came to Twickenham. These were the first people we

saw.

Away across the road the woods beyond Ham and Petersham were still

afire. Twickenham was uninjured by either Heat-Ray or Black Smoke, and

there were more people about here, though none could give us news. For

the most part they were like ourselves, taking advantage of a lull to

shift their quarters. I have an impression that many of the houses here

were still occupied by scared inhabitants, too frightened even for

flight. Here too the evidence of a hasty rout was abundant along the

road. I remember most vividly three smashed bicycles in a heap, pounded

into the road by the wheels of subsequent carts. We crossed Richmond

Bridge about half past eight. We hurried across the exposed bridge, of

course, but I noticed floating down the stream a number of red masses,

some many feet across. I did not know what these were—there was no time

for scrutiny—and I put a more horrible interpretation on them than they

deserved. Here again on the Surrey side were black dust that had once

been smoke, and dead bodies—a heap near the approach to the station;

but we had no glimpse of the Martians until we were some way towards

Barnes.

We saw in the blackened distance a group of three people running down a

side street towards the river, but otherwise it seemed deserted. Up the

hill Richmond town was burning briskly; outside the town of Richmond

there was no trace of the Black Smoke.

Then suddenly, as we approached Kew, came a number of people running,

and the upperworks of a Martian fighting-machine loomed in sight over

the housetops, not a hundred yards away from us. We stood aghast at our

danger, and had the Martian looked down we must immediately have

perished. We were so terrified that we dared not go on, but turned

aside and hid in a shed in a garden. There the curate crouched, weeping

silently, and refusing to stir again.

But my fixed idea of reaching Leatherhead would not let me rest, and in

the twilight I ventured out again. I went through a shrubbery, and

along a passage beside a big house standing in its own grounds, and so

emerged upon the road towards Kew. The curate I left in the shed, but

he came hurrying after me.

That second start was the most foolhardy thing I ever did. For it was

manifest the Martians were about us. No sooner had the curate overtaken

me than we saw either the fighting-machine we had seen before or

another, far away across the meadows in the direction of Kew Lodge.

Four or five little black figures hurried before it across the

green-grey of the field, and in a moment it was evident this Martian

pursued them. In three strides he was among them, and they ran

radiating from his feet in all directions. He used no Heat-Ray to

destroy them, but picked them up one by one. Apparently he tossed them

into the great metallic carrier which projected behind him, much as a

workman’s basket hangs over his shoulder.

It was the first time I realised that the Martians might have any other

purpose than destruction with defeated humanity. We stood for a moment

petrified, then turned and fled through a gate behind us into a walled

garden, fell into, rather than found, a fortunate ditch, and lay there,

scarce daring to whisper to each other until the stars were out.

I suppose it was nearly eleven o’clock before we gathered courage to

start again, no longer venturing into the road, but sneaking along

hedgerows and through plantations, and watching keenly through the

darkness, he on the right and I on the left, for the Martians, who

seemed to be all about us. In one place we blundered upon a scorched

and blackened area, now cooling and ashen, and a number of scattered

dead bodies of men, burned horribly about the heads and trunks but with

their legs and boots mostly intact; and of dead horses, fifty feet,

perhaps, behind a line of four ripped guns and smashed gun carriages.

Sheen, it seemed, had escaped destruction, but the place was silent and

deserted. Here we happened on no dead, though the night was too dark

for us to see into the side roads of the place. In Sheen my companion

suddenly complained of faintness and thirst, and we decided to try one

of the houses.

The first house we entered, after a little difficulty with the window,

was a small semi-detached villa, and I found nothing eatable left in

the place but some mouldy cheese. There was, however, water to drink;

and I took a hatchet, which promised to be useful in our next

house-breaking.

We then crossed to a place where the road turns towards Mortlake. Here

there stood a white house within a walled garden, and in the pantry of

this domicile we found a store of food—two loaves of bread in a pan, an

uncooked steak, and the half of a ham. I give this catalogue so

precisely because, as it happened, we were destined to subsist upon

this store for the next fortnight. Bottled beer stood under a shelf,

and there were two bags of haricot beans and some limp lettuces. This

pantry opened into a kind of wash-up kitchen, and in this was firewood;

there was also a cupboard, in which we found nearly a dozen of

burgundy, tinned soups and salmon, and two tins of biscuits.

We sat in the adjacent kitchen in the dark—for we dared not strike a

light—and ate bread and ham, and drank beer out of the same bottle. The

curate, who was still timorous and restless, was now, oddly enough, for

pushing on, and I was urging him to keep up his strength by eating when

the thing happened that was to imprison us.

“It can’t be midnight yet,” I said, and then came a blinding glare of

vivid green light. Everything in the kitchen leaped out, clearly

visible in green and black, and vanished again. And then followed such

a concussion as I have never heard before or since. So close on the

heels of this as to seem instantaneous came a thud behind me, a clash

of glass, a crash and rattle of falling masonry all about us, and the

plaster of the ceiling came down upon us, smashing into a multitude of

fragments upon our heads. I was knocked headlong across the floor

against the oven handle and stunned. I was insensible for a long time,

the curate told me, and when I came to we were in darkness again, and

he, with a face wet, as I found afterwards, with blood from a cut

forehead, was dabbing water over me.

For some time I could not recollect what had happened. Then things came

to me slowly. A bruise on my temple asserted itself.

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

At last I answered him. I sat up.

“Don’t move,” he said. “The floor is covered with smashed crockery from

the dresser. You can’t possibly move without making a noise, and I

fancy _they_ are outside.”

We both sat quite silent, so that we could scarcely hear each other

breathing. Everything seemed deadly still, but once something near us,

some plaster or broken brickwork, slid down with a rumbling sound.

Outside and very near was an intermittent, metallic rattle.

“That!” said the curate, when presently it happened again.

“Yes,” I said. “But what is it?”

“A Martian!” said the curate.