The War of the Worlds
By H.G. Wells
| Day 2 Audio |
After the glimpse I had had of
the Martians emerging from the cylinder in which they had come to the earth from
their planet, a kind of fascination paralysed my actions. I remained standing
knee-deep in the heather, staring at the mound that hid them. I was a
battleground of fear and curiosity.
I did not dare to go back
towards the pit, but I felt a passionate longing to peer into it. I began
walking, therefore, in a big curve, seeking some point of vantage and
continually looking at the sand heaps that hid these new-comers to our earth.
Once a leash of thin black whips, like the arms of an octopus, flashed across
the sunset and was immediately withdrawn, and afterwards a thin rod rose up,
joint by joint, bearing at its apex a circular disk that spun with a wobbling
motion. What could be going on there?
Most of the spectators had
gathered in one or two groups--one a little crowd towards Woking, the other a
knot of people in the direction of Chobham. Evidently they shared my mental
conflict. There were few near me. One man I approached--he was, I perceived, a
neighbour of mine, though I did not know his name--and accosted. But it was
scarcely a time for articulate conversation.
"What ugly brutes!" he said.
"Good God! What ugly brutes!" He repeated this over and over again.
"Did you see a man in the pit?"
I said; but he made no answer to that. We became silent, and stood watching for
a time side by side, deriving, I fancy, a certain comfort in one another's
company. Then I shifted my position to a little knoll that gave me the advantage
of a yard or more of elevation and when I looked for him presently he was
walking towards Woking.
The sunset faded to twilight
before anything further happened. The crowd far away on the left, towards
Woking, seemed to grow, and I heard now a faint murmur from it. The little knot
of people towards Chobham dispersed. There was scarcely an intimation of
movement from the pit.
It was this, as much as
anything, that gave people courage, and I suppose the new arrivals from Woking
also helped to restore confidence. At any rate, as the dusk came on a slow,
intermittent movement upon the sand pits began, a movement that seemed to gather
force as the stillness of the evening about the cylinder remained unbroken.
Vertical black figures in twos and threes would advance, stop, watch, and
advance again, spreading out as they did so in a thin irregular crescent that
promised to enclose the pit in its attenuated horns. I, too, on my side began to
move towards the pit.
Then I saw some cabmen and
others had walked boldly into the sand pits, and heard the clatter of hoofs and
the gride of wheels. I saw a lad trundling off the barrow of apples. And then,
within thirty yards of the pit, advancing from the direction of Horsell, I noted
a little black knot of men, the foremost of whom was waving a white flag.
This was the Deputation. There
had been a hasty consultation, and since the Martians were evidently, in spite
of their repulsive forms, intelligent creatures, it had been resolved to show
them, by approaching them with signals, that we too were intelligent.
Flutter, flutter, went the flag,
first to the right, then to the left. It was too far for me to recognise anyone
there, but afterwards I learned that Ogilvy, Stent, and Henderson were with
others in this attempt at communication. This little group had in its advance
dragged inward, so to speak, the circumference of the now almost complete circle
of people, and a number of dim black figures followed it at discreet distances.
Suddenly there was a flash of
light, and a quantity of luminous greenish smoke came out of the pit in three
distinct puffs, which drove up, one after the other, straight into the still
air.
This smoke (or flame, perhaps,
would be the better word for it) was so bright that the deep blue sky overhead
and the hazy stretches of brown common towards Chertsey, set with black pine
trees, seemed to darken abruptly as these puffs arose, and to remain the darker
after their dispersal. At the same time a faint hissing sound became audible.
Beyond the pit stood the little
wedge of people with the white flag at its apex, arrested by these phenomena, a
little knot of small vertical black shapes upon the black ground. As the green
smoke arose, their faces flashed out pallid green, and faded again as it
vanished. Then slowly the hissing passed into a humming, into a long, loud,
droning noise. Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a
beam of light seemed to flicker out from it.
Forthwith flashes of actual
flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered
group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed
into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to
fire.
Then, by the light of their own
destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to
run.
I stood staring, not as yet
realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant
crowd. All I felt was that it was something very strange. An almost noiseless
and blinding flash of light, and a man fell headlong and lay still; and as the
unseen shaft of heat passed over them, pine trees burst into fire, and every dry
furze bush became with one dull thud a mass of flames. And far away towards
Knaphill I saw the flashes of trees and hedges and wooden buildings suddenly set
alight.
It was sweeping round swiftly
and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat. I
perceived it coming towards me by the flashing bushes it touched, and was too
astounded and stupefied to stir. I heard the crackle of fire in the sand pits
and the sudden squeal of a horse that was as suddenly stilled. Then it was as if
an invisible yet intensely heated finger were drawn through the heather between
me and the Martians, and all along a curving line beyond the sand pits the dark
ground smoked and crackled. Something fell with a crash far away to the left
where the road from Woking station opens out on the common. Forthwith the
hissing and humming ceased, and the black, domelike object sank slowly out of
sight into the pit.
All this had happened with such
swiftness that I had stood motionless, dumbfounded and dazzled by the flashes of
light. Had that death swept through a full circle, it must inevitably have slain
me in my surprise. But it passed and spared me, and left the night about me
suddenly dark and unfamiliar.
The undulating common seemed now
dark almost to blackness, except where its roadways lay grey and pale under the
deep blue sky of the early night. It was dark, and suddenly void of men.
Overhead the stars were mustering, and in the west the sky was still a pale,
bright, almost greenish blue. The tops of the pine trees and the roofs of
Horsell came out sharp and black against the western afterglow. The Martians and
their appliances were altogether invisible, save for that thin mast upon which
their restless mirror wobbled. Patches of bush and isolated trees here and there
smoked and glowed still, and the houses towards Woking station were sending up
spires of flame into the stillness of the evening air.
Nothing was changed save for
that and a terrible astonishment. The little group of black specks with the flag
of white had been swept out of existence, and the stillness of the evening, so
it seemed to me, had scarcely been broken.
It came to me that I was upon
this dark common, helpless, unprotected, and alone. Suddenly, like a thing
falling upon me from without, came--fear.
With an effort I turned and
began a stumbling run through the heather.
The fear I felt was no rational
fear, but a panic terror not only of the Martians, but of the dusk and stillness
all about me. Such an extraordinary effect in unmanning me it had that I ran
weeping silently as a child might do. Once I had turned, I did not dare to look
back.
I remember I felt an
extraordinary persuasion that I was being played with, that presently, when I
was upon the very verge of safety, this mysterious death--as swift as the
passage of light--would leap after me from the pit about the cylinder and strike
me down.
It is still a matter of wonder
how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently. Many think
that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of
practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a
parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic
mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse
projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely proved these details.
However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the
matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible
flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks
and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into
steam.
That night nearly forty people
lay under the starlight about the pit, charred and distorted beyond recognition,
and all night long the common from Horsell to Maybury was deserted and brightly
ablaze.
The news of the massacre
probably reached Chobham, Woking, and Ottershaw about the same time. In Woking
the shops had closed when the tragedy happened, and a number of people, shop
people and so forth, attracted by the stories they had heard, were walking over
the Horsell Bridge and along the road between the hedges that runs out at last
upon the common. You may imagine the young people brushed up after the labours
of the day, and making this novelty, as they would make any novelty, the excuse
for walking together and enjoying a trivial flirtation. You may figure to
yourself the hum of voices along the road in the gloaming....
As yet, of course, few people in
Woking even knew that the cylinder had opened, though poor Henderson had sent a
messenger on a bicycle to the post office with a special wire to an evening
paper.
As these folks came out by twos
and threes upon the open, they found little knots of people talking excitedly
and peering at the spinning mirror over the sand pits, and the new-comers were,
no doubt, soon infected by the excitement of the occasion.
By half past eight, when the
Deputation was destroyed, there may have been a crowd of three hundred people or
more at this place, besides those who had left the road to approach the Martians
nearer. There were three policemen too, one of whom was mounted, doing their
best, under instructions from Stent, to keep the people back and deter them from
approaching the cylinder. There was some booing from those more thoughtless and
excitable souls to whom a crowd is always an occasion for noise and horse-play.
Stent and Ogilvy, anticipating
some possibilities of a collision, had telegraphed from Horsell to the barracks
as soon as the Martians emerged, for the help of a company of soldiers to
protect these strange creatures from violence. After that they returned to lead
that ill-fated advance. The description of their death, as it was seen by the
crowd, tallies very closely with my own impressions: the three puffs of green
smoke, the deep humming note, and the flashes of flame.
But that crowd of people had a
far narrower escape than mine. Only the fact that a hummock of heathery sand
intercepted the lower part of the Heat-Ray saved them. Had the elevation of the
parabolic mirror been a few yards higher, none could have lived to tell the
tale. They saw the flashes and the men falling and an invisible hand, as it
were, lit the bushes as it hurried towards them through the twilight. Then, with
a whistling note that rose above the droning of the pit, the beam swung close
over their heads, lighting the tops of the beech trees that line the road, and
splitting the bricks, smashing the windows, firing the window frames, and
bringing down in crumbling ruin a portion of the gable of the house nearest the
corner.
In the sudden thud, hiss, and
glare of the igniting trees, the panic-stricken crowd seems to have swayed
hesitatingly for some moments. Sparks and burning twigs began to fall into the
road, and single leaves like puffs of flame. Hats and dresses caught fire. Then
came a crying from the common. There were shrieks and shouts, and suddenly a
mounted policeman came galloping through the confusion with his hands clasped
over his head, screaming.
"They're coming!" a woman
shrieked, and incontinently everyone was turning and pushing at those behind, in
order to clear their way to Woking again. They must have bolted as blindly as a
flock of sheep. Where the road grows narrow and black between the high banks the
crowd jammed, and a desperate struggle occurred. All that crowd did not escape;
three persons at least, two women and a little boy, were crushed and trampled
there, and left to die amid the terror and the darkness.
For my own part, I remember
nothing of my flight except the stress of blundering against trees and stumbling
through the heather. All about me gathered the invisible terrors of the
Martians; that pitiless sword of heat seemed whirling to and fro, flourishing
overhead before it descended and smote me out of life. I came into the road
between the crossroads and Horsell, and ran along this to the crossroads.
At last I could go no further; I
was exhausted with the violence of my emotion and of my flight, and I staggered
and fell by the wayside. That was near the bridge that crosses the canal by the
gasworks. I fell and lay still.
I must have remained there some
time.
I sat up, strangely perplexed.
For a moment, perhaps, I could not clearly understand how I came there. My
terror had fallen from me like a garment. My hat had gone, and my collar had
burst away from its fastener. A few minutes before, there had only been three
real things before me--the immensity of the night and space and nature, my own
feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death. Now it was as if
something turned over, and the point of view altered abruptly. There was no
sensible transition from one state of mind to the other. I was immediately the
self of every day again--a decent, ordinary citizen. The silent common, the
impulse of my flight, the starting flames, were as if they had been in a dream.
I asked myself had these latter things indeed happened? I could not credit it.
I rose and walked unsteadily up
the steep incline of the bridge. My mind was blank wonder. My muscles and nerves
seemed drained of their strength. I dare say I staggered drunkenly. A head rose
over the arch, and the figure of a workman carrying a basket appeared. Beside
him ran a little boy. He passed me, wishing me good night. I was minded to speak
to him, but did not. I answered his greeting with a meaningless mumble and went
on over the bridge.
Over the Maybury arch a train, a
billowing tumult of white, firelit smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted
windows, went flying south--clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone. A dim
group of people talked in the gate of one of the houses in the pretty little row
of gables that was called Oriental Terrace. It was all so real and so familiar.
And that behind me! It was frantic, fantastic! Such things, I told myself, could
not be.
Perhaps I am a man of
exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I
suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about
me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably
remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This
feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.
But the trouble was the blank
incongruity of this serenity and the swift death flying yonder, not two miles
away. There was a noise of business from the gasworks, and the electric lamps
were all alight. I stopped at the group of people.
"What news from the common?"
said I.
There were two men and a woman
at the gate.
"Eh?" said one of the men,
turning.
"What news from the common?" I
said. "'Ain't yer just been there?" asked the men.
"People seem fair silly about
the common," said the woman over the gate. "What's it all abart?"
"Haven't you heard of the men
from Mars?" said I; "the creatures from Mars?"
"Quite enough," said the woman
over the gate. "Thenks"; and all three of them laughed.
I felt foolish and angry. I
tried and found I could not tell them what I had seen. They laughed again at my
broken sentences.
"You'll hear more yet," I said,
and went on to my home.
I startled my wife at the
doorway, so haggard was I. I went into the dining room, sat down, drank some
wine, and so soon as I could collect myself sufficiently I told her the things I
had seen. The dinner, which was a cold one, had already been served, and
remained neglected on the table while I told my story.
"There is one thing," I said, to
allay the fears I had aroused; "they are the most sluggish things I ever saw
crawl. They may keep the pit and kill people who come near them, but they cannot
get out of it.... But the horror of them!"
"Don't, dear!" said my wife,
knitting her brows and putting her hand on mine.
"Poor Ogilvy!" I said. "To think
he may be lying dead there!"
My wife at least did not find my
experience incredible. When I saw how deadly white her face was, I ceased
abruptly.
"They may come here," she said
again and again.
I pressed her to take wine, and
tried to reassure her.
"They can scarcely move," I
said.
I began to comfort her and
myself by repeating all that Ogilvy had told me of the impossibility of the
Martians establishing themselves on the earth. In particular I laid stress on
the gravitational difficulty. On the surface of the earth the force of gravity
is three times what it is on the surface of Mars. A Martian, therefore, would
weigh three times more than on Mars, albeit his muscular strength would be the
same. His own body would be a cope of lead to him. That, indeed, was the general
opinion. Both The Times and the Daily Telegraph, for instance,
insisted on it the next morning, and both overlooked, just as I did, two obvious
modifying influences.
The atmosphere of the earth, we
now know, contains far more oxygen or far less argon (whichever way one likes to
put it) than does Mars. The invigorating influences of this excess of oxygen
upon the Martians indisputably did much to counterbalance the increased weight
of their bodies. And, in the second place, we all overlooked the fact that such
mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed was quite able to dispense with
muscular exertion at a pinch.
But I did not consider these
points at the time, and so my reasoning was dead against the chances of the
invaders. With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity
of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.
"They have done a foolish
thing," said I, fingering my wineglass. "They are dangerous because, no doubt,
they are mad with terror. Perhaps they expected to find no living
things--certainly no intelligent living things.
"A shell in the pit" said I, "if
the worst comes to the worst will kill them all."
The intense excitement of the
events had no doubt left my perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember
that dinner table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet
anxious face peering at me from under the pink lamp shade, the white cloth with
its silver and glass table furniture--for in those days even philosophical
writers had many little luxuries--the crimson-purple wine in my glass, are
photographically distinct. At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts with a
cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted
timidity of the Martians.
So some respectable dodo in the
Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that
shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death
tomorrow, my dear."
I did not know it, but that was
the last civilised dinner I was to eat for very many strange and terrible days.
The most extraordinary thing to
my mind, of all the strange and wonderful things that happened upon that Friday,
was the dovetailing of the commonplace habits of our social order with the first
beginnings of the series of events that was to topple that social order
headlong. If on Friday night you had taken a pair of compasses and drawn a
circle with a radius of five miles round the Woking sand pits, I doubt if you
would have had one human being outside it, unless it were some relation of Stent
or of the three or four cyclists or London people lying dead on the common,
whose emotions or habits were at all affected by the new-comers. Many people had
heard of the cylinder, of course, and talked about it in their leisure, but it
certainly did not make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have
done.
In London that night poor
Henderson's telegram describing the gradual unscrewing of the shot was judged to
be a canard, and his evening paper, after wiring for authentication from him and
receiving no reply--the man was killed--decided not to print a special edition.
Even within the five-mile circle
the great majority of people were inert. I have already described the behaviour
of the men and women to whom I spoke. All over the district people were dining
and supping; working men were gardening after the labours of the day, children
were being put to bed, young people were wandering through the lanes
love-making, students sat over their books.
Maybe there was a murmur in the
village streets, a novel and dominant topic in the public-houses, and here and
there a messenger, or even an eye-witness of the later occurrences, caused a
whirl of excitement, a shouting, and a running to and fro; but for the most part
the daily routine of working, eating, drinking, sleeping, went on as it had done
for countless years--as though no planet Mars existed in the sky. Even at Woking
station and Horsell and Chobham that was the case.
In Woking junction, until a late
hour, trains were stopping and going on, others were shunting on the sidings,
passengers were alighting and waiting, and everything was proceeding in the most
ordinary way. A boy from the town, trenching on Smith's monopoly, was selling
papers with the afternoon's news. The ringing impact of trucks, the sharp
whistle of the engines from the junction, mingled with their shouts of "Men from
Mars!" Excited men came into the station about nine o'clock with incredible
tidings, and caused no more disturbance than drunkards might have done. People
rattling Londonwards peered into the darkness outside the carriage windows, and
saw only a rare, flickering, vanishing spark dance up from the direction of
Horsell, a red glow and a thin veil of smoke driving across the stars, and
thought that nothing more serious than a heath fire was happening. It was only
round the edge of the common that any disturbance was perceptible. There were
half a dozen villas burning on the Woking border. There were lights in all the
houses on the common side of the three villages, and the people there kept awake
till dawn.
A curious crowd lingered
restlessly, people coming and going but the crowd remaining, both on the Chobham
and Horsell bridges. One or two adventurous souls, it was afterwards found, went
into the darkness and crawled quite near the Martians; but they never returned,
for now and again a light-ray, like the beam of a warship's searchlight swept
the common, and the Heat-Ray was ready to follow. Save for such, that big area
of common was silent and desolate, and the charred bodies lay about on it all
night under the stars, and all the next day. A noise of hammering from the pit
was heard by many people.
So you have the state of things
on Friday night. In the centre, sticking into the skin of our old planet Earth
like a poisoned dart, was this cylinder. But the poison was scarcely working
yet. Around it was a patch of silent common, smouldering in places, and with a
few dark, dimly seen objects lying in contorted attitudes here and there. Here
and there was a burning bush or tree. Beyond was a fringe of excitement, and
farther than that fringe the inflammation had not crept as yet. In the rest of
the world the stream of life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years.
The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve and
destroy brain, had still to develop.
All night long the Martians were
hammering and stirring, sleepless, indefatigable, at work upon the machines they
were making ready, and ever and again a puff of greenish-white smoke whirled up
to the starlit sky.
About eleven a company of
soldiers came through Horsell, and deployed along the edge of the common to form
a cordon. Later a second company marched through Chobham to deploy on the north
side of the common. Several officers from the Inkerman barracks had been on the
common earlier in the day, and one, Major Eden, was reported to be missing. The
colonel of the regiment came to the Chobham bridge and was busy questioning the
crowd at midnight. The military authorities were certainly alive to the
seriousness of the business. About eleven, the next morning's papers were able
to say, a squadron of hussars, two Maxims, and about four hundred men of the
Cardigan regiment started from Aldershot.
A few seconds after midnight the
crowd in the Chertsey road, Woking, saw a star fall from heaven into the pine
woods to the northwest. It had a greenish colour, and caused a silent brightness
like summer lightning. This was the second cylinder.
Saturday lives in my memory as a
day of suspense. It was a day of lassitude too, hot and close, with, I am told,
a rapidly fluctuating barometer. I had slept but little, though my wife had
succeeded in sleeping, and I rose early. I went into my garden before breakfast
and stood listening, but towards the common there was nothing stirring but a
lark.
The milkman came as usual. I
heard the rattle of his chariot and I went round to the side gate to ask the
latest news. He told me that during the night the Martians had been surrounded
by troops, and that guns were expected. Then--a familiar, reassuring note--I
heard a train running towards Woking.
"They aren't to be killed," said
the milkman, "if that can possibly be avoided."
I saw my neighbour gardening,
chatted with him for a time, and then strolled in to breakfast. It was a most
unexceptional morning. My neighbour was of opinion that the troops would be able
to capture or to destroy the Martians during the day.
"It's a pity they make
themselves so unapproachable," he said. "It would be curious to know how they
live on another planet; we might learn a thing or two."
He came up to the fence and
extended a handful of strawberries, for his gardening was as generous as it was
enthusiastic. At the same time he told me of the burning of the pine woods about
the Byfleet Golf Links.
"They say," said he, "that
there's another of those blessed things fallen there--number two. But one's
enough, surely. This lot'll cost the insurance people a pretty penny before
everything's settled." He laughed with an air of the greatest good humour as he
said this. The woods, he said, were still burning, and pointed out a haze of
smoke to me. "They will be hot under foot for days, on account of the thick soil
of pine needles and turf," he said, and then grew serious over "poor Ogilvy."
After breakfast, instead of
working, I decided to walk down towards the common. Under the railway bridge I
found a group of soldiers--sappers, I think, men in small round caps, dirty red
jackets unbuttoned, and showing their blue shirts, dark trousers, and boots
coming to the calf. They told me no one was allowed over the canal, and, looking
along the road towards the bridge, I saw one of the Cardigan men standing
sentinel there. I talked with these soldiers for a time; I told them of my sight
of the Martians on the previous evening. None of them had seen the Martians, and
they had but the vaguest ideas of them, so that they plied me with questions.
They said that they did not know who had authorised the movements of the troops;
their idea was that a dispute had arisen at the Horse Guards. The ordinary
sapper is a great deal better educated than the common soldier, and they
discussed the peculiar conditions of the possible fight with some acuteness. I
described the Heat-Ray to them, and they began to argue among themselves.
"Crawl up under cover and rush
'em, say I," said one.
"Get aht!," said another.
"What's cover against this 'ere 'eat? Sticks to cook yer! What we got to do is
to go as near as the ground'll let us, and then drive a trench."
"Blow yer trenches! You always
want trenches; you ought to ha' been born a rabbit Snippy."
"'Ain't they got any necks,
then?" said a third, abruptly--a little, contemplative, dark man, smoking a
pipe.
I repeated my description.
"Octopuses," said he, "that's
what I calls 'em. Talk about fishers of men--fighters of fish it is this time!"
"It ain't no murder killing
beasts like that," said the first speaker.
"Why not shell the darned things
strite off and finish 'em?" said the little dark man. "You carn tell what they
might do."
"Where's your shells?" said the
first speaker. "There ain't no time. Do it in a rush, that's my tip, and do it
at once."
So they discussed it. After a
while I left them, and went on to the railway station to get as many morning
papers as I could.
But I will not weary the reader
with a description of that long morning and of the longer afternoon. I did not
succeed in getting a glimpse of the common, for even Horsell and Chobham church
towers were in the hands of the military authorities. The soldiers I addressed
didn't know anything; the officers were mysterious as well as busy. I found
people in the town quite secure again in the presence of the military, and I
heard for the first time from Marshall, the tobacconist, that his son was among
the dead on the common. The soldiers had made the people on the outskirts of
Horsell lock up and leave their houses.
I got back to lunch about two,
very tired for, as I have said, the day was extremely hot and dull; and in order
to refresh myself I took a cold bath in the afternoon. About half past four I
went up to the railway station to get an evening paper, for the morning papers
had contained only a very inaccurate description of the killing of Stent,
Henderson, Ogilvy, and the others. But there was little I didn't know. The
Martians did not show an inch of themselves. They seemed busy in their pit, and
there was a sound of hammering and an almost continuous streamer of smoke.
Apparently they were busy getting ready for a struggle. "Fresh attempts have
been made to signal, but without success," was the stereotyped formula of the
papers. A sapper told me it was done by a man in a ditch with a flag on a long
pole. The Martians took as much notice of such advances as we should of the
lowing of a cow.
I must confess the sight of all
this armament, all this preparation, greatly excited me. My imagination became
belligerent, and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways; something of my
schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism came back. It hardly seemed a fair fight
to me at that time. They seemed very helpless in that pit of theirs.
About three o'clock there began
the thud of a gun at measured intervals from Chertsey or Addlestone. I learned
that the smouldering pine wood into which the second cylinder had fallen was
being shelled, in the hope of destroying that object before it opened. It was
only about five, however, that a field gun reached Chobham for use against the
first body of Martians.
About six in the evening, as I
sat at tea with my wife in the summerhouse talking vigorously about the battle
that was lowering upon us, I heard a muffled detonation from the common, and
immediately after a gust of firing. Close on the heels of that came a violent
rattling crash, quite close to us, that shook the ground; and, starting out upon
the lawn, I saw the tops of the trees about the Oriental College burst into
smoky red flame, and the tower of the little church beside it slide down into
ruin. The pinnacle of the mosque had vanished, and the roof line of the college
itself looked as if a hundred-ton gun had been at work upon it. One of our
chimneys cracked as if a shot had hit it, flew, and a piece of it came
clattering down the tiles and made a heap of broken red fragments upon the
flower bed by my study window.
I and my wife stood amazed. Then
I realised that the crest of Maybury Hill must be within range of the Martians'
Heat-Ray now that the college was cleared out of the way.
At that I gripped my wife's arm,
and without ceremony ran her out into the road. Then I fetched out the servant,
telling her I would go upstairs myself for the box she was clamouring for.
"We can't possibly stay here," I
said; and as I spoke the firing reopened for a moment upon the common.
"But where are we to go?" said
my wife in terror.
I thought perplexed. Then I
remembered her cousins at Leatherhead.
"Leatherhead!" I shouted above
the sudden noise.
She looked away from me
downhill. The people were coming out of their houses, astonished.
"How are we to get to
Leatherhead?" she said.
Down the hill I saw a bevy of
hussars ride under the railway bridge; three galloped through the open gates of
the Oriental College; two others dismounted, and began running from house to
house. The sun, shining through the smoke that drove up from the tops of the
trees, seemed blood red, and threw an unfamiliar lurid light upon everything.
"Stop here," said I; "you are
safe here"; and I started off at once for the Spotted Dog, for I knew the
landlord had a horse and dog cart. I ran, for I perceived that in a moment
everyone upon this side of the hill would be moving. I found him in his bar,
quite unaware of what was going on behind his house. A man stood with his back
to me, talking to him.
"I must have a pound," said the
landlord, "and I've no one to drive it."
"I'll give you two," said I,
over the stranger's shoulder.
"What for?"
"And I'll bring it back by
midnight," I said.
"Lord!" said the landlord;
"what's the hurry? I'm selling my bit of a pig. Two pounds, and you bring it
back? What's going on now?"
I explained hastily that I had
to leave my home, and so secured the dog cart. At the time it did not seem to me
nearly so urgent that the landlord should leave his. I took care to have the
cart there and then, drove it off down the road, and, leaving it in charge of my
wife and servant, rushed into my house and packed a few valuables, such plate as
we had, and so forth. The beech trees below the house were burning while I did
this, and the palings up the road glowed red. While I was occupied in this way,
one of the dismounted hussars came running up. He was going from house to house,
warning people to leave. He was going on as I came out of my front door, lugging
my treasures, done up in a tablecloth. I shouted after him:
"What news?"
He turned, stared, bawled
something about "crawling out in a thing like a dish cover," and ran on to the
gate of the house at the crest. A sudden whirl of black smoke driving across the
road hid him for a moment. I ran to my neighbour's door and rapped to satisfy
myself of what I already knew, that his wife had gone to London with him and had
locked up their house. I went in again, according to my promise, to get my
servant's box, lugged it out, clapped it beside her on the tail of the dog cart,
and then caught the reins and jumped up into the driver's seat beside my wife.
In another moment we were clear of the smoke and noise, and spanking down the
opposite slope of Maybury Hill towards Old Woking.
In front was a quiet sunny
landscape, a wheat field ahead on either side of the road, and the Maybury Inn
with its swinging sign. I saw the doctor's cart ahead of me. At the bottom of
the hill I turned my head to look at the hillside I was leaving. Thick streamers
of black smoke shot with threads of red fire were driving up into the still air,
and throwing dark shadows upon the green treetops eastward. The smoke already
extended far away to the east and west--to the Byfleet pine woods eastward, and
to Woking on the west. The road was dotted with people running towards us. And
very faint now, but very distinct through the hot, quiet air, one heard the
whirr of a machine-gun that was presently stilled, and an intermittent cracking
of rifles. Apparently the Martians were setting fire to everything within range
of their Heat-Ray.
I am not an expert driver, and I
had immediately to turn my attention to the horse. When I looked back again the
second hill had hidden the black smoke. I slashed the horse with the whip, and
gave him a loose rein until Woking and Send lay between us and that quivering
tumult. I overtook and passed the doctor between Woking and Send.
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