The War of the Worlds
By H.G. Wells
| Day 3 Audio |
Leatherhead is about twelve
miles from Maybury Hill. The scent of hay was in the air through the lush
meadows beyond Pyrford, and the hedges on either side were sweet and gay with
multitudes of dog-roses. The heavy firing that had broken out while we were
driving down Maybury Hill ceased as abruptly as it began, leaving the evening
very peaceful and still. We got to Leatherhead without misadventure about nine
o'clock, and the horse had an hour's rest while I took supper with my cousins
and commended my wife to their care.
My wife was curiously silent
throughout the drive, and seemed oppressed with forebodings of evil. I talked to
her reassuringly, pointing out that the Martians were tied to the Pit by sheer
heaviness, and at the utmost could but crawl a little out of it; but she
answered only in monosyllables. Had it not been for my promise to the innkeeper,
she would, I think, have urged me to stay in Leatherhead that night. Would that
I had! Her face, I remember, was very white as we parted.
For my own part, I had been
feverishly excited all day. Something very like the war fever that occasionally
runs through a civilised community had got into my blood, and in my heart I was
not so very sorry that I had to return to Maybury that night. I was even afraid
that that last fusillade I had heard might mean the extermination of our
invaders from Mars. I can best express my state of mind by saying that I wanted
to be in at the death.
It was nearly eleven when I
started to return. The night was unexpectedly dark; to me, walking out of the
lighted passage of my cousins' house, it seemed indeed black, and it was as hot
and close as the day. Overhead the clouds were driving fast, albeit not a breath
stirred the shrubs about us. My cousins' man lit both lamps. Happily, I knew the
road intimately. My wife stood in the light of the doorway, and watched me until
I jumped up into the dog cart. Then abruptly she turned and went in, leaving my
cousins side by side wishing me good hap.
I was a little depressed at
first with the contagion of my wife's fears, but very soon my thoughts reverted
to the Martians. At that time I was absolutely in the dark as to the course of
the evening's fighting. I did not know even the circumstances that had
precipitated the conflict. As I came through Ockham (for that was the way I
returned, and not through Send and Old Woking) I saw along the western horizon a
blood-red glow, which as I drew nearer, crept slowly up the sky. The driving
clouds of the gathering thunderstorm mingled there with masses of black and red
smoke.
Ripley Street was deserted, and
except for a lighted window or so the village showed not a sign of life; but I
narrowly escaped an accident at the corner of the road to Pyrford, where a knot
of people stood with their backs to me. They said nothing to me as I passed. I
do not know what they knew of the things happening beyond the hill, nor do I
know if the silent houses I passed on my way were sleeping securely, or deserted
and empty, or harassed and watching against the terror of the night.
From Ripley until I came through
Pyrford I was in the valley of the Wey, and the red glare was hidden from me. As
I ascended the little hill beyond Pyrford Church the glare came into view again,
and the trees about me shivered with the first intimation of the storm that was
upon me. Then I heard midnight pealing out from Pyrford Church behind me, and
then came the silhouette of Maybury Hill, with its treetops and roofs black and
sharp against the red.
Even as I beheld this a lurid
green glare lit the road about me and showed the distant woods towards
Addlestone. I felt a tug at the reins. I saw that the driving clouds had been
pierced as it were by a thread of green fire, suddenly lighting their confusion
and falling into the field to my left. It was the third falling star!
Close on its apparition, and
blindingly violet by contrast, danced out the first lightning of the gathering
storm, and the thunder burst like a rocket overhead. The horse took the bit
between his teeth and bolted.
A moderate incline runs towards
the foot of Maybury Hill, and down this we clattered. Once the lightning had
begun, it went on in as rapid a succession of flashes as I have ever seen. The
thunderclaps, treading one on the heels of another and with a strange crackling
accompaniment, sounded more like the working of a gigantic electric machine than
the usual detonating reverberations. The flickering light was blinding and
confusing, and a thin hail smote gustily at my face as I drove down the slope.
At first I regarded little but
the road before me, and then abruptly my attention was arrested by something
that was moving rapidly down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At first I took
it for the wet roof of a house, but one flash following another showed it to be
in swift rolling movement. It was an elusive vision--a moment of bewildering
darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the Orphanage
near the crest of the hill, the green tops of the pine trees, and this
problematical object came out clear and sharp and bright.
And this Thing I saw! How can I
describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the
young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of
glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel
dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the
riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with
two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with
the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted
and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant
flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of
machinery on a tripod stand.
Then suddenly the trees in the
pine wood ahead of me were parted, as brittle reeds are parted by a man
thrusting through them; they were snapped off and driven headlong, and a second
huge tripod appeared, rushing, as it seemed, headlong towards me. And I was
galloping hard to meet it! At the sight of the second monster my nerve went
altogether. Not stopping to look again, I wrenched the horse's head hard round
to the right and in another moment the dog cart had heeled over upon the horse;
the shafts smashed noisily, and I was flung sideways and fell heavily into a
shallow pool of water.
I crawled out almost
immediately, and crouched, my feet still in the water, under a clump of furze.
The horse lay motionless (his neck was broken, poor brute!) and by the lightning
flashes I saw the black bulk of the overturned dog cart and the silhouette of
the wheel still spinning slowly. In another moment the colossal mechanism went
striding by me, and passed uphill towards Pyrford.
Seen nearer, the Thing was
incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way.
Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering
tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about
its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen
hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a
head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a
gigantic fisherman's basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the
joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an instant it was gone.
So much I saw then, all vaguely
for the flickering of the lightning, in blinding highlights and dense black
shadows.
As it passed it set up an
exultant deafening howl that drowned the thunder--"Aloo! Aloo!"--and in another
minute it was with its companion, half a mile away, stooping over something in
the field. I have no doubt this Thing in the field was the third of the ten
cylinders they had fired at us from Mars.
For some minutes I lay there in
the rain and darkness watching, by the intermittent light, these monstrous
beings of metal moving about in the distance over the hedge tops. A thin hail
was now beginning, and as it came and went their figures grew misty and then
flashed into clearness again. Now and then came a gap in the lightning, and the
night swallowed them up.
I was soaked with hail above and
puddle water below. It was some time before my blank astonishment would let me
struggle up the bank to a drier position, or think at all of my imminent peril.
Not far from me was a little
one-roomed squatter's hut of wood, surrounded by a patch of potato garden. I
struggled to my feet at last, and, crouching and making use of every chance of
cover, I made a run for this. I hammered at the door, but I could not make the
people hear (if there were any people inside), and after a time I desisted, and,
availing myself of a ditch for the greater part of the way, succeeded in
crawling, unobserved by these monstrous machines, into the pine woods towards
Maybury.
Under cover of this I pushed on,
wet and shivering now, towards my own house. I walked among the trees trying to
find the footpath. It was very dark indeed in the wood, for the lightning was
now becoming infrequent, and the hail, which was pouring down in a torrent, fell
in columns through the gaps in the heavy foliage.
If I had fully realised the
meaning of all the things I had seen I should have immediately worked my way
round through Byfleet to Street Cobham, and so gone back to rejoin my wife at
Leatherhead. But that night the strangeness of things about me, and my physical
wretchedness, prevented me, for I was bruised, weary, wet to the skin, deafened
and blinded by the storm.
I had a vague idea of going on
to my own house, and that was as much motive as I had. I staggered through the
trees, fell into a ditch and bruised my knees against a plank, and finally
splashed out into the lane that ran down from the College Arms. I say splashed,
for the storm water was sweeping the sand down the hill in a muddy torrent.
There in the darkness a man blundered into me and sent me reeling back.
He gave a cry of terror, sprang
sideways, and rushed on before I could gather my wits sufficiently to speak to
him. So heavy was the stress of the storm just at this place that I had the
hardest task to win my way up the hill. I went close up to the fence on the left
and worked my way along its palings.
Near the top I stumbled upon
something soft, and, by a flash of lightning, saw between my feet a heap of
black broadcloth and a pair of boots. Before I could distinguish clearly how the
man lay, the flicker of light had passed. I stood over him waiting for the next
flash. When it came, I saw that he was a sturdy man, cheaply but not shabbily
dressed; his head was bent under his body, and he lay crumpled up close to the
fence, as though he had been flung violently against it.
Overcoming the repugnance
natural to one who had never before touched a dead body, I stooped and turned
him over to feel for his heart. He was quite dead. Apparently his neck had been
broken. The lightning flashed for a third time, and his face leaped upon me. I
sprang to my feet. It was the landlord of the Spotted Dog, whose conveyance I
had taken.
I stepped over him gingerly and
pushed on up the hill. I made my way by the police station and the College Arms
towards my own house. Nothing was burning on the hillside, though from the
common there still came a red glare and a rolling tumult of ruddy smoke beating
up against the drenching hail. So far as I could see by the flashes, the houses
about me were mostly uninjured. By the College Arms a dark heap lay in the road.
Down the road towards Maybury
Bridge there were voices and the sound of feet, but I had not the courage to
shout or to go to them. I let myself in with my latchkey, closed, locked and
bolted the door, staggered to the foot of the staircase, and sat down. My
imagination was full of those striding metallic monsters, and of the dead body
smashed against the fence.
I crouched at the foot of the
staircase with my back to the wall, shivering violently.
I have already said that my
storms of emotion have a trick of exhausting themselves. After a time I
discovered that I was cold and wet, and with little pools of water about me on
the stair carpet. I got up almost mechanically, went into the dining room and
drank some whiskey, and then I was moved to change my clothes.
After I had done that I went
upstairs to my study, but why I did so I do not know. The window of my study
looks over the trees and the railway towards Horsell Common. In the hurry of our
departure this window had been left open. The passage was dark, and, by contrast
with the picture the window frame enclosed, the side of the room seemed
impenetrably dark. I stopped short in the doorway.
The thunderstorm had passed. The
towers of the Oriental College and the pine trees about it had gone, and very
far away, lit by a vivid red glare, the common about the sand pits was visible.
Across the light huge black shapes, grotesque and strange, moved busily to and
fro.
It seemed indeed as if the whole
country in that direction was on fire--a broad hillside set with minute tongues
of flame, swaying and writhing with the gusts of the dying storm, and throwing a
red reflection upon the cloud scud above. Every now and then a haze of smoke
from some nearer conflagration drove across the window and hid the Martian
shapes. I could not see what they were doing, nor the clear form of them, nor
recognise the black objects they were busied upon. Neither could I see the
nearer fire, though the reflections of it danced on the wall and ceiling of the
study. A sharp, resinous tang of burning was in the air.
I closed the door noiselessly
and crept towards the window. As I did so, the view opened out until, on the one
hand, it reached to the houses about Woking station, and on the other to the
charred and blackened pine woods of Byfleet. There was a light down below the
hill, on the railway, near the arch, and several of the houses along the Maybury
road and the streets near the station were glowing ruins. The light upon the
railway puzzled me at first; there were a black heap and a vivid glare, and to
the right of that a row of yellow oblongs. Then I perceived this was a wrecked
train, the fore part smashed and on fire, the hinder carriages still upon the
rails.
Between these three main centres
of light--the houses, the train, and the burning county towards
Chobham--stretched irregular patches of dark country, broken here and there by
intervals of dimly glowing and smoking ground. It was the strangest spectacle,
that black expanse set with fire. It reminded me, more than anything else, of
the Potteries at night. At first I could distinguish no people at all, though I
peered intently for them. Later I saw against the light of Woking station a
number of black figures hurrying one after the other across the line.
And this was the little world in
which I had been living securely for years, this fiery chaos! What had happened
in the last seven hours I still did not know; nor did I know, though I was
beginning to guess, the relation between these mechanical colossi and the
sluggish lumps I had seen disgorged from the cylinder. With a queer feeling of
impersonal interest I turned my desk chair to the window, sat down, and stared
at the blackened country, and particularly at the three gigantic black things
that were going to and fro in the glare about the sand pits.
They seemed amazingly busy. I
began to ask myself what they could be. Were they intelligent mechanisms? Such a
thing I felt was impossible. Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling,
directing, using, much as a man's brain sits and rules in his body? I began to
compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my
life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower
animal.
The storm had left the sky
clear, and over the smoke of the burning land the little fading pinpoint of Mars
was dropping into the west, when a soldier came into my garden. I heard a slight
scraping at the fence, and rousing myself from the lethargy that had fallen upon
me, I looked down and saw him dimly, clambering over the palings. At the sight
of another human being my torpor passed, and I leaned out of the window eagerly.
"Hist!" said I, in a whisper.
He stopped astride of the fence
in doubt. Then he came over and across the lawn to the corner of the house. He
bent down and stepped softly.
"Who's there?" he said, also
whispering, standing under the window and peering up.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"God knows."
"Are you trying to hide?"
"That's it."
"Come into the house," I said.
I went down, unfastened the
door, and let him in, and locked the door again. I could not see his face. He
was hatless, and his coat was unbuttoned.
"My God!" he said, as I drew him
in.
"What has happened?" I asked.
"What hasn't?" In the obscurity
I could see he made a gesture of despair. "They wiped us out--simply wiped us
out," he repeated again and again.
He followed me, almost
mechanically, into the dining room.
"Take some whiskey," I said,
pouring out a stiff dose.
He drank it. Then abruptly he
sat down before the table, put his head on his arms, and began to sob and weep
like a little boy, in a perfect passion of emotion, while I, with a curious
forgetfulness of my own recent despair, stood beside him, wondering.
It was a long time before he
could steady his nerves to answer my questions, and then he answered
perplexingly and brokenly. He was a driver in the artillery, and had only come
into action about seven. At that time firing was going on across the common, and
it was said the first party of Martians were crawling slowly towards their
second cylinder under cover of a metal shield.
Later this shield staggered up
on tripod legs and became the first of the fighting-machines I had seen. The gun
he drove had been unlimbered near Horsell, in order to command the sand pits,
and its arrival it was that had precipitated the action. As the limber gunners
went to the rear, his horse trod in a rabbit hole and came down, throwing him
into a depression of the ground. At the same moment the gun exploded behind him,
the ammunition blew up, there was fire all about him, and he found himself lying
under a heap of charred dead men and dead horses.
"I lay still," he said, "scared
out of my wits, with the fore quarter of a horse atop of me. We'd been wiped
out. And the smell--good God! Like burnt meat! I was hurt across the back by the
fall of the horse, and there I had to lie until I felt better. Just like parade
it had been a minute before--then stumble, bang, swish!"
"Wiped out!" he said.
He had hid under the dead horse
for a long time, peeping out furtively across the common. The Cardigan men had
tried a rush, in skirmishing order, at the pit, simply to be swept out of
existence. Then the monster had risen to its feet and had begun to walk
leisurely to and fro across the common among the few fugitives, with its
headlike hood turning about exactly like the head of a cowled human being. A
kind of arm carried a complicated metallic case, about which green flashes
scintillated, and out of the funnel of this there smoked the Heat-Ray.
In a few minutes there was, so
far as the soldier could see, not a living thing left upon the common, and every
bush and tree upon it that was not already a blackened skeleton was burning. The
hussars had been on the road beyond the curvature of the ground, and he saw
nothing of them. He heard the Martians rattle for a time and then become still.
The giant saved Woking station and its cluster of houses until the last; then in
a moment the Heat-Ray was brought to bear, and the town became a heap of fiery
ruins. Then the Thing shut off the Heat-Ray, and turning its back upon the
artilleryman, began to waddle away towards the smouldering pine woods that
sheltered the second cylinder. As it did so a second glittering Titan built
itself up out of the pit.
The second monster followed the
first, and at that the artilleryman began to crawl very cautiously across the
hot heather ash towards Horsell. He managed to get alive into the ditch by the
side of the road, and so escaped to Woking. There his story became ejaculatory.
The place was impassable. It seems there were a few people alive there, frantic
for the most part and many burned and scalded. He was turned aside by the fire,
and hid among some almost scorching heaps of broken wall as one of the Martian
giants returned. He saw this one pursue a man, catch him up in one of its steely
tentacles, and knock his head against the trunk of a pine tree. At last, after
nightfall, the artilleryman made a rush for it and got over the railway
embankment.
Since then he had been skulking
along towards Maybury, in the hope of getting out of danger Londonward. People
were hiding in trenches and cellars, and many of the survivors had made off
towards Woking village and Send. He had been consumed with thirst until he found
one of the water mains near the railway arch smashed, and the water bubbling out
like a spring upon the road.
That was the story I got from
him, bit by bit. He grew calmer telling me and trying to make me see the things
he had seen. He had eaten no food since midday, he told me early in his
narrative, and I found some mutton and bread in the pantry and brought it into
the room. We lit no lamp for fear of attracting the Martians, and ever and again
our hands would touch upon bread or meat. As he talked, things about us came
darkly out of the darkness, and the trampled bushes and broken rose trees
outside the window grew distinct. It would seem that a number of men or animals
had rushed across the lawn. I began to see his face, blackened and haggard, as
no doubt mine was also.
When we had finished eating we
went softly upstairs to my study, and I looked again out of the open window. In
one night the valley had become a valley of ashes. The fires had dwindled now.
Where flames had been there were now streamers of smoke; but the countless ruins
of shattered and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees that the night
had hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn. Yet
here and there some object had had the luck to escape--a white railway signal
here, the end of a greenhouse there, white and fresh amid the wreckage. Never
before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so
universal. And shining with the growing light of the east, three of the metallic
giants stood about the pit, their cowls rotating as though they were surveying
the desolation they had made.
It seemed to me that the pit had
been enlarged, and ever and again puffs of vivid green vapour streamed up and
out of it towards the brightening dawn--streamed up, whirled, broke, and
vanished.
Beyond were the pillars of fire
about Chobham. They became pillars of bloodshot smoke at the first touch of day.
As the dawn grew brighter we
withdrew from the window from which we had watched the Martians, and went very
quietly downstairs.
The artilleryman agreed with me
that the house was no place to stay in. He proposed, he said, to make his way
Londonward, and thence rejoin his battery--No. 12, of the Horse Artillery. My
plan was to return at once to Leatherhead; and so greatly had the strength of
the Martians impressed me that I had determined to take my wife to Newhaven, and
go with her out of the country forthwith. For I already perceived clearly that
the country about London must inevitably be the scene of a disastrous struggle
before such creatures as these could be destroyed.
Between us and Leatherhead,
however, lay the third cylinder, with its guarding giants. Had I been alone, I
think I should have taken my chance and struck across country. But the
artilleryman dissuaded me: "It's no kindness to the right sort of wife," he
said, "to make her a widow"; and in the end I agreed to go with him, under cover
of the woods, northward as far as Street Cobham before I parted with him. Thence
I would make a big detour by Epsom to reach Leatherhead.
I should have started at once,
but my companion had been in active service and he knew better than that. He
made me ransack the house for a flask, which he filled with whiskey; and we
lined every available pocket with packets of biscuits and slices of meat. Then
we crept out of the house, and ran as quickly as we could down the ill-made road
by which I had come overnight. The houses seemed deserted. In the road lay a
group of three charred bodies close together, struck dead by the Heat-Ray; and
here and there were things that people had dropped--a clock, a slipper, a silver
spoon, and the like poor valuables. At the corner turning up towards the post
office a little cart, filled with boxes and furniture, and horseless, heeled
over on a broken wheel. A cash box had been hastily smashed open and thrown
under the debris.
Except the lodge at the
Orphanage, which was still on fire, none of the houses had suffered very greatly
here. The Heat-Ray had shaved the chimney tops and passed. Yet, save ourselves,
there did not seem to be a living soul on Maybury Hill. The majority of the
inhabitants had escaped, I suppose, by way of the Old Woking road--the road I
had taken when I drove to Leatherhead--or they had hidden.
We went down the lane, by the
body of the man in black, sodden now from the overnight hail, and broke into the
woods at the foot of the hill. We pushed through these towards the railway
without meeting a soul. The woods across the line were but the scarred and
blackened ruins of woods; for the most part the trees had fallen, but a certain
proportion still stood, dismal grey stems, with dark brown foliage instead of
green.
On our side the fire had done no
more than scorch the nearer trees; it had failed to secure its footing. In one
place the woodmen had been at work on Saturday; trees, felled and freshly
trimmed, lay in a clearing, with heaps of sawdust by the sawing-machine and its
engine. Hard by was a temporary hut, deserted. There was not a breath of wind
this morning, and everything was strangely still. Even the birds were hushed,
and as we hurried along I and the artilleryman talked in whispers and looked now
and again over our shoulders. Once or twice we stopped to listen.
After a time we drew near the
road, and as we did so we heard the clatter of hoofs and saw through the tree
stems three cavalry soldiers riding slowly towards Woking. We hailed them, and
they halted while we hurried towards them. It was a lieutenant and a couple of
privates of the 8th Hussars, with a stand like a theodolite, which the
artilleryman told me was a heliograph.
"You are the first men I've seen
coming this way this morning," said the lieutenant. "What's brewing?"
His voice and face were eager.
The men behind him stared curiously. The artilleryman jumped down the bank into
the road and saluted. "Gun destroyed last night, sir. Have been hiding. Trying
to rejoin battery, sir. You'll come in sight of the Martians, I expect, about
half a mile along this road."
"What the dickens are they
like?" asked the lieutenant.
"Giants in armour, sir. Hundred
feet high. Three legs and a body like 'luminium, with a mighty great head in a
hood, sir."
"Get out!" said the lieutenant.
"What confounded nonsense!"
"You'll see, sir. They carry a
kind of box, sir, that shoots fire and strikes you dead."
"What d'ye mean--a gun?"
"No, sir," and the artilleryman
began a vivid account of the Heat-Ray. Halfway through, the lieutenant
interrupted him and looked up at me. I was still standing on the bank by the
side of the road.
"It's perfectly true," I said.
"Well," said the lieutenant, "I
suppose it's my business to see it too. Look here"--to the artilleryman--"we're
detailed here clearing people out of their houses. You'd better go along and
report yourself to Brigadier-General Marvin, and tell him all you know. He's at
Weybridge. Know the way?"
"I do," I said; and he turned
his horse southward again.
"Half a mile, you say?" said he.
"At most," I answered, and
pointed over the treetops southward. He thanked me and rode on, and we saw them
no more.
Farther along we came upon a
group of three women and two children in the road, busy clearing out a
labourer's cottage. They had got hold of a little hand truck, and were piling it
up with unclean-looking bundles and shabby furniture. They were all too
assiduously engaged to talk to us as we passed.
By Byfleet station we emerged
from the pine trees, and found the country calm and peaceful under the morning
sunlight. We were far beyond the range of the Heat-Ray there, and had it not
been for the silent desertion of some of the houses, the stirring movement of
packing in others, and the knot of soldiers standing on the bridge over the
railway and staring down the line towards Woking, the day would have seemed very
like any other Sunday.
Several farm waggons and carts
were moving creakily along the road to Addlestone, and suddenly through the gate
of a field we saw, across a stretch of flat meadow, six twelve-pounders standing
neatly at equal distances pointing towards Woking. The gunners stood by the guns
waiting, and the ammunition waggons were at a business-like distance. The men
stood almost as if under inspection.
"That's good!" said I. "They
will get one fair shot, at any rate."
The artilleryman hesitated at
the gate.
"I shall go on," he said.
Farther on towards Weybridge,
just over the bridge, there were a number of men in white fatigue jackets
throwing up a long rampart, and more guns behind.
"It's bows and arrows against
the lightning, anyhow," said the artilleryman. "They 'aven't seen that fire-beam
yet."
The officers who were not
actively engaged stood and stared over the treetops southwestward, and the men
digging would stop every now and again to stare in the same direction.
Byfleet was in a tumult; people
packing, and a score of hussars, some of them dismounted, some on horseback,
were hunting them about. Three or four black government waggons, with crosses in
white circles, and an old omnibus, among other vehicles, were being loaded in
the village street. There were scores of people, most of them sufficiently
sabbatical to have assumed their best clothes. The soldiers were having the
greatest difficulty in making them realise the gravity of their position. We saw
one shrivelled old fellow with a huge box and a score or more of flower pots
containing orchids, angrily expostulating with the corporal who would leave them
behind. I stopped and gripped his arm.
"Do you know what's over there?"
I said, pointing at the pine tops that hid the Martians.
"Eh?" said he, turning. "I was
explainin' these is vallyble."
"Death!" I shouted. "Death is
coming! Death!" and leaving him to digest that if he could, I hurried on after
the artilleryman. At the corner I looked back. The soldier had left him, and he
was still standing by his box, with the pots of orchids on the lid of it, and
staring vaguely over the trees.
No one in Weybridge could tell
us where the headquarters were established; the whole place was in such
confusion as I had never seen in any town before. Carts, carriages everywhere,
the most astonishing miscellany of conveyances and horseflesh. The respectable
inhabitants of the place, men in golf and boating costumes, wives prettily
dressed, were packing, river-side loafers energetically helping, children
excited, and, for the most part, highly delighted at this astonishing variation
of their Sunday experiences. In the midst of it all the worthy vicar was very
pluckily holding an early celebration, and his bell was jangling out above the
excitement.
I and the artilleryman, seated
on the step of the drinking fountain, made a very passable meal upon what we had
brought with us. Patrols of soldiers--here no longer hussars, but grenadiers in
white--were warning people to move now or to take refuge in their cellars as
soon as the firing began. We saw as we crossed the railway bridge that a growing
crowd of people had assembled in and about the railway station, and the swarming
platform was piled with boxes and packages. The ordinary traffic had been
stopped, I believe, in order to allow of the passage of troops and guns to
Chertsey, and I have heard since that a savage struggle occurred for places in
the special trains that were put on at a later hour.
We remained at Weybridge until
midday, and at that hour we found ourselves at the place near Shepperton Lock
where the Wey and Thames join. Part of the time we spent helping two old women
to pack a little cart. The Wey has a treble mouth, and at this point boats are
to be hired, and there was a ferry across the river. On the Shepperton side was
an inn with a lawn, and beyond that the tower of Shepperton Church--it has been
replaced by a spire--rose above the trees.
Here we found an excited and
noisy crowd of fugitives. As yet the flight had not grown to a panic, but there
were already far more people than all the boats going to and fro could enable to
cross. People came panting along under heavy burdens; one husband and wife were
even carrying a small outhouse door between them, with some of their household
goods piled thereon. One man told us he meant to try to get away from Shepperton
station.
There was a lot of shouting, and
one man was even jesting. The idea people seemed to have here was that the
Martians were simply formidable human beings, who might attack and sack the
town, to be certainly destroyed in the end. Every now and then people would
glance nervously across the Wey, at the meadows towards Chertsey, but everything
over there was still.
Across the Thames, except just
where the boats landed, everything was quiet, in vivid contrast with the Surrey
side. The people who landed there from the boats went tramping off down the
lane. The big ferryboat had just made a journey. Three or four soldiers stood on
the lawn of the inn, staring and jesting at the fugitives, without offering to
help. The inn was closed, as it was now within prohibited hours.
"What's that?" cried a boatman,
and "Shut up, you fool!" said a man near me to a yelping dog. Then the sound
came again, this time from the direction of Chertsey, a muffled thud--the sound
of a gun.
The fighting was beginning.
Almost immediately unseen batteries across the river to our right, unseen
because of the trees, took up the chorus, firing heavily one after the other. A
woman screamed. Everyone stood arrested by the sudden stir of battle, near us
and yet invisible to us. Nothing was to be seen save flat meadows, cows feeding
unconcernedly for the most part, and silvery pollard willows motionless in the
warm sunlight.
"The sojers'll stop 'em," said a
woman beside me, doubtfully. A haziness rose over the treetops.
Then suddenly we saw a rush of
smoke far away up the river, a puff of smoke that jerked up into the air and
hung; and forthwith the ground heaved under foot and a heavy explosion shook the
air, smashing two or three windows in the houses near, and leaving us
astonished.
"Here they are!" shouted a man
in a blue jersey. "Yonder! D'yer see them? Yonder!"
Quickly, one after the other,
one, two, three, four of the armoured Martians appeared, far away over the
little trees, across the flat meadows that stretched towards Chertsey, and
striding hurriedly towards the river. Little cowled figures they seemed at
first, going with a rolling motion and as fast as flying birds.
Then, advancing obliquely
towards us, came a fifth. Their armoured bodies glittered in the sun as they
swept swiftly forward upon the guns, growing rapidly larger as they drew nearer.
One on the extreme left, the remotest that is, flourished a huge case high in
the air, and the ghostly, terrible Heat-Ray I had already seen on Friday night
smote towards Chertsey, and struck the town.
At sight of these strange,
swift, and terrible creatures the crowd near the water's edge seemed to me to be
for a moment horror-struck. There was no screaming or shouting, but a silence.
Then a hoarse murmur and a movement of feet--a splashing from the water. A man,
too frightened to drop the portmanteau he carried on his shoulder, swung round
and sent me staggering with a blow from the corner of his burden. A woman thrust
at me with her hand and rushed past me. I turned with the rush of the people,
but I was not too terrified for thought. The terrible Heat-Ray was in my mind.
To get under water! That was it!
"Get under water!" I shouted,
unheeded.
I faced about again, and rushed
towards the approaching Martian, rushed right down the gravelly beach and
headlong into the water. Others did the same. A boatload of people putting back
came leaping out as I rushed past. The stones under my feet were muddy and
slippery, and the river was so low that I ran perhaps twenty feet scarcely
waist-deep. Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely a couple of hundred
yards away, I flung myself forward under the surface. The splashes of the people
in the boats leaping into the river sounded like thunderclaps in my ears. People
were landing hastily on both sides of the river.
But the Martian machine took no
more notice for the moment of the people running this way and that than a man
would of the confusion of ants in a nest against which his foot has kicked.
When, half suffocated, I raised my head above water, the Martian's hood pointed
at the batteries that were still firing across the river, and as it advanced it
swung loose what must have been the generator of the Heat-Ray.
In another moment it was on the
bank, and in a stride wading halfway across. The knees of its foremost legs bent
at the farther bank, and in another moment it had raised itself to its full
height again, close to the village of Shepperton. Forthwith the six guns which,
unknown to anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the outskirts of
that village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near concussion, the last close
upon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was already raising the case
generating the Heat-Ray as the first shell burst six yards above the hood.
I gave a cry of astonishment. I
saw and thought nothing of the other four Martian monsters; my attention was
riveted upon the nearer incident. Simultaneously two other shells burst in the
air near the body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time
to dodge, the fourth shell.
The shell burst clean in the
face of the Thing. The hood bulged, flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered
fragments of red flesh and glittering metal.
"Hit!" shouted I, with something
between a scream and a cheer.
I heard answering shouts from
the people in the water about me. I could have leaped out of the water with that
momentary exultation.
The decapitated colossus reeled
like a drunken giant; but it did not fall over. It recovered its balance by a
miracle, and, no longer heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the
Heat-Ray now rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living
intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to the four
winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate device of metal
whirling to destruction. It drove along in a straight line, incapable of
guidance. It struck the tower of Shepperton Church, smashing it down as the
impact of a battering ram might have done, swerved aside, blundered on and
collapsed with tremendous force into the river out of my sight.
A violent explosion shook the
air, and a spout of water, steam, mud, and shattered metal shot far up into the
sky. As the camera of the Heat-Ray hit the water, the latter had immediately
flashed into steam. In another moment a huge wave, like a muddy tidal bore but
almost scaldingly hot, came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw people
struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and shouting faintly above the
seething and roar of the Martian's collapse.
For a moment I heeded nothing of
the heat, forgot the patent need of self-preservation. I splashed through the
tumultuous water, pushing aside a man in black to do so, until I could see round
the bend. Half a dozen deserted boats pitched aimlessly upon the confusion of
the waves. The fallen Martian came into sight downstream, lying across the
river, and for the most part submerged.
Thick clouds of steam were
pouring off the wreckage, and through the tumultuously whirling wisps I could
see, intermittently and vaguely, the gigantic limbs churning the water and
flinging a splash and spray of mud and froth into the air. The tentacles swayed
and struck like living arms, and, save for the helpless purposelessness of these
movements, it was as if some wounded thing were struggling for its life amid the
waves. Enormous quantities of a ruddy-brown fluid were spurting up in noisy jets
out of the machine.
My attention was diverted from
this death flurry by a furious yelling, like that of the thing called a siren in
our manufacturing towns. A man, knee-deep near the towing path, shouted
inaudibly to me and pointed. Looking back, I saw the other Martians advancing
with gigantic strides down the riverbank from the direction of Chertsey. The
Shepperton guns spoke this time unavailingly.
At that I ducked at once under
water, and, holding my breath until movement was an agony, blundered painfully
ahead under the surface as long as I could. The water was in a tumult about me,
and rapidly growing hotter.
When for a moment I raised my
head to take breath and throw the hair and water from my eyes, the steam was
rising in a whirling white fog that at first hid the Martians altogether. The
noise was deafening. Then I saw them dimly, colossal figures of grey, magnified
by the mist. They had passed by me, and two were stooping over the frothing,
tumultuous ruins of their comrade.
The third and fourth stood
beside him in the water, one perhaps two hundred yards from me, the other
towards Lale- ham. The generators of the Heat-Rays waved high, and the hissing
beams smote down this way and that.
The air was full of sound, a
deafening and confusing conflict of noises--the clangorous din of the Martians,
the crash of falling houses, the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into
flame, and the crackling and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up
to mingle with the steam from the river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and fro
over Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent white, that gave
place at once to a smoky dance of lurid flames. The nearer houses still stood
intact, awaiting their fate, shadowy, faint and pallid in the steam, with the
fire behind them going to and fro.
For a moment perhaps I stood
there, breast-high in the almost boiling water, dumbfounded at my position,
hopeless of escape. Through the reek I could see the people who had been with me
in the river scrambling out of the water through the reeds, like little frogs
hurrying through grass from the advance of a man, or running to and fro in utter
dismay on the towing path.
Then suddenly the white flashes
of the Heat-Ray came leaping towards me. The houses caved in as they dissolved
at its touch, and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar. The
Ray flickered up and down the towing path, licking off the people who ran this
way and that, and came down to the water's edge not fifty yards from where I
stood. It swept across the river to Shepperton, and the water in its track rose
in a boiling weal crested with steam. I turned shoreward.
In another moment the huge wave,
well-nigh at the boiling-point had rushed upon me. I screamed aloud, and
scalded, half blinded, agonised, I staggered through the leaping, hissing water
towards the shore. Had my foot stumbled, it would have been the end. I fell
helplessly, in full sight of the Martians, upon the broad, bare gravelly spit
that runs down to mark the angle of the Wey and Thames. I expected nothing but
death.
I have a dim memory of the foot
of a Martian coming down within a score of yards of my head, driving straight
into the loose gravel, whirling it this way and that and lifting again; of a
long suspense, and then of the four carrying the debris of their comrade between
them, now clear and then presently faint through a veil of smoke, receding
interminably, as it seemed to me, across a vast space of river and meadow. And
then, very slowly, I realised that by a miracle I had escaped.
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