The War of the Worlds

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Title: The war of the worlds

Author: H. G. Wells

Release date: October 1, 2004 [eBook #36]
Most recently updated: March 30, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36

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The War of the Worlds

by H. G. Wells

‘But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited?
. . . Are we or they Lords of the World? . . . And
how are all things made for man?’
KEPLER (quoted in _The Anatomy of Melancholy_)

Contents

BOOK ONE.—THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS

I. THE EVE OF THE WAR.
II. THE FALLING STAR.
III. ON HORSELL COMMON.
IV. THE CYLINDER OPENS.
V. THE HEAT-RAY.
VI. THE HEAT-RAY IN THE CHOBHAM ROAD.
VII. HOW I REACHED HOME.
VIII. FRIDAY NIGHT.
IX. THE FIGHTING BEGINS.
X. IN THE STORM.
XI. AT THE WINDOW.
XII. WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON.
XIII. HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CURATE.
XIV. IN LONDON.
XV. WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY.
XVI. THE EXODUS FROM LONDON.
XVII. THE “THUNDER CHILD”.

BOOK TWO.—THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS

I. UNDER FOOT.
II. WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE.
III. THE DAYS OF IMPRISONMENT.
IV. THE DEATH OF THE CURATE.
V. THE STILLNESS.
VI. THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS.
VII. THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL.
VIII. DEAD LONDON.
IX. WRECKAGE.
X. THE EPILOGUE.

BOOK ONE
THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS

I.
THE EVE OF THE WAR.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century
that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences
greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied
themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and
studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might
scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of
water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe
about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire
over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do
the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources
of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life
upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of
the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men
fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to
themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the
gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the
beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,
regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their
plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great
disillusionment.

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the
sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it
receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It
must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world;
and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface
must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of
the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the
temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all
that is necessary for the support of animated existence.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to
the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that
intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all,
beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since
Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the
superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that
it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.

The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already
gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still
largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region
the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter.
Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until
they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change
huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically
inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to
us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the
inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened
their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And
looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we
have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only
35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own
warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy
atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting
cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow,
navy-crowded seas.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at
least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The
intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant
struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief
of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this
world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they
regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their
only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation,
creeps upon them.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless
and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon
animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior
races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely
swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European
immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy
as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing
subtlety—their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of
ours—and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh
perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen
the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like
Schiaparelli watched the red planet—it is odd, by-the-bye, that for
countless centuries Mars has been the star of war—but failed to
interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so
well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.

During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated
part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of
Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in
the issue of _Nature_ dated August 2. I am inclined to think that this
blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk
into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar
markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak
during the next two oppositions.

The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached
opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange
palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of
incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight of
the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted,
indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an
enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had become
invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal
puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, “as
flaming gases rushed out of a gun.”

A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was
nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the _Daily
Telegraph_, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest
dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard of
the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at
Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of
his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a
scrutiny of the red planet.

In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that vigil
very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern
throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking
of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an
oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved
about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a
circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field.
It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly
marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect
round. But so little it was, so silvery warm—a pin’s head of light! It
was as if it quivered, but really this was the telescope vibrating with
the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.

As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to
advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty
millions of miles it was from us—more than forty millions of miles of
void. Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of
the material universe swims.

Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light,
three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the
unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that blackness looks
on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far profounder.
And invisible to me because it was so remote and small, flying swiftly
and steadily towards me across that incredible distance, drawing nearer
every minute by so many thousands of miles, came the Thing they were
sending us, the Thing that was to bring so much struggle and calamity
and death to the earth. I never dreamed of it then as I watched; no one
on earth dreamed of that unerring missile.

That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from the distant
planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, the slightest projection
of the outline just as the chronometer struck midnight; and at that I
told Ogilvy and he took my place. The night was warm and I was thirsty,
and I went stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the
darkness, to the little table where the siphon stood, while Ogilvy
exclaimed at the streamer of gas that came out towards us.

That night another invisible missile started on its way to the earth
from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four hours after the first
one. I remember how I sat on the table there in the blackness, with
patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes. I wished I had a
light to smoke by, little suspecting the meaning of the minute gleam I
had seen and all that it would presently bring me. Ogilvy watched till
one, and then gave it up; and we lit the lantern and walked over to his
house. Down below in the darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all
their hundreds of people, sleeping in peace.

He was full of speculation that night about the condition of Mars, and
scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who were
signalling us. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy
shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was in
progress. He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic
evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets.

“The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one,” he
said.

Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after
about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a
flame each night. Why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on earth
has attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the firing caused the
Martians inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through
a powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating patches,
spread through the clearness of the planet’s atmosphere and obscured
its more familiar features.

Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last, and popular
notes appeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the volcanoes
upon Mars. The seriocomic periodical _Punch_, I remember, made a happy
use of it in the political cartoon. And, all unsuspected, those
missiles the Martians had fired at us drew earthward, rushing now at a
pace of many miles a second through the empty gulf of space, hour by
hour and day by day, nearer and nearer. It seems to me now almost
incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men
could go about their petty concerns as they did. I remember how
jubilant Markham was at securing a new photograph of the planet for the
illustrated paper he edited in those days. People in these latter times
scarcely realise the abundance and enterprise of our nineteenth-century
papers. For my own part, I was much occupied in learning to ride the
bicycle, and busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable
developments of moral ideas as civilisation progressed.

One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been 10,000,000
miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I
explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a
bright dot of light creeping zenithward, towards which so many
telescopes were pointed. It was a warm night. Coming home, a party of
excursionists from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing
music. There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as the
people went to bed. From the railway station in the distance came the
sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into
melody by the distance. My wife pointed out to me the brightness of the
red, green, and yellow signal lights hanging in a framework against the
sky. It seemed so safe and tranquil.

II.
THE FALLING STAR.

Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in the
morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the
atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary
falling star. Albin described it as leaving a greenish streak behind it
that glowed for some seconds. Denning, our greatest authority on
meteorites, stated that the height of its first appearance was about
ninety or one hundred miles. It seemed to him that it fell to earth
about one hundred miles east of him.

I was at home at that hour and writing in my study; and although my
French windows face towards Ottershaw and the blind was up (for I loved
in those days to look up at the night sky), I saw nothing of it. Yet
this strangest of all things that ever came to earth from outer space
must have fallen while I was sitting there, visible to me had I only
looked up as it passed. Some of those who saw its flight say it
travelled with a hissing sound. I myself heard nothing of that. Many
people in Berkshire, Surrey, and Middlesex must have seen the fall of
it, and, at most, have thought that another meteorite had descended. No
one seems to have troubled to look for the fallen mass that night.

But very early in the morning poor Ogilvy, who had seen the shooting
star and who was persuaded that a meteorite lay somewhere on the common
between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, rose early with the idea of
finding it. Find it he did, soon after dawn, and not far from the
sand-pits. An enormous hole had been made by the impact of the
projectile, and the sand and gravel had been flung violently in every
direction over the heath, forming heaps visible a mile and a half away.
The heather was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke rose against
the dawn.

The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand, amidst the
scattered splinters of a fir tree it had shivered to fragments in its
descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder,
caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured
incrustation. It had a diameter of about thirty yards. He approached
the mass, surprised at the size and more so at the shape, since most
meteorites are rounded more or less completely. It was, however, still
so hot from its flight through the air as to forbid his near approach.
A stirring noise within its cylinder he ascribed to the unequal cooling
of its surface; for at that time it had not occurred to him that it
might be hollow.

He remained standing at the edge of the pit that the Thing had made for
itself, staring at its strange appearance, astonished chiefly at its
unusual shape and colour, and dimly perceiving even then some evidence
of design in its arrival. The early morning was wonderfully still, and
the sun, just clearing the pine trees towards Weybridge, was already
warm. He did not remember hearing any birds that morning, there was
certainly no breeze stirring, and the only sounds were the faint
movements from within the cindery cylinder. He was all alone on the
common.

Then suddenly he noticed with a start that some of the grey clinker,
the ashy incrustation that covered the meteorite, was falling off the
circular edge of the end. It was dropping off in flakes and raining
down upon the sand. A large piece suddenly came off and fell with a
sharp noise that brought his heart into his mouth.

For a minute he scarcely realised what this meant, and, although the
heat was excessive, he clambered down into the pit close to the bulk to
see the Thing more clearly. He fancied even then that the cooling of
the body might account for this, but what disturbed that idea was the
fact that the ash was falling only from the end of the cylinder.

And then he perceived that, very slowly, the circular top of the
cylinder was rotating on its body. It was such a gradual movement that
he discovered it only through noticing that a black mark that had been
near him five minutes ago was now at the other side of the
circumference. Even then he scarcely understood what this indicated,
until he heard a muffled grating sound and saw the black mark jerk
forward an inch or so. Then the thing came upon him in a flash. The
cylinder was artificial—hollow—with an end that screwed out! Something
within the cylinder was unscrewing the top!

“Good heavens!” said Ogilvy. “There’s a man in it—men in it! Half
roasted to death! Trying to escape!”

At once, with a quick mental leap, he linked the Thing with the flash
upon Mars.

The thought of the confined creature was so dreadful to him that he
forgot the heat and went forward to the cylinder to help turn. But
luckily the dull radiation arrested him before he could burn his hands
on the still-glowing metal. At that he stood irresolute for a moment,
then turned, scrambled out of the pit, and set off running wildly into
Woking. The time then must have been somewhere about six o’clock. He
met a waggoner and tried to make him understand, but the tale he told
and his appearance were so wild—his hat had fallen off in the pit—that
the man simply drove on. He was equally unsuccessful with the potman
who was just unlocking the doors of the public-house by Horsell Bridge.
The fellow thought he was a lunatic at large and made an unsuccessful
attempt to shut him into the taproom. That sobered him a little; and
when he saw Henderson, the London journalist, in his garden, he called
over the palings and made himself understood.

“Henderson,” he called, “you saw that shooting star last night?”

“Well?” said Henderson.

“It’s out on Horsell Common now.”

“Good Lord!” said Henderson. “Fallen meteorite! That’s good.”

“But it’s something more than a meteorite. It’s a cylinder—an
artificial cylinder, man! And there’s something inside.”

Henderson stood up with his spade in his hand.

“What’s that?” he said. He was deaf in one ear.

Ogilvy told him all that he had seen. Henderson was a minute or so
taking it in. Then he dropped his spade, snatched up his jacket, and
came out into the road. The two men hurried back at once to the common,
and found the cylinder still lying in the same position. But now the
sounds inside had ceased, and a thin circle of bright metal showed
between the top and the body of the cylinder. Air was either entering
or escaping at the rim with a thin, sizzling sound.

They listened, rapped on the scaly burnt metal with a stick, and,
meeting with no response, they both concluded the man or men inside
must be insensible or dead.

Of course the two were quite unable to do anything. They shouted
consolation and promises, and went off back to the town again to get
help. One can imagine them, covered with sand, excited and disordered,
running up the little street in the bright sunlight just as the shop
folks were taking down their shutters and people were opening their
bedroom windows. Henderson went into the railway station at once, in
order to telegraph the news to London. The newspaper articles had
prepared men’s minds for the reception of the idea.

By eight o’clock a number of boys and unemployed men had already
started for the common to see the “dead men from Mars.” That was the
form the story took. I heard of it first from my newspaper boy about a
quarter to nine when I went out to get my _Daily Chronicle_. I was
naturally startled, and lost no time in going out and across the
Ottershaw bridge to the sand-pits.

III.
ON HORSELL COMMON.

I found a little crowd of perhaps twenty people surrounding the huge
hole in which the cylinder lay. I have already described the appearance
of that colossal bulk, embedded in the ground. The turf and gravel
about it seemed charred as if by a sudden explosion. No doubt its
impact had caused a flash of fire. Henderson and Ogilvy were not there.
I think they perceived that nothing was to be done for the present, and
had gone away to breakfast at Henderson’s house.

There were four or five boys sitting on the edge of the Pit, with their
feet dangling, and amusing themselves—until I stopped them—by throwing
stones at the giant mass. After I had spoken to them about it, they
began playing at “touch” in and out of the group of bystanders.

Among these were a couple of cyclists, a jobbing gardener I employed
sometimes, a girl carrying a baby, Gregg the butcher and his little
boy, and two or three loafers and golf caddies who were accustomed to
hang about the railway station. There was very little talking. Few of
the common people in England had anything but the vaguest astronomical
ideas in those days. Most of them were staring quietly at the big table
like end of the cylinder, which was still as Ogilvy and Henderson had
left it. I fancy the popular expectation of a heap of charred corpses
was disappointed at this inanimate bulk. Some went away while I was
there, and other people came. I clambered into the pit and fancied I
heard a faint movement under my feet. The top had certainly ceased to
rotate.

It was only when I got thus close to it that the strangeness of this
object was at all evident to me. At the first glance it was really no
more exciting than an overturned carriage or a tree blown across the
road. Not so much so, indeed. It looked like a rusty gas float. It
required a certain amount of scientific education to perceive that the
grey scale of the Thing was no common oxide, that the yellowish-white
metal that gleamed in the crack between the lid and the cylinder had an
unfamiliar hue. “Extra-terrestrial” had no meaning for most of the
onlookers.

At that time it was quite clear in my own mind that the Thing had come
from the planet Mars, but I judged it improbable that it contained any
living creature. I thought the unscrewing might be automatic. In spite
of Ogilvy, I still believed that there were men in Mars. My mind ran
fancifully on the possibilities of its containing manuscript, on the
difficulties in translation that might arise, whether we should find
coins and models in it, and so forth. Yet it was a little too large for
assurance on this idea. I felt an impatience to see it opened. About
eleven, as nothing seemed happening, I walked back, full of such
thought, to my home in Maybury. But I found it difficult to get to work
upon my abstract investigations.

In the afternoon the appearance of the common had altered very much.
The early editions of the evening papers had startled London with
enormous headlines:

“A MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM MARS.”

“REMARKABLE STORY FROM WOKING,”

and so forth. In addition, Ogilvy’s wire to the Astronomical Exchange
had roused every observatory in the three kingdoms.

There were half a dozen flys or more from the Woking station standing
in the road by the sand-pits, a basket-chaise from Chobham, and a
rather lordly carriage. Besides that, there was quite a heap of
bicycles. In addition, a large number of people must have walked, in
spite of the heat of the day, from Woking and Chertsey, so that there
was altogether quite a considerable crowd—one or two gaily dressed
ladies among the others.

It was glaringly hot, not a cloud in the sky nor a breath of wind, and
the only shadow was that of the few scattered pine trees. The burning
heather had been extinguished, but the level ground towards Ottershaw
was blackened as far as one could see, and still giving off vertical
streamers of smoke. An enterprising sweet-stuff dealer in the Chobham
Road had sent up his son with a barrow-load of green apples and ginger
beer.

Going to the edge of the pit, I found it occupied by a group of about
half a dozen men—Henderson, Ogilvy, and a tall, fair-haired man that I
afterwards learned was Stent, the Astronomer Royal, with several
workmen wielding spades and pickaxes. Stent was giving directions in a
clear, high-pitched voice. He was standing on the cylinder, which was
now evidently much cooler; his face was crimson and streaming with
perspiration, and something seemed to have irritated him.

A large portion of the cylinder had been uncovered, though its lower
end was still embedded. As soon as Ogilvy saw me among the staring
crowd on the edge of the pit he called to me to come down, and asked me
if I would mind going over to see Lord Hilton, the lord of the manor.

The growing crowd, he said, was becoming a serious impediment to their
excavations, especially the boys. They wanted a light railing put up,
and help to keep the people back. He told me that a faint stirring was
occasionally still audible within the case, but that the workmen had
failed to unscrew the top, as it afforded no grip to them. The case
appeared to be enormously thick, and it was possible that the faint
sounds we heard represented a noisy tumult in the interior.

I was very glad to do as he asked, and so become one of the privileged
spectators within the contemplated enclosure. I failed to find Lord
Hilton at his house, but I was told he was expected from London by the
six o’clock train from Waterloo; and as it was then about a quarter
past five, I went home, had some tea, and walked up to the station to
waylay him.

IV.
THE CYLINDER OPENS.

When I returned to the common the sun was setting. Scattered groups
were hurrying from the direction of Woking, and one or two persons were
returning. The crowd about the pit had increased, and stood out black
against the lemon yellow of the sky—a couple of hundred people,
perhaps. There were raised voices, and some sort of struggle appeared
to be going on about the pit. Strange imaginings passed through my
mind. As I drew nearer I heard Stent’s voice:

“Keep back! Keep back!”

A boy came running towards me.

“It’s a-movin’,” he said to me as he passed; “a-screwin’ and a-screwin’
out. I don’t like it. I’m a-goin’ ’ome, I am.”

I went on to the crowd. There were really, I should think, two or three
hundred people elbowing and jostling one another, the one or two ladies
there being by no means the least active.

“He’s fallen in the pit!” cried some one.

“Keep back!” said several.

The crowd swayed a little, and I elbowed my way through. Every one
seemed greatly excited. I heard a peculiar humming sound from the pit.

“I say!” said Ogilvy; “help keep these idiots back. We don’t know
what’s in the confounded thing, you know!”

I saw a young man, a shop assistant in Woking I believe he was,
standing on the cylinder and trying to scramble out of the hole again.
The crowd had pushed him in.

The end of the cylinder was being screwed out from within. Nearly two
feet of shining screw projected. Somebody blundered against me, and I
narrowly missed being pitched onto the top of the screw. I turned, and
as I did so the screw must have come out, for the lid of the cylinder
fell upon the gravel with a ringing concussion. I stuck my elbow into
the person behind me, and turned my head towards the Thing again. For a
moment that circular cavity seemed perfectly black. I had the sunset in
my eyes.

I think everyone expected to see a man emerge—possibly something a
little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man. I know I
did. But, looking, I presently saw something stirring within the
shadow: greyish billowy movements, one above another, and then two
luminous disks—like eyes. Then something resembling a little grey
snake, about the thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the
writhing middle, and wriggled in the air towards me—and then another.

A sudden chill came over me. There was a loud shriek from a woman
behind. I half turned, keeping my eyes fixed upon the cylinder still,
from which other tentacles were now projecting, and began pushing my
way back from the edge of the pit. I saw astonishment giving place to
horror on the faces of the people about me. I heard inarticulate
exclamations on all sides. There was a general movement backwards. I
saw the shopman struggling still on the edge of the pit. I found myself
alone, and saw the people on the other side of the pit running off,
Stent among them. I looked again at the cylinder, and ungovernable
terror gripped me. I stood petrified and staring.

A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising
slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught
the light, it glistened like wet leather.

Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass
that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one
might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim
of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature
heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped
the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the
strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its
pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin
beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth,
the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs
in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of
movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above
all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once
vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something
fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of
the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter,
this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

Suddenly the monster vanished. It had toppled over the brim of the
cylinder and fallen into the pit, with a thud like the fall of a great
mass of leather. I heard it give a peculiar thick cry, and forthwith
another of these creatures appeared darkly in the deep shadow of the
aperture.

I turned and, running madly, made for the first group of trees, perhaps
a hundred yards away; but I ran slantingly and stumbling, for I could
not avert my face from these things.

There, among some young pine trees and furze bushes, I stopped,
panting, and waited further developments. The common round the
sand-pits was dotted with people, standing like myself in a
half-fascinated terror, staring at these creatures, or rather at the
heaped gravel at the edge of the pit in which they lay. And then, with
a renewed horror, I saw a round, black object bobbing up and down on
the edge of the pit. It was the head of the shopman who had fallen in,
but showing as a little black object against the hot western sun. Now
he got his shoulder and knee up, and again he seemed to slip back until
only his head was visible. Suddenly he vanished, and I could have
fancied a faint shriek had reached me. I had a momentary impulse to go
back and help him that my fears overruled.

Everything was then quite invisible, hidden by the deep pit and the
heap of sand that the fall of the cylinder had made. Anyone coming
along the road from Chobham or Woking would have been amazed at the
sight—a dwindling multitude of perhaps a hundred people or more
standing in a great irregular circle, in ditches, behind bushes, behind
gates and hedges, saying little to one another and that in short,
excited shouts, and staring, staring hard at a few heaps of sand. The
barrow of ginger beer stood, a queer derelict, black against the
burning sky, and in the sand-pits was a row of deserted vehicles with
their horses feeding out of nosebags or pawing the ground.

V.
THE HEAT-RAY.

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. Forth-with the hissing and humming ceased, and the
black, dome-like 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.

VI.
THE HEAT-RAY IN THE CHOBHAM ROAD.

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 newcomers 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.

VII.
HOW I REACHED HOME.

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, therefore. 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
short-sighted 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.

VIII.
FRIDAY NIGHT.

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.

IX.
THE FIGHTING BEGINS.

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.

X.
IN THE STORM.

Leatherhead is about twelve miles from Maybury Hill. The scent of hay
was in the air through the lush meadows beyond Pyrford, and the hedges
on either side were sweet and gay with multitudes of dog-roses. The
heavy firing that had broken out while we were driving down Maybury
Hill ceased as abruptly as it began, leaving the evening very peaceful
and still. We got to Leatherhead without misadventure about nine
o’clock, and the horse had an hour’s rest while I took supper with my
cousins and commended my wife to their care.

My wife was curiously silent throughout the drive, and seemed oppressed
with forebodings of evil. I talked to her reassuringly, pointing out
that the Martians were tied to the pit by sheer heaviness, and at the
utmost could but crawl a little out of it; but she answered only in
monosyllables. Had it not been for my promise to the innkeeper, she
would, I think, have urged me to stay in Leatherhead that night. Would
that I had! Her face, I remember, was very white as we parted.

For my own part, I had been feverishly excited all day. Something very
like the war fever that occasionally runs through a civilised community
had got into my blood, and in my heart I was not so very sorry that I
had to return to Maybury that night. I was even afraid that that last
fusillade I had heard might mean the extermination of our invaders from
Mars. I can best express my state of mind by saying that I wanted to be
in at the death.

It was nearly eleven when I started to return. The night was
unexpectedly dark; to me, walking out of the lighted passage of my
cousins’ house, it seemed indeed black, and it was as hot and close as
the day. Overhead the clouds were driving fast, albeit not a breath
stirred the shrubs about us. My cousins’ man lit both lamps. Happily, I
knew the road intimately. My wife stood in the light of the doorway,
and watched me until I jumped up into the dog cart. Then abruptly she
turned and went in, leaving my cousins side by side wishing me good
hap.

I was a little depressed at first with the contagion of my wife’s
fears, but very soon my thoughts reverted to the Martians. At that time
I was absolutely in the dark as to the course of the evening’s
fighting. I did not know even the circumstances that had precipitated
the conflict. As I came through Ockham (for that was the way I
returned, and not through Send and Old Woking) I saw along the western
horizon a blood-red glow, which as I drew nearer, crept slowly up the
sky. The driving clouds of the gathering thunderstorm mingled there
with masses of black and red smoke.

Ripley Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window or so the
village showed not a sign of life; but I narrowly escaped an accident
at the corner of the road to Pyrford, where a knot of people stood with
their backs to me. They said nothing to me as I passed. I do not know
what they knew of the things happening beyond the hill, nor do I know
if the silent houses I passed on my way were sleeping securely, or
deserted and empty, or harassed and watching against the terror of the
night.

From Ripley until I came through Pyrford I was in the valley of the
Wey, and the red glare was hidden from me. As I ascended the little
hill beyond Pyrford Church the glare came into view again, and the
trees about me shivered with the first intimation of the storm that was
upon me. Then I heard midnight pealing out from Pyrford Church behind
me, and then came the silhouette of Maybury Hill, with its tree-tops
and roofs black and sharp against the red.

Even as I beheld this a lurid green glare lit the road about me and
showed the distant woods towards Addlestone. I felt a tug at the reins.
I saw that the driving clouds had been pierced as it were by a thread
of green fire, suddenly lighting their confusion and falling into the
field to my left. It was the third falling star!

Close on its apparition, and blindingly violet by contrast, danced out
the first lightning of the gathering storm, and the thunder burst like
a rocket overhead. The horse took the bit between his teeth and bolted.

A moderate incline runs towards the foot of Maybury Hill, and down this
we clattered. Once the lightning had begun, it went on in as rapid a
succession of flashes as I have ever seen. The thunderclaps, treading
one on the heels of another and with a strange crackling accompaniment,
sounded more like the working of a gigantic electric machine than the
usual detonating reverberations. The flickering light was blinding and
confusing, and a thin hail smote gustily at my face as I drove down the
slope.

At first I regarded little but the road before me, and then abruptly my
attention was arrested by something that was moving rapidly down the
opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At first I took it for the wet roof of
a house, but one flash following another showed it to be in swift
rolling movement. It was an elusive vision—a moment of bewildering
darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the
Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of the pine trees,
and this problematical object came out clear and sharp and bright.

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher
than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them
aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now
across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the
clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder.
A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in
the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the
next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool
tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression
those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a
great body of machinery on a tripod stand.

Then suddenly the trees in the pine wood ahead of me were parted, as
brittle reeds are parted by a man thrusting through them; they were
snapped off and driven headlong, and a second huge tripod appeared,
rushing, as it seemed, headlong towards me. And I was galloping hard to
meet it! At the sight of the second monster my nerve went altogether.
Not stopping to look again, I wrenched the horse’s head hard round to
the right and in another moment the dog cart had heeled over upon the
horse; the shafts smashed noisily, and I was flung sideways and fell
heavily into a shallow pool of water.

I crawled out almost immediately, and crouched, my feet still in the
water, under a clump of furze. The horse lay motionless (his neck was
broken, poor brute!) and by the lightning flashes I saw the black bulk
of the overturned dog cart and the silhouette of the wheel still
spinning slowly. In another moment the colossal mechanism went striding
by me, and passed uphill towards Pyrford.

Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere
insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing
metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which
gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange
body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood
that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a
head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal
like a gigantic fisherman’s basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted
out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an
instant it was gone.

So much I saw then, all vaguely for the flickering of the lightning, in
blinding highlights and dense black shadows.

As it passed it set up an exultant deafening howl that drowned the
thunder—“Aloo! Aloo!”—and in another minute it was with its companion,
half a mile away, stooping over something in the field. I have no doubt
this Thing in the field was the third of the ten cylinders they had
fired at us from Mars.

For some minutes I lay there in the rain and darkness watching, by the
intermittent light, these monstrous beings of metal moving about in the
distance over the hedge tops. A thin hail was now beginning, and as it
came and went their figures grew misty and then flashed into clearness
again. Now and then came a gap in the lightning, and the night
swallowed them up.

I was soaked with hail above and puddle water below. It was some time
before my blank astonishment would let me struggle up the bank to a
drier position, or think at all of my imminent peril.

Not far from me was a little one-roomed squatter’s hut of wood,
surrounded by a patch of potato garden. I struggled to my feet at last,
and, crouching and making use of every chance of cover, I made a run
for this. I hammered at the door, but I could not make the people hear
(if there were any people inside), and after a time I desisted, and,
availing myself of a ditch for the greater part of the way, succeeded
in crawling, unobserved by these monstrous machines, into the pine
woods towards Maybury.

Under cover of this I pushed on, wet and shivering now, towards my own
house. I walked among the trees trying to find the footpath. It was
very dark indeed in the wood, for the lightning was now becoming
infrequent, and the hail, which was pouring down in a torrent, fell in
columns through the gaps in the heavy foliage.

If I had fully realised the meaning of all the things I had seen I
should have immediately worked my way round through Byfleet to Street
Cobham, and so gone back to rejoin my wife at Leatherhead. But that
night the strangeness of things about me, and my physical wretchedness,
prevented me, for I was bruised, weary, wet to the skin, deafened and
blinded by the storm.

I had a vague idea of going on to my own house, and that was as much
motive as I had. I staggered through the trees, fell into a ditch and
bruised my knees against a plank, and finally splashed out into the
lane that ran down from the College Arms. I say splashed, for the storm
water was sweeping the sand down the hill in a muddy torrent. There in
the darkness a man blundered into me and sent me reeling back.

He gave a cry of terror, sprang sideways, and rushed on before I could
gather my wits sufficiently to speak to him. So heavy was the stress of
the storm just at this place that I had the hardest task to win my way
up the hill. I went close up to the fence on the left and worked my way
along its palings.

Near the top I stumbled upon something soft, and, by a flash of
lightning, saw between my feet a heap of black broadcloth and a pair of
boots. Before I could distinguish clearly how the man lay, the flicker
of light had passed. I stood over him waiting for the next flash. When
it came, I saw that he was a sturdy man, cheaply but not shabbily
dressed; his head was bent under his body, and he lay crumpled up close
to the fence, as though he had been flung violently against it.

Overcoming the repugnance natural to one who had never before touched a
dead body, I stooped and turned him over to feel for his heart. He was
quite dead. Apparently his neck had been broken. The lightning flashed
for a third time, and his face leaped upon me. I sprang to my feet. It
was the landlord of the Spotted Dog, whose conveyance I had taken.

I stepped over him gingerly and pushed on up the hill. I made my way by
the police station and the College Arms towards my own house. Nothing
was burning on the hillside, though from the common there still came a
red glare and a rolling tumult of ruddy smoke beating up against the
drenching hail. So far as I could see by the flashes, the houses about
me were mostly uninjured. By the College Arms a dark heap lay in the
road.

Down the road towards Maybury Bridge there were voices and the sound of
feet, but I had not the courage to shout or to go to them. I let myself
in with my latchkey, closed, locked and bolted the door, staggered to
the foot of the staircase, and sat down. My imagination was full of
those striding metallic monsters, and of the dead body smashed against
the fence.

I crouched at the foot of the staircase with my back to the wall,
shivering violently.

XI.
AT THE WINDOW.

I have already said that my storms of emotion have a trick of
exhausting themselves. After a time I discovered that I was cold and
wet, and with little pools of water about me on the stair carpet. I got
up almost mechanically, went into the dining room and drank some
whisky, and then I was moved to change my clothes.

After I had done that I went upstairs to my study, but why I did so I
do not know. The window of my study looks over the trees and the
railway towards Horsell Common. In the hurry of our departure this
window had been left open. The passage was dark, and, by contrast with
the picture the window frame enclosed, the side of the room seemed
impenetrably dark. I stopped short in the doorway.

The thunderstorm had passed. The towers of the Oriental College and the
pine trees about it had gone, and very far away, lit by a vivid red
glare, the common about the sand-pits was visible. Across the light
huge black shapes, grotesque and strange, moved busily to and fro.

It seemed indeed as if the whole country in that direction was on
fire—a broad hillside set with minute tongues of flame, swaying and
writhing with the gusts of the dying storm, and throwing a red
reflection upon the cloud scud above. Every now and then a haze of
smoke from some nearer conflagration drove across the window and hid
the Martian shapes. I could not see what they were doing, nor the clear
form of them, nor recognise the black objects they were busied upon.
Neither could I see the nearer fire, though the reflections of it
danced on the wall and ceiling of the study. A sharp, resinous tang of
burning was in the air.

I closed the door noiselessly and crept towards the window. As I did
so, the view opened out until, on the one hand, it reached to the
houses about Woking station, and on the other to the charred and
blackened pine woods of Byfleet. There was a light down below the hill,
on the railway, near the arch, and several of the houses along the
Maybury road and the streets near the station were glowing ruins. The
light upon the railway puzzled me at first; there were a black heap and
a vivid glare, and to the right of that a row of yellow oblongs. Then I
perceived this was a wrecked train, the fore part smashed and on fire,
the hinder carriages still upon the rails.

Between these three main centres of light—the houses, the train, and
the burning county towards Chobham—stretched irregular patches of dark
country, broken here and there by intervals of dimly glowing and
smoking ground. It was the strangest spectacle, that black expanse set
with fire. It reminded me, more than anything else, of the Potteries at
night. At first I could distinguish no people at all, though I peered
intently for them. Later I saw against the light of Woking station a
number of black figures hurrying one after the other across the line.

And this was the little world in which I had been living securely for
years, this fiery chaos! What had happened in the last seven hours I
still did not know; nor did I know, though I was beginning to guess,
the relation between these mechanical colossi and the sluggish lumps I
had seen disgorged from the cylinder. With a queer feeling of
impersonal interest I turned my desk chair to the window, sat down, and
stared at the blackened country, and particularly at the three gigantic
black things that were going to and fro in the glare about the
sand-pits.

They seemed amazingly busy. I began to ask myself what they could be.
Were they intelligent mechanisms? Such a thing I felt was impossible.
Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a
man’s brain sits and rules in his body? I began to compare the things
to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an
ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.

The storm had left the sky clear, and over the smoke of the burning
land the little fading pinpoint of Mars was dropping into the west,
when a soldier came into my garden. I heard a slight scraping at the
fence, and rousing myself from the lethargy that had fallen upon me, I
looked down and saw him dimly, clambering over the palings. At the
sight of another human being my torpor passed, and I leaned out of the
window eagerly.

“Hist!” said I, in a whisper.

He stopped astride of the fence in doubt. Then he came over and across
the lawn to the corner of the house. He bent down and stepped softly.

“Who’s there?” he said, also whispering, standing under the window and
peering up.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“God knows.”

“Are you trying to hide?”

“That’s it.”

“Come into the house,” I said.

I went down, unfastened the door, and let him in, and locked the door
again. I could not see his face. He was hatless, and his coat was
unbuttoned.

“My God!” he said, as I drew him in.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“What hasn’t?” In the obscurity I could see he made a gesture of
despair. “They wiped us out—simply wiped us out,” he repeated again and
again.

He followed me, almost mechanically, into the dining room.

“Take some whisky,” I said, pouring out a stiff dose.

He drank it. Then abruptly he sat down before the table, put his head
on his arms, and began to sob and weep like a little boy, in a perfect
passion of emotion, while I, with a curious forgetfulness of my own
recent despair, stood beside him, wondering.

It was a long time before he could steady his nerves to answer my
questions, and then he answered perplexingly and brokenly. He was a
driver in the artillery, and had only come into action about seven. At
that time firing was going on across the common, and it was said the
first party of Martians were crawling slowly towards their second
cylinder under cover of a metal shield.

Later this shield staggered up on tripod legs and became the first of
the fighting-machines I had seen. The gun he drove had been unlimbered
near Horsell, in order to command the sand-pits, and its arrival it was
that had precipitated the action. As the limber gunners went to the
rear, his horse trod in a rabbit hole and came down, throwing him into
a depression of the ground. At the same moment the gun exploded behind
him, the ammunition blew up, there was fire all about him, and he found
himself lying under a heap of charred dead men and dead horses.

“I lay still,” he said, “scared out of my wits, with the fore quarter
of a horse atop of me. We’d been wiped out. And the smell—good God!
Like burnt meat! I was hurt across the back by the fall of the horse,
and there I had to lie until I felt better. Just like parade it had
been a minute before—then stumble, bang, swish!

“Wiped out!” he said.

He had hid under the dead horse for a long time, peeping out furtively
across the common. The Cardigan men had tried a rush, in skirmishing
order, at the pit, simply to be swept out of existence. Then the
monster had risen to its feet and had begun to walk leisurely to and
fro across the common among the few fugitives, with its headlike hood
turning about exactly like the head of a cowled human being. A kind of
arm carried a complicated metallic case, about which green flashes
scintillated, and out of the funnel of this there smoked the Heat-Ray.

In a few minutes there was, so far as the soldier could see, not a
living thing left upon the common, and every bush and tree upon it that
was not already a blackened skeleton was burning. The hussars had been
on the road beyond the curvature of the ground, and he saw nothing of
them. He heard the Maxims rattle for a time and then become still. The
giant saved Woking station and its cluster of houses until the last;
then in a moment the Heat-Ray was brought to bear, and the town became
a heap of fiery ruins. Then the Thing shut off the Heat-Ray, and
turning its back upon the artilleryman, began to waddle away towards
the smouldering pine woods that sheltered the second cylinder. As it
did so a second glittering Titan built itself up out of the pit.

The second monster followed the first, and at that the artilleryman
began to crawl very cautiously across the hot heather ash towards
Horsell. He managed to get alive into the ditch by the side of the
road, and so escaped to Woking. There his story became ejaculatory. The
place was impassable. It seems there were a few people alive there,
frantic for the most part and many burned and scalded. He was turned
aside by the fire, and hid among some almost scorching heaps of broken
wall as one of the Martian giants returned. He saw this one pursue a
man, catch him up in one of its steely tentacles, and knock his head
against the trunk of a pine tree. At last, after nightfall, the
artilleryman made a rush for it and got over the railway embankment.

Since then he had been skulking along towards Maybury, in the hope of
getting out of danger Londonward. People were hiding in trenches and
cellars, and many of the survivors had made off towards Woking village
and Send. He had been consumed with thirst until he found one of the
water mains near the railway arch smashed, and the water bubbling out
like a spring upon the road.

That was the story I got from him, bit by bit. He grew calmer telling
me and trying to make me see the things he had seen. He had eaten no
food since midday, he told me early in his narrative, and I found some
mutton and bread in the pantry and brought it into the room. We lit no
lamp for fear of attracting the Martians, and ever and again our hands
would touch upon bread or meat. As he talked, things about us came
darkly out of the darkness, and the trampled bushes and broken rose
trees outside the window grew distinct. It would seem that a number of
men or animals had rushed across the lawn. I began to see his face,
blackened and haggard, as no doubt mine was also.

When we had finished eating we went softly upstairs to my study, and I
looked again out of the open window. In one night the valley had become
a valley of ashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where flames had been
there were now streamers of smoke; but the countless ruins of shattered
and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees that the night had
hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn.
Yet here and there some object had had the luck to escape—a white
railway signal here, the end of a greenhouse there, white and fresh
amid the wreckage. Never before in the history of warfare had
destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal. And shining with
the growing light of the east, three of the metallic giants stood about
the pit, their cowls rotating as though they were surveying the
desolation they had made.

It seemed to me that the pit had been enlarged, and ever and again
puffs of vivid green vapour streamed up and out of it towards the
brightening dawn—streamed up, whirled, broke, and vanished.

Beyond were the pillars of fire about Chobham. They became pillars of
bloodshot smoke at the first touch of day.

XII.
WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON.

As the dawn grew brighter we withdrew from the window from which we had
watched the Martians, and went very quietly downstairs.

The artilleryman agreed with me that the house was no place to stay in.
He proposed, he said, to make his way Londonward, and thence rejoin his
battery—No. 12, of the Horse Artillery. My plan was to return at once
to Leatherhead; and so greatly had the strength of the Martians
impressed me that I had determined to take my wife to Newhaven, and go
with her out of the country forthwith. For I already perceived clearly
that the country about London must inevitably be the scene of a
disastrous struggle before such creatures as these could be destroyed.

Between us and Leatherhead, however, lay the third cylinder, with its
guarding giants. Had I been alone, I think I should have taken my
chance and struck across country. But the artilleryman dissuaded me:
“It’s no kindness to the right sort of wife,” he said, “to make her a
widow;” and in the end I agreed to go with him, under cover of the
woods, northward as far as Street Cobham before I parted with him.
Thence I would make a big detour by Epsom to reach Leatherhead.

I should have started at once, but my companion had been in active
service and he knew better than that. He made me ransack the house for
a flask, which he filled with whisky; and we lined every available
pocket with packets of biscuits and slices of meat. Then we crept out
of the house, and ran as quickly as we could down the ill-made road by
which I had come overnight. The houses seemed deserted. In the road lay
a group of three charred bodies close together, struck dead by the
Heat-Ray; and here and there were things that people had dropped—a
clock, a slipper, a silver spoon, and the like poor valuables. At the
corner turning up towards the post office a little cart, filled with
boxes and furniture, and horseless, heeled over on a broken wheel. A
cash box had been hastily smashed open and thrown under the debris.

Except the lodge at the Orphanage, which was still on fire, none of the
houses had suffered very greatly here. The Heat-Ray had shaved the
chimney tops and passed. Yet, save ourselves, there did not seem to be
a living soul on Maybury Hill. The majority of the inhabitants had
escaped, I suppose, by way of the Old Woking road—the road I had taken
when I drove to Leatherhead—or they had hidden.

We went down the lane, by the body of the man in black, sodden now from
the overnight hail, and broke into the woods at the foot of the hill.
We pushed through these towards the railway without meeting a soul. The
woods across the line were but the scarred and blackened ruins of
woods; for the most part the trees had fallen, but a certain proportion
still stood, dismal grey stems, with dark brown foliage instead of
green.

On our side the fire had done no more than scorch the nearer trees; it
had failed to secure its footing. In one place the woodmen had been at
work on Saturday; trees, felled and freshly trimmed, lay in a clearing,
with heaps of sawdust by the sawing-machine and its engine. Hard by was
a temporary hut, deserted. There was not a breath of wind this morning,
and everything was strangely still. Even the birds were hushed, and as
we hurried along I and the artilleryman talked in whispers and looked
now and again over our shoulders. Once or twice we stopped to listen.

After a time we drew near the road, and as we did so we heard the
clatter of hoofs and saw through the tree stems three cavalry soldiers
riding slowly towards Woking. We hailed them, and they halted while we
hurried towards them. It was a lieutenant and a couple of privates of
the 8th Hussars, with a stand like a theodolite, which the artilleryman
told me was a heliograph.

“You are the first men I’ve seen coming this way this morning,” said
the lieutenant. “What’s brewing?”

His voice and face were eager. The men behind him stared curiously. The
artilleryman jumped down the bank into the road and saluted.

“Gun destroyed last night, sir. Have been hiding. Trying to rejoin
battery, sir. You’ll come in sight of the Martians, I expect, about
half a mile along this road.”

“What the dickens are they like?” asked the lieutenant.

“Giants in armour, sir. Hundred feet high. Three legs and a body like
’luminium, with a mighty great head in a hood, sir.”

“Get out!” said the lieutenant. “What confounded nonsense!”

“You’ll see, sir. They carry a kind of box, sir, that shoots fire and
strikes you dead.”

“What d’ye mean—a gun?”

“No, sir,” and the artilleryman began a vivid account of the Heat-Ray.
Halfway through, the lieutenant interrupted him and looked up at me. I
was still standing on the bank by the side of the road.

“It’s perfectly true,” I said.

“Well,” said the lieutenant, “I suppose it’s my business to see it too.
Look here”—to the artilleryman—“we’re detailed here clearing people out
of their houses. You’d better go along and report yourself to
Brigadier-General Marvin, and tell him all you know. He’s at Weybridge.
Know the way?”

“I do,” I said; and he turned his horse southward again.

“Half a mile, you say?” said he.

“At most,” I answered, and pointed over the treetops southward. He
thanked me and rode on, and we saw them no more.

Farther along we came upon a group of three women and two children in
the road, busy clearing out a labourer’s cottage. They had got hold of
a little hand truck, and were piling it up with unclean-looking bundles
and shabby furniture. They were all too assiduously engaged to talk to
us as we passed.

By Byfleet station we emerged from the pine trees, and found the
country calm and peaceful under the morning sunlight. We were far
beyond the range of the Heat-Ray there, and had it not been for the
silent desertion of some of the houses, the stirring movement of
packing in others, and the knot of soldiers standing on the bridge over
the railway and staring down the line towards Woking, the day would
have seemed very like any other Sunday.

Several farm waggons and carts were moving creakily along the road to
Addlestone, and suddenly through the gate of a field we saw, across a
stretch of flat meadow, six twelve-pounders standing neatly at equal
distances pointing towards Woking. The gunners stood by the guns
waiting, and the ammunition waggons were at a business-like distance.
The men stood almost as if under inspection.

“That’s good!” said I. “They will get one fair shot, at any rate.”

The artilleryman hesitated at the gate.

“I shall go on,” he said.

Farther on towards Weybridge, just over the bridge, there were a number
of men in white fatigue jackets throwing up a long rampart, and more
guns behind.

“It’s bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow,” said the
artilleryman. “They ’aven’t seen that fire-beam yet.”

The officers who were not actively engaged stood and stared over the
treetops southwestward, and the men digging would stop every now and
again to stare in the same direction.

Byfleet was in a tumult; people packing, and a score of hussars, some
of them dismounted, some on horseback, were hunting them about. Three
or four black government waggons, with crosses in white circles, and an
old omnibus, among other vehicles, were being loaded in the village
street. There were scores of people, most of them sufficiently
sabbatical to have assumed their best clothes. The soldiers were having
the greatest difficulty in making them realise the gravity of their
position. We saw one shrivelled old fellow with a huge box and a score
or more of flower pots containing orchids, angrily expostulating with
the corporal who would leave them behind. I stopped and gripped his
arm.

“Do you know what’s over there?” I said, pointing at the pine tops that
hid the Martians.

“Eh?” said he, turning. “I was explainin’ these is vallyble.”

“Death!” I shouted. “Death is coming! Death!” and leaving him to digest
that if he could, I hurried on after the artillery-man. At the corner I
looked back. The soldier had left him, and he was still standing by his
box, with the pots of orchids on the lid of it, and staring vaguely
over the trees.

No one in Weybridge could tell us where the headquarters were
established; the whole place was in such confusion as I had never seen
in any town before. Carts, carriages everywhere, the most astonishing
miscellany of conveyances and horseflesh. The respectable inhabitants
of the place, men in golf and boating costumes, wives prettily dressed,
were packing, river-side loafers energetically helping, children
excited, and, for the most part, highly delighted at this astonishing
variation of their Sunday experiences. In the midst of it all the
worthy vicar was very pluckily holding an early celebration, and his
bell was jangling out above the excitement.

I and the artilleryman, seated on the step of the drinking fountain,
made a very passable meal upon what we had brought with us. Patrols of
soldiers—here no longer hussars, but grenadiers in white—were warning
people to move now or to take refuge in their cellars as soon as the
firing began. We saw as we crossed the railway bridge that a growing
crowd of people had assembled in and about the railway station, and the
swarming platform was piled with boxes and packages. The ordinary
traffic had been stopped, I believe, in order to allow of the passage
of troops and guns to Chertsey, and I have heard since that a savage
struggle occurred for places in the special trains that were put on at
a later hour.

We remained at Weybridge until midday, and at that hour we found
ourselves at the place near Shepperton Lock where the Wey and Thames
join. Part of the time we spent helping two old women to pack a little
cart. The Wey has a treble mouth, and at this point boats are to be
hired, and there was a ferry across the river. On the Shepperton side
was an inn with a lawn, and beyond that the tower of Shepperton
Church—it has been replaced by a spire—rose above the trees.

Here we found an excited and noisy crowd of fugitives. As yet the
flight had not grown to a panic, but there were already far more people
than all the boats going to and fro could enable to cross. People came
panting along under heavy burdens; one husband and wife were even
carrying a small outhouse door between them, with some of their
household goods piled thereon. One man told us he meant to try to get
away from Shepperton station.

There was a lot of shouting, and one man was even jesting. The idea
people seemed to have here was that the Martians were simply formidable
human beings, who might attack and sack the town, to be certainly
destroyed in the end. Every now and then people would glance nervously
across the Wey, at the meadows towards Chertsey, but everything over
there was still.

Across the Thames, except just where the boats landed, everything was
quiet, in vivid contrast with the Surrey side. The people who landed
there from the boats went tramping off down the lane. The big ferryboat
had just made a journey. Three or four soldiers stood on the lawn of
the inn, staring and jesting at the fugitives, without offering to
help. The inn was closed, as it was now within prohibited hours.

“What’s that?” cried a boatman, and “Shut up, you fool!” said a man
near me to a yelping dog. Then the sound came again, this time from the
direction of Chertsey, a muffled thud—the sound of a gun.

The fighting was beginning. Almost immediately unseen batteries across
the river to our right, unseen because of the trees, took up the
chorus, firing heavily one after the other. A woman screamed. Everyone
stood arrested by the sudden stir of battle, near us and yet invisible
to us. Nothing was to be seen save flat meadows, cows feeding
unconcernedly for the most part, and silvery pollard willows motionless
in the warm sunlight.

“The sojers’ll stop ’em,” said a woman beside me, doubtfully. A
haziness rose over the treetops.

Then suddenly we saw a rush of smoke far away up the river, a puff of
smoke that jerked up into the air and hung; and forthwith the ground
heaved under foot and a heavy explosion shook the air, smashing two or
three windows in the houses near, and leaving us astonished.

“Here they are!” shouted a man in a blue jersey. “Yonder! D’yer see
them? Yonder!”

Quickly, one after the other, one, two, three, four of the armoured
Martians appeared, far away over the little trees, across the flat
meadows that stretched towards Chertsey, and striding hurriedly towards
the river. Little cowled figures they seemed at first, going with a
rolling motion and as fast as flying birds.

Then, advancing obliquely towards us, came a fifth. Their armoured
bodies glittered in the sun as they swept swiftly forward upon the
guns, growing rapidly larger as they drew nearer. One on the extreme
left, the remotest that is, flourished a huge case high in the air, and
the ghostly, terrible Heat-Ray I had already seen on Friday night smote
towards Chertsey, and struck the town.

At sight of these strange, swift, and terrible creatures the crowd near
the water’s edge seemed to me to be for a moment horror-struck. There
was no screaming or shouting, but a silence. Then a hoarse murmur and a
movement of feet—a splashing from the water. A man, too frightened to
drop the portmanteau he carried on his shoulder, swung round and sent
me staggering with a blow from the corner of his burden. A woman thrust
at me with her hand and rushed past me. I turned with the rush of the
people, but I was not too terrified for thought. The terrible Heat-Ray
was in my mind. To get under water! That was it!

“Get under water!” I shouted, unheeded.

I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching Martian, rushed
right down the gravelly beach and headlong into the water. Others did
the same. A boatload of people putting back came leaping out as I
rushed past. The stones under my feet were muddy and slippery, and the
river was so low that I ran perhaps twenty feet scarcely waist-deep.
Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely a couple of hundred
yards away, I flung myself forward under the surface. The splashes of
the people in the boats leaping into the river sounded like
thunderclaps in my ears. People were landing hastily on both sides of
the river. But the Martian machine took no more notice for the moment
of the people running this way and that than a man would of the
confusion of ants in a nest against which his foot has kicked. When,
half suffocated, I raised my head above water, the Martian’s hood
pointed at the batteries that were still firing across the river, and
as it advanced it swung loose what must have been the generator of the
Heat-Ray.

In another moment it was on the bank, and in a stride wading halfway
across. The knees of its foremost legs bent at the farther bank, and in
another moment it had raised itself to its full height again, close to
the village of Shepperton. Forthwith the six guns which, unknown to
anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the outskirts of that
village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near concussion, the last
close upon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was already
raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the first shell burst six
yards above the hood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIII.
HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CURATE.

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

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

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

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

I saw an abandoned boat, very small and remote, drifting down-stream;
and throwing off the most of my sodden clothes, I went after it, gained
it, and so escaped out of that destruction. There were no oars in the
boat, but I contrived to paddle, as well as my parboiled hands would
allow, down the river towards Halliford and Walton, going very
ted