The war of the worlds
and, moving about under an armour of metallic shields, have completely
wrecked Woking station with the adjacent houses, and massacred an
entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment. No details are known. Maxims
have been absolutely useless against their armour; the field guns have
been disabled by them. Flying hussars have been galloping into
Chertsey. The Martians appear to be moving slowly towards Chertsey or
Windsor. Great anxiety prevails in West Surrey, and earthworks are
being thrown up to check the advance Londonward.” That was how the
_Sunday Sun_ put it, and a clever and remarkably prompt “handbook”
article in the _Referee_ compared the affair to a menagerie suddenly
let loose in a village.
No one in London knew positively of the nature of the armoured
Martians, and there was still a fixed idea that these monsters must be
sluggish: “crawling,” “creeping painfully”—such expressions occurred in
almost all the earlier reports. None of the telegrams could have been
written by an eyewitness of their advance. The Sunday papers printed
separate editions as further news came to hand, some even in default of
it. But there was practically nothing more to tell people until late in
the afternoon, when the authorities gave the press agencies the news in
their possession. It was stated that the people of Walton and
Weybridge, and all the district were pouring along the roads
Londonward, and that was all.
My brother went to church at the Foundling Hospital in the morning,
still in ignorance of what had happened on the previous night. There he
heard allusions made to the invasion, and a special prayer for peace.
Coming out, he bought a _Referee_. He became alarmed at the news in
this, and went again to Waterloo station to find out if communication
were restored. The omnibuses, carriages, cyclists, and innumerable
people walking in their best clothes seemed scarcely affected by the
strange intelligence that the newsvendors were disseminating. People
were interested, or, if alarmed, alarmed only on account of the local
residents. At the station he heard for the first time that the Windsor
and Chertsey lines were now interrupted. The porters told him that
several remarkable telegrams had been received in the morning from
Byfleet and Chertsey stations, but that these had abruptly ceased. My
brother could get very little precise detail out of them.
“There’s fighting going on about Weybridge” was the extent of their
information.
The train service was now very much disorganised. Quite a number of
people who had been expecting friends from places on the South-Western
network were standing about the station. One grey-headed old gentleman
came and abused the South-Western Company bitterly to my brother. “It
wants showing up,” he said.
One or two trains came in from Richmond, Putney, and Kingston,
containing people who had gone out for a day’s boating and found the
locks closed and a feeling of panic in the air. A man in a blue and
white blazer addressed my brother, full of strange tidings.
“There’s hosts of people driving into Kingston in traps and carts and
things, with boxes of valuables and all that,” he said. “They come from
Molesey and Weybridge and Walton, and they say there’s been guns heard
at Chertsey, heavy firing, and that mounted soldiers have told them to
get off at once because the Martians are coming. We heard guns firing
at Hampton Court station, but we thought it was thunder. What the
dickens does it all mean? The Martians can’t get out of their pit, can
they?”
My brother could not tell him.
Afterwards he found that the vague feeling of alarm had spread to the
clients of the underground railway, and that the Sunday excursionists
began to return from all over the South-Western “lung”—Barnes,
Wimbledon, Richmond Park, Kew, and so forth—at unnaturally early hours;
but not a soul had anything more than vague hearsay to tell of.
Everyone connected with the terminus seemed ill-tempered.
About five o’clock the gathering crowd in the station was immensely
excited by the opening of the line of communication, which is almost
invariably closed, between the South-Eastern and the South-Western
stations, and the passage of carriage trucks bearing huge guns and
carriages crammed with soldiers. These were the guns that were brought
up from Woolwich and Chatham to cover Kingston. There was an exchange
of pleasantries: “You’ll get eaten!” “We’re the beast-tamers!” and so
forth. A little while after that a squad of police came into the
station and began to clear the public off the platforms, and my brother
went out into the street again.
The church bells were ringing for evensong, and a squad of Salvation
Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road. On the bridge a number of
loafers were watching a curious brown scum that came drifting down the
stream in patches. The sun was just setting, and the Clock Tower and
the Houses of Parliament rose against one of the most peaceful skies it
is possible to imagine, a sky of gold, barred with long transverse
stripes of reddish-purple cloud. There was talk of a floating body. One
of the men there, a reservist he said he was, told my brother he had
seen the heliograph flickering in the west.
In Wellington Street my brother met a couple of sturdy roughs who had
just been rushed out of Fleet Street with still-wet newspapers and
staring placards. “Dreadful catastrophe!” they bawled one to the other
down Wellington Street. “Fighting at Weybridge! Full description!
Repulse of the Martians! London in Danger!” He had to give threepence
for a copy of that paper.
Then it was, and then only, that he realised something of the full
power and terror of these monsters. He learned that they were not
merely a handful of small sluggish creatures, but that they were minds
swaying vast mechanical bodies; and that they could move swiftly and
smite with such power that even the mightiest guns could not stand
against them.
They were described as “vast spiderlike machines, nearly a hundred feet
high, capable of the speed of an express train, and able to shoot out a
beam of intense heat.” Masked batteries, chiefly of field guns, had
been planted in the country about Horsell Common, and especially
between the Woking district and London. Five of the machines had been
seen moving towards the Thames, and one, by a happy chance, had been
destroyed. In the other cases the shells had missed, and the batteries
had been at once annihilated by the Heat-Rays. Heavy losses of soldiers
were mentioned, but the tone of the dispatch was optimistic.
The Martians had been repulsed; they were not invulnerable. They had
retreated to their triangle of cylinders again, in the circle about
Woking. Signallers with heliographs were pushing forward upon them from
all sides. Guns were in rapid transit from Windsor, Portsmouth,
Aldershot, Woolwich—even from the north; among others, long wire-guns
of ninety-five tons from Woolwich. Altogether one hundred and sixteen
were in position or being hastily placed, chiefly covering London.
Never before in England had there been such a vast or rapid
concentration of military material.
Any further cylinders that fell, it was hoped, could be destroyed at
once by high explosives, which were being rapidly manufactured and
distributed. No doubt, ran the report, the situation was of the
strangest and gravest description, but the public was exhorted to avoid
and discourage panic. No doubt the Martians were strange and terrible
in the extreme, but at the outside there could not be more than twenty
of them against our millions.
The authorities had reason to suppose, from the size of the cylinders,
that at the outside there could not be more than five in each
cylinder—fifteen altogether. And one at least was disposed of—perhaps
more. The public would be fairly warned of the approach of danger, and
elaborate measures were being taken for the protection of the people in
the threatened southwestern suburbs. And so, with reiterated assurances
of the safety of London and the ability of the authorities to cope with
the difficulty, this quasi-proclamation closed.
This was printed in enormous type on paper so fresh that it was still
wet, and there had been no time to add a word of comment. It was
curious, my brother said, to see how ruthlessly the usual contents of
the paper had been hacked and taken out to give this place.
All down Wellington Street people could be seen fluttering out the pink
sheets and reading, and the Strand was suddenly noisy with the voices
of an army of hawkers following these pioneers. Men came scrambling off
buses to secure copies. Certainly this news excited people intensely,
whatever their previous apathy. The shutters of a map shop in the
Strand were being taken down, my brother said, and a man in his Sunday
raiment, lemon-yellow gloves even, was visible inside the window
hastily fastening maps of Surrey to the glass.
Going on along the Strand to Trafalgar Square, the paper in his hand,
my brother saw some of the fugitives from West Surrey. There was a man
with his wife and two boys and some articles of furniture in a cart
such as greengrocers use. He was driving from the direction of
Westminster Bridge; and close behind him came a hay waggon with five or
six respectable-looking people in it, and some boxes and bundles. The
faces of these people were haggard, and their entire appearance
contrasted conspicuously with the Sabbath-best appearance of the people
on the omnibuses. People in fashionable clothing peeped at them out of
cabs. They stopped at the Square as if undecided which way to take, and
finally turned eastward along the Strand. Some way behind these came a
man in workday clothes, riding one of those old-fashioned tricycles
with a small front wheel. He was dirty and white in the face.
My brother turned down towards Victoria, and met a number of such
people. He had a vague idea that he might see something of me. He
noticed an unusual number of police regulating the traffic. Some of the
refugees were exchanging news with the people on the omnibuses. One was
professing to have seen the Martians. “Boilers on stilts, I tell you,
striding along like men.” Most of them were excited and animated by
their strange experience.
Beyond Victoria the public-houses were doing a lively trade with these
arrivals. At all the street corners groups of people were reading
papers, talking excitedly, or staring at these unusual Sunday visitors.
They seemed to increase as night drew on, until at last the roads, my
brother said, were like Epsom High Street on a Derby Day. My brother
addressed several of these fugitives and got unsatisfactory answers
from most.
None of them could tell him any news of Woking except one man, who
assured him that Woking had been entirely destroyed on the previous
night.
“I come from Byfleet,” he said; “a man on a bicycle came through the
place in the early morning, and ran from door to door warning us to
come away. Then came soldiers. We went out to look, and there were
clouds of smoke to the south—nothing but smoke, and not a soul coming
that way. Then we heard the guns at Chertsey, and folks coming from
Weybridge. So I’ve locked up my house and come on.”
At that time there was a strong feeling in the streets that the
authorities were to blame for their incapacity to dispose of the
invaders without all this inconvenience.
About eight o’clock a noise of heavy firing was distinctly audible all
over the south of London. My brother could not hear it for the traffic
in the main thoroughfares, but by striking through the quiet back
streets to the river he was able to distinguish it quite plainly.
He walked from Westminster to his apartments near Regent’s Park, about