The war of the worlds
two. He was now very anxious on my account, and disturbed at the
evident magnitude of the trouble. His mind was inclined to run, even as
mine had run on Saturday, on military details. He thought of all those
silent, expectant guns, of the suddenly nomadic countryside; he tried
to imagine “boilers on stilts” a hundred feet high.
There were one or two cartloads of refugees passing along Oxford
Street, and several in the Marylebone Road, but so slowly was the news
spreading that Regent Street and Portland Place were full of their
usual Sunday-night promenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and along
the edge of Regent’s Park there were as many silent couples “walking
out” together under the scattered gas lamps as ever there had been. The
night was warm and still, and a little oppressive; the sound of guns
continued intermittently, and after midnight there seemed to be sheet
lightning in the south.
He read and re-read the paper, fearing the worst had happened to me. He
was restless, and after supper prowled out again aimlessly. He returned
and tried in vain to divert his attention to his examination notes. He
went to bed a little after midnight, and was awakened from lurid dreams
in the small hours of Monday by the sound of door knockers, feet
running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour of bells. Red
reflections danced on the ceiling. For a moment he lay astonished,
wondering whether day had come or the world gone mad. Then he jumped
out of bed and ran to the window.
His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up and down the
street there were a dozen echoes to the noise of his window sash, and
heads in every kind of night disarray appeared. Enquiries were being
shouted. “They are coming!” bawled a policeman, hammering at the door;
“the Martians are coming!” and hurried to the next door.
The sound of drumming and trumpeting came from the Albany Street
Barracks, and every church within earshot was hard at work killing
sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin. There was a noise of doors
opening, and window after window in the houses opposite flashed from
darkness into yellow illumination.
Up the street came galloping a closed carriage, bursting abruptly into
noise at the corner, rising to a clattering climax under the window,
and dying away slowly in the distance. Close on the rear of this came a
couple of cabs, the forerunners of a long procession of flying
vehicles, going for the most part to Chalk Farm station, where the
North-Western special trains were loading up, instead of coming down
the gradient into Euston.
For a long time my brother stared out of the window in blank
astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after door, and
delivering their incomprehensible message. Then the door behind him
opened, and the man who lodged across the landing came in, dressed only
in shirt, trousers, and slippers, his braces loose about his waist, his
hair disordered from his pillow.
“What the devil is it?” he asked. “A fire? What a devil of a row!”
They both craned their heads out of the window, straining to hear what
the policemen were shouting. People were coming out of the side
streets, and standing in groups at the corners talking.
“What the devil is it all about?” said my brother’s fellow lodger.
My brother answered him vaguely and began to dress, running with each
garment to the window in order to miss nothing of the growing
excitement. And presently men selling unnaturally early newspapers came
bawling into the street:
“London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond defences
forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!”
And all about him—in the rooms below, in the houses on each side and
across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the hundred
other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the Westbourne Park
district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kilburn and St.
John’s Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and Highbury and
Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the vastness of London
from Ealing to East Ham—people were rubbing their eyes, and opening
windows to stare out and ask aimless questions, dressing hastily as the
first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It
was the dawn of the great panic. London, which had gone to bed on
Sunday night oblivious and inert, was awakened, in the small hours of
Monday morning, to a vivid sense of danger.
Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother went
down and out into the street, just as the sky between the parapets of
the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying people on foot and
in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. “Black Smoke!” he heard
people crying, and again “Black Smoke!” The contagion of such a
unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on the
door-step, he saw another newsvendor approaching, and got a paper
forthwith. The man was running away with the rest, and selling his
papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and
panic.
And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic dispatch of the
Commander-in-Chief:
“The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a black and
poisonous vapour by means of rockets. They have smothered our
batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are
advancing slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way. It
is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Black Smoke but
in instant flight.”
That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the great
six-million city was stirring, slipping, running; presently it would be
pouring _en masse_ northward.
“Black Smoke!” the voices cried. “Fire!”
The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, a cart
carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks and curses, against the water
trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights went to and fro in the
houses, and some of the passing cabs flaunted unextinguished lamps. And
overhead the dawn was growing brighter, clear and steady and calm.
He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down
stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in
dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed, ejaculating.
As my brother began to realise the import of all these things, he
turned hastily to his own room, put all his available money—some ten
pounds altogether—into his pockets, and went out again into the
streets.
XV.
WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY.
It was while the curate had sat and talked so wildly to me under the
hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford, and while my brother was
watching the fugitives stream over Westminster Bridge, that the
Martians had resumed the offensive. So far as one can ascertain from
the conflicting accounts that have been put forth, the majority of them
remained busied with preparations in the Horsell pit until nine that
night, hurrying on some operation that disengaged huge volumes of green
smoke.
But three certainly came out about eight o’clock and, advancing slowly
and cautiously, made their way through Byfleet and Pyrford towards
Ripley and Weybridge, and so came in sight of the expectant batteries
against the setting sun. These Martians did not advance in a body, but
in a line, each perhaps a mile and a half from his nearest fellow. They
communicated with one another by means of sirenlike howls, running up
and down the scale from one note to another.
It was this howling and firing of the guns at Ripley and St. George’s
Hill that we had heard at Upper Halliford. The Ripley gunners,
unseasoned artillery volunteers who ought never to have been placed in
such a position, fired one wild, premature, ineffectual volley, and
bolted on horse and foot through the deserted village, while the
Martian, without using his Heat-Ray, walked serenely over their guns,
stepped gingerly among them, passed in front of them, and so came
unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, which he destroyed.
The St. George’s Hill men, however, were better led or of a better
mettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they were, they seem to have been
quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to them. They laid their guns
as deliberately as if they had been on parade, and fired at about a
thousand yards’ range.
The shells flashed all round him, and he was seen to advance a few
paces, stagger, and go down. Everybody yelled together, and the guns
were reloaded in frantic haste. The overthrown Martian set up a
prolonged ululation, and immediately a second glittering giant,
answering him, appeared over the trees to the south. It would seem that
a leg of the tripod had been smashed by one of the shells. The whole of
the second volley flew wide of the Martian on the ground, and,
simultaneously, both his companions brought their Heat-Rays to bear on
the battery. The ammunition blew up, the pine trees all about the guns
flashed into fire, and only one or two of the men who were already
running over the crest of the hill escaped.
After this it would seem that the three took counsel together and
halted, and the scouts who were watching them report that they remained
absolutely stationary for the next half hour. The Martian who had been
overthrown crawled tediously out of his hood, a small brown figure,
oddly suggestive from that distance of a speck of blight, and
apparently engaged in the repair of his support. About nine he had
finished, for his cowl was then seen above the trees again.
It was a few minutes past nine that night when these three sentinels
were joined by four other Martians, each carrying a thick black tube. A
similar tube was handed to each of the three, and the seven proceeded
to distribute themselves at equal distances along a curved line between
St. George’s Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of
Ripley.
A dozen rockets sprang out of the hills before them so soon as they
began to move, and warned the waiting batteries about Ditton and Esher.
At the same time four of their fighting machines, similarly armed with
tubes, crossed the river, and two of them, black against the western
sky, came into sight of myself and the curate as we hurried wearily and
painfully along the road that runs northward out of Halliford. They
moved, as it seemed to us, upon a cloud, for a milky mist covered the
fields and rose to a third of their height.
At this sight the curate cried faintly in his throat, and began
running; but I knew it was no good running from a Martian, and I turned
aside and crawled through dewy nettles and brambles into the broad
ditch by the side of the road. He looked back, saw what I was doing,
and turned to join me.
The two halted, the nearer to us standing and facing Sunbury, the
remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the evening star, away
towards Staines.
The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took up their
positions in the huge crescent about their cylinders in absolute
silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never
since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still.
To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the
same effect—the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling
night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the stars, the afterglow
of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St. George’s Hill and the
woods of Painshill.
But facing that crescent everywhere—at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton,
Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and across
the flat grass meadows to the north of it, wherever a cluster of trees
or village houses gave sufficient cover—the guns were waiting. The
signal rockets burst and rained their sparks through the night and