The war of the worlds
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.