The war of the worlds
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