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CHAPTER NINE

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.



CHAPTER TEN

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.



CHAPTER ELEVEN

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
whiskey, 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 whiskey," 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 Martians 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.



CHAPTER TWELVE

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 whiskey; 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.

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