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| The war of the worlds: At the window: Chapter Eleven |
It seemed true 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
recognize 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 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 was 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 hindered carriages
still upon the rails.
Between these three main centers 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, 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 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 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, 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 was crawling slowly toward their second cylinder under the 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 forequarter 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 a parade, it had been a minute before— then stumble, bang, swish!’ ‘Wiped out!’ he said.
He had hidden 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, the HeatRay 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 smoldering 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. 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 being 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. Shining with the growing light of the east, three 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 vapor 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
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