The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (best large ereader TXT) 📖

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.