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

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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 artilleryman. 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