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

under an armour of metallic shields, have completely

wrecked Woking station with the adjacent houses, and massacred an

entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment. No details are known.

Maxims have been absolutely useless against their armour; the field

guns have been disabled by them. Flying hussars have been galloping

into Chertsey. The Martians appear to be moving slowly towards

Chertsey or Windsor. Great anxiety prevails in West Surrey, and

earthworks are being thrown up to check the advance Londonward.” That

was how the Sunday SUN put it, and a clever and remarkably prompt

“handbook” article in the REFEREE compared the affair to a menagerie

suddenly let loose in a village.

 

No one in London knew positively of the nature of the armoured

Martians, and there was still a fixed idea that these monsters must be

sluggish: “crawling,” “creeping painfully”—such expressions occurred

in almost all the earlier reports. None of the telegrams could have

been written by an eyewitness of their advance. The Sunday papers

printed separate editions as further news came to hand, some even in

default of it. But there was practically nothing more to tell people

until late in the afternoon, when the authorities gave the press

agencies the news in their possession. It was stated that the people

of Walton and Weybridge, and all the district were pouring along the

roads Londonward, and that was all.

 

My brother went to church at the Foundling Hospital in the morning,

still in ignorance of what had happened on the previous night. There

he heard allusions made to the invasion, and a special prayer for

peace. Coming out, he bought a REFEREE. He became alarmed at the

news in this, and went again to Waterloo station to find out if

communication were restored. The omnibuses, carriages, cyclists, and

innumerable people walking in their best clothes seemed scarcely

affected by the strange intelligence that the news venders were

disseminating. People were interested, or, if alarmed, alarmed only

on account of the local residents. At the station he heard for the

first time that the Windsor and Chertsey lines were now interrupted.

The porters told him that several remarkable telegrams had been

received in the morning from Byfleet and Chertsey stations, but that

these had abruptly ceased. My brother could get very little precise

detail out of them.

 

“There’s fighting going on about Weybridge” was the extent of their

information.

 

The train service was now very much disorganised. Quite a number

of people who had been expecting friends from places on the SouthWestern network were standing about the station. One grey-headed old

gentleman came and abused the SouthWestern Company bitterly to my

brother. “It wants showing up,” he said.

 

One or two trains came in from Richmond, Putney, and Kingston,

containing people who had gone out for a day’s boating and found the

locks closed and a feeling of panic in the air. A man in a blue and

white blazer addressed my brother, full of strange tidings.

 

“There’s hosts of people driving into Kingston in traps and carts

and things, with boxes of valuables and all that,” he said. “They

come from Molesey and Weybridge and Walton, and they say there’s been

guns heard at Chertsey, heavy firing, and that mounted soldiers have

told them to get off at once because the Martians are coming. We

heard guns firing at Hampton Court station, but we thought it was

thunder. What the dickens does it all mean? The Martians can’t get

out of their pit, can they?”

 

My brother could not tell him.

 

Afterwards he found that the vague feeling of alarm had spread to

the clients of the underground railway, and that the Sunday

excursionists began to return from all over the SouthWestern “lung”—

Barnes, Wimbledon, Richmond Park, Kew, and so forth—at unnaturally

early hours; but not a soul had anything more than vague hearsay to

tell of. Everyone connected with the terminus seemed ill-tempered.

 

About five o’clock the gathering crowd in the station was immensely

excited by the opening of the line of communication, which is almost

invariably closed, between the South-Eastern and the SouthWestern

stations, and the passage of carriage trucks bearing huge guns and

carriages crammed with soldiers. These were the guns that were

brought up from Woolwich and Chatham to cover Kingston. There was an

exchange of pleasantries: “You’ll get eaten!” “We’re the beast-tamers!” and so forth. A little while after that a squad of police

came into the station and began to clear the public off the platforms,

and my brother went out into the street again.

 

The church bells were ringing for evensong, and a squad of

Salvation Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road. On the bridge

a number of loafers were watching a curious brown scum that came

drifting down the stream in patches. The sun was just setting, and the

Clock Tower and the Houses of Parliament rose against one of the most

peaceful skies it is possible to imagine, a sky of gold, barred with

long transverse stripes of reddish-purple cloud. There was talk of a

floating body. One of the men there, a reservist he said he was, told

my brother he had seen the heliograph flickering in the west.

 

In Wellington Street my brother met a couple of sturdy roughs who

had just been rushed out of Fleet Street with still-wet newspapers and

staring placards. “Dreadful catastrophe!” they bawled one to the

other down Wellington Street. “Fighting at Weybridge! Full

description! Repulse of the Martians! London in Danger!” He had to

give threepence for a copy of that paper.

 

Then it was, and then only, that he realised something of the full

power and terror of these monsters. He learned that they were not

merely a handful of small sluggish creatures, but that they were minds

swaying vast mechanical bodies; and that they could move swiftly and

smite with such power that even the mightiest guns could not stand

against them.

 

They were described as “vast spiderlike machines, nearly a hundred

feet high, capable of the speed of an express train, and able to shoot

out a beam of intense heat.” Masked batteries, chiefly of field guns,

had been planted in the country about Horsell Common, and especially

between the Woking district and London. Five of the machines had been

seen moving towards the Thames, and one, by a happy chance, had been

destroyed. In the other cases the shells had missed, and the

batteries had been at once annihilated by the Heat-Rays. Heavy losses

of soldiers were mentioned, but the tone of the dispatch was

optimistic.

 

The Martians had been repulsed; they were not invulnerable. They

had retreated to their triangle of cylinders again, in the circle

about Woking. Signallers with heliographs were pushing forward upon

them from all sides. Guns were in rapid transit from Windsor,

Portsmouth, Aldershot, Woolwich—even from the north; among others,

long wire-guns of ninety-five tons from Woolwich. Altogether one

hundred and sixteen were in position or being hastily placed, chiefly

covering London. Never before in England had there been such a vast

or rapid concentration of military material.

 

Any further cylinders that fell, it was hoped, could be destroyed

at once by high explosives, which were being rapidly manufactured and

distributed. No doubt, ran the report, the situation was of the

strangest and gravest description, but the public was exhorted to

avoid and discourage panic. No doubt the Martians were strange and

terrible in the extreme, but at the outside there could not be more

than twenty of them against our millions.

 

The authorities had reason to suppose, from the size of the

cylinders, that at the outside there could not be more than five in

each cylinder—fifteen altogether. And one at least was disposed of—

perhaps more. The public would be fairly warned of the approach of

danger, and elaborate measures were being taken for the protection of

the people in the threatened southwestern suburbs. And so, with

reiterated assurances of the safety of London and the ability of the

authorities to cope with the difficulty, this quasi-proclamation

closed.

 

This was printed in enormous type on paper so fresh that it was

still wet, and there had been no time to add a word of comment. It

was curious, my brother said, to see how ruthlessly the usual contents

of the paper had been hacked and taken out to give this place.

 

All down Wellington Street people could be seen fluttering out the

pink sheets and reading, and the Strand was suddenly noisy with the

voices of an army of hawkers following these pioneers. Men came

scrambling off buses to secure copies. Certainly this news excited

people intensely, whatever their previous apathy. The shutters of a

map shop in the Strand were being taken down, my brother said, and a

man in his Sunday raiment, lemon-yellow gloves even, was visible

inside the window hastily fastening maps of Surrey to the glass.

 

Going on along the Strand to Trafalgar Square, the paper in his

hand, my brother saw some of the fugitives from West Surrey. There

was a man with his wife and two boys and some articles of furniture in

a cart such as greengrocers use. He was driving from the direction of

Westminster Bridge; and close behind him came a hay waggon with five

or six respectable-looking people in it, and some boxes and bundles.

The faces of these people were haggard, and their entire appearance

contrasted conspicuously with the Sabbath-best appearance of the

people on the omnibuses. People in fashionable clothing peeped at

them out of cabs. They stopped at the Square as if undecided which

way to take, and finally turned eastward along the Strand. Some way

behind these came a man in workday clothes, riding one of those old-fashioned tricycles with a small front wheel. He was dirty and white

in the face.

 

My brother turned down towards Victoria, and met a number of such

people. He had a vague idea that he might see something of me. He

noticed an unusual number of police regulating the traffic. Some of

the refugees were exchanging news with the people on the omnibuses.

One was professing to have seen the Martians. “Boilers on stilts, I

tell you, striding along like men.” Most of them were excited and

animated by their strange experience.

 

Beyond Victoria the public-houses were doing a lively trade with

these arrivals. At all the street corners groups of people were

reading papers, talking excitedly, or staring at these unusual Sunday

visitors. They seemed to increase as night drew on, until at last the

roads, my brother said, were like Epsom High Street on a Derby Day. My

brother addressed several of these fugitives and got unsatisfactory

answers from most.

 

None of them could tell him any news of Woking except one man, who

assured him that Woking had been entirely destroyed on the previous

night.

 

“I come from Byfleet,” he said; “man on a bicycle came through the

place in the early morning, and ran from door to door warning us to

come away. Then came soldiers. We went out to look, and there were

clouds of smoke to the south—nothing but smoke, and not a soul coming

that way. Then we heard the guns at Chertsey, and folks coming from

Weybridge. So I’ve locked up my house and come on.”

 

At the time there was a strong feeling in the streets that the

authorities were to blame for their incapacity to dispose of the

invaders without all this inconvenience.

 

About eight o’clock a noise of heavy firing was distinctly audible

all over the south of London. My brother could not hear it for the

traffic in the main thoroughfares, but by striking through the quiet

back streets to the river he was able to distinguish it quite plainly.

 

He walked