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

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE “THUNDER CHILD”

 

Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday

have annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself

slowly through the home counties. Not only along the road through

Barnet, but also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the

roads eastward to Southend and Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames

to Deal and Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one could

have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above

London every northward and eastward road running out of the tangled

maze of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming

fugitives, each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress. I

have set forth at length in the last chapter my brother’s account of

the road through Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise

how that swarming of black dots appeared to one of those concerned.

Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human

beings moved and suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and

Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would have been but a drop

in that current. And this was no disciplined march; it was a

stampede—a stampede gigantic and terrible—without order and without

a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving

headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the

massacre of mankind.

 

Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network of

streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents, gardens—

already derelict—spread out like a huge map, and in the southward

BLOTTED. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would have seemed as if

some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart. Steadily,

incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting out

ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising

ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found valley,

exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting paper.

 

And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the river,

the glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and methodically

spreading their poison cloud over this patch of country and then over

that, laying it again with their steam jets when it had served its

purpose, and taking possession of the conquered country. They do not

seem to have aimed at extermination so much as at complete

demoralisation and the destruction of any opposition. They exploded

any stores of powder they came upon, cut every telegraph, and wrecked

the railways here and there. They were hamstringing mankind. They

seemed in no hurry to extend the field of their operations, and did

not come beyond the central part of London all that day. It is

possible that a very considerable number of people in London stuck to

their houses through Monday morning. Certain it is that many died at

home suffocated by the Black Smoke.

 

Until about midday the Pool of London was an astonishing scene.

Steamboats and shipping of all sorts lay there, tempted by the

enormous sums of money offered by fugitives, and it is said that many

who swam out to these vessels were thrust off with boathooks and

drowned. About one o’clock in the afternoon the thinning remnant of a

cloud of the black vapour appeared between the arches of Blackfriars

Bridge. At that the Pool became a scene of mad confusion, fighting,

and collision, and for some time a multitude of boats and barges

jammed in the northern arch of the Tower Bridge, and the sailors and

lightermen had to fight savagely against the people who swarmed upon

them from the riverfront. People were actually clambering down the

piers of the bridge from above.

 

When, an hour later, a Martian appeared beyond the Clock Tower and

waded down the river, nothing but wreckage floated above Limehouse.

 

Of the falling of the fifth cylinder I have presently to tell. The

sixth star fell at Wimbledon. My brother, keeping watch beside the

women in the chaise in a meadow, saw the green flash of it far beyond

the hills. On Tuesday the little party, still set upon getting across

the sea, made its way through the swarming country towards Colchester.

The news that the Martians were now in possession of the whole of

London was confirmed. They had been seen at Highgate, and even, it

was said, at Neasden. But they did not come into my brother’s view

until the morrow.

 

That day the scattered multitudes began to realise the urgent need

of provisions. As they grew hungry the rights of property ceased to

be regarded. Farmers were out to defend their cattle-sheds,

granaries, and ripening root crops with arms in their hands. A number

of people now, like my brother, had their faces eastward, and there

were some desperate souls even going back towards London to get food.

These were chiefly people from the northern suburbs, whose knowledge

of the Black Smoke came by hearsay. He heard that about half the

members of the government had gathered at Birmingham, and that

enormous quantities of high explosives were being prepared to be used

in automatic mines across the Midland counties.

 

He was also told that the Midland Railway Company had replaced the

desertions of the first day’s panic, had resumed traffic, and was

running northward trains from St. Albans to relieve the congestion of

the home counties. There was also a placard in Chipping Ongar

announcing that large stores of flour were available in the northern

towns and that within twenty-four hours bread would be distributed

among the starving people in the neighbourhood. But this intelligence

did not deter him from the plan of escape he had formed, and the three

pressed eastward all day, and heard no more of the bread distribution

than this promise. Nor, as a matter of fact, did anyone else hear

more of it. That night fell the seventh star, falling upon Primrose

Hill. It fell while Miss Elphinstone was watching, for she took that

duty alternately with my brother. She saw it.

 

On Wednesday the three fugitives—they had passed the night in a

field of unripe wheat—reached Chelmsford, and there a body of the

inhabitants, calling itself the Committee of Public Supply, seized the

pony as provisions, and would give nothing in exchange for it but the

promise of a share in it the next day. Here there were rumours of

Martians at Epping, and news of the destruction of Waltham Abbey

Powder Mills in a vain attempt to blow up one of the invaders.

 

People were watching for Martians here from the church towers. My

brother, very luckily for him as it chanced, preferred to push on at

once to the coast rather than wait for food, although all three of

them were very hungry. By midday they passed through Tillingham,

which, strangely enough, seemed to be quite silent and deserted, save

for a few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham they

suddenly came in sight of the sea, and the most amazing crowd of

shipping of all sorts that it is possible to imagine.

 

For after the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they came

on to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and

afterwards to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They

lay in a huge sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last

towards the Naze. Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks—

English, Scotch, French, Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches from the

Thames, yachts, electric boats; and beyond were ships of large burden,

a multitude of filthy colliers, trim merchantmen, cattle ships,

passenger boats, petroleum tanks, ocean tramps, an old white transport

even, neat white and grey liners from Southampton and Hamburg; and

along the blue coast across the Blackwater my brother could make out

dimly a dense swarm of boats chaffering with the people on the beach,

a swarm which also extended up the Blackwater almost to Maldon.

 

About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water,

almost, to my brother’s perception, like a water-logged ship. This

was the ram THUNDER CHILD. It was the only warship in sight, but far

away to the right over the smooth surface of the sea—for that day

there was a dead calm—lay a serpent of black smoke to mark the next

ironclads of the Channel Fleet, which hovered in an extended line,

steam up and ready for action, across the Thames estuary during the

course of the Martian conquest, vigilant and yet powerless to prevent

it.

 

At the sight of the sea, Mrs. Elphinstone, in spite of the

assurances of her sister-in-law, gave way to panic. She had never

been out of England before, she would rather die than trust herself

friendless in a foreign country, and so forth. She seemed, poor woman,

to imagine that the French and the Martians might prove very similar.

She had been growing increasingly hysterical, fearful, and depressed

during the two days’ journeyings. Her great idea was to return to

Stanmore. Things had been always well and safe at Stanmore. They

would find George at Stanmore.

 

It was with the greatest difficulty they could get her down to the

beach, where presently my