第 10 页

think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent."

For a time he sat in blank silence.

"But how can we escape?" he asked, suddenly. "They are

invulnerable, they are pitiless."

"Neither the one nor, perhaps, the other," I answered. "And the

mightier they are the more sane and wary should we be. One of them

was killed yonder not three hours ago."

"Killed!" he said, staring about him. "How can God's ministers be

killed?"

"I saw it happen." I proceeded to tell him. "We have chanced to

come in for the thick of it," said I, "and that is all."

"What is that flicker in the sky?" he asked abruptly.

I told him it was the heliograph signalling--that it was the sign

of human help and effort in the sky.

"We are in the midst of it," I said, "quiet as it is. That flicker

in the sky tells of the gathering storm. Yonder, I take it are the

Martians, and Londonward, where those hills rise about Richmond and

Kingston and the trees give cover, earthworks are being thrown up and

guns are being placed. Presently the Martians will be coming this way

again."

And even as I spoke he sprang to his feet and stopped me by a

gesture.

"Listen!" he said.

From beyond the low hills across the water came the dull resonance

of distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still.

A cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the

west the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of

Weybridge and Shepperton and the hot, still splendour of the sunset.

"We had better follow this path," I said, "northward."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IN LONDON

My younger brother was in London when the Martians fell at Woking.

He was a medical student working for an imminent examination, and he

heard nothing of the arrival until Saturday morning. The morning

papers on Saturday contained, in addition to lengthy special articles

on the planet Mars, on life in the planets, and so forth, a brief and

vaguely worded telegram, all the more striking for its brevity.

The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd, had killed a

number of people with a quick-firing gun, so the story ran. The

telegram concluded with the words: "Formidable as they seem to be, the

Martians have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen, and,

indeed, seem incapable of doing so. Probably this is due to the

relative strength of the earth's gravitational energy." On that last

text their leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.

Of course all the students in the crammer's biology class, to which

my brother went that day, were intensely interested, but there were no

signs of any unusual excitement in the streets. The afternoon papers

puffed scraps of news under big headlines. They had nothing to tell

beyond the movements of troops about the common, and the burning of

the pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, until eight. Then the

_St. James's Gazette_, in an extra-special edition, announced the bare

fact of the interruption of telegraphic communication. This was

thought to be due to the falling of burning pine trees across the

line. Nothing more of the fighting was known that night, the night of

my drive to Leatherhead and back.

My brother felt no anxiety about us, as he knew from the

description in the papers that the cylinder was a good two miles from

my house. He made up his mind to run down that night to me, in order,

as he says, to see the Things before they were killed. He dispatched

a telegram, which never reached me, about four o'clock, and spent the

evening at a music hall.

In London, also, on Saturday night there was a thunderstorm, and my

brother reached Waterloo in a cab. On the platform from which the

midnight train usually starts he learned, after some waiting, that an

accident prevented trains from reaching Woking that night. The nature

of the accident he could not ascertain; indeed, the railway

authorities did not clearly know at that time. There was very little

excitement in the station, as the officials, failing to realise that

anything further than a breakdown between Byfleet and Woking junction

had occurred, were running the theatre trains which usually passed

through Woking round by Virginia Water or Guildford. They were busy

making the necessary arrangements to alter the route of the

Southampton and Portsmouth Sunday League excursions. A nocturnal

newspaper reporter, mistaking my brother for the traffic manager, to

whom he bears a slight resemblance, waylaid and tried to interview

him. Few people, excepting the railway officials, connected the

breakdown with the Martians.

I have read, in another account of these events, that on Sunday

morning "all London was electrified by the news from Woking." As a

matter of fact, there was nothing to justify that very extravagant

phrase. Plenty of Londoners did not hear of the Martians until the

panic of Monday morning. Those who did took some time to realise all

that the hastily worded telegrams in the Sunday papers conveyed. The

majority of people in London do not read Sunday papers.

The habit of personal security, moreover, is so deeply fixed in the

Londoner's mind, and startling intelligence so much a matter of course

in the papers, that they could read without any personal tremors:

"About seven o'clock last night the Martians came out of the cylinder,

and, moving about 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

South-Western network were standing about the station. One

grey-headed old gentleman came and abused the South-Western 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 South-Western

"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 South-Western

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