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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 from Westminster to his apartments near Regent's Park,

about two. He was now very anxious on my account, and disturbed at

the evident magnitude of the trouble. His mind was inclined to run,

even as mine had run on Saturday, on military details. He thought of

all those silent, expectant guns, of the suddenly nomadic countryside;

he tried to imagine "boilers on stilts" a hundred feet high.

There were one or two cartloads of refugees passing along Oxford

Street, and several in the Marylebone Road, but so slowly was the news

spreading that Regent Street and Portland Place were full of their

usual Sunday-night promenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and

along the edge of Regent's Park there were as many silent couples

"walking out" together under the scattered gas lamps as ever there had

been. The night was warm and still, and a little oppressive; the

sound of guns continued intermittently, and after midnight there

seemed to be sheet lightning in the south.

He read and re-read the paper, fearing the worst had happened to me.

He was restless, and after supper prowled out again aimlessly. He

returned and tried in vain to divert his attention to his examination

notes. He went to bed a little after midnight, and was awakened from

lurid dreams in the small hours of Monday by the sound of door

knockers, feet running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour

of bells. Red reflections danced on the ceiling. For a moment he lay

astonished, wondering whether day had come or the world gone mad.

Then he jumped out of bed and ran to the window.

His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up and down

the street there were a dozen echoes to the noise of his window sash,

and heads in every kind of night disarray appeared. Enquiries were

being shouted. "They are coming!" bawled a policeman, hammering at

the door; "the Martians are coming!" and hurried to the next door.

The sound of drumming and trumpeting came from the Albany Street

Barracks, and every church within earshot was hard at work killing

sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin. There was a noise of doors

opening, and window after window in the houses opposite flashed from

darkness into yellow illumination.

Up the street came galloping a closed carriage, bursting abruptly

into noise at the corner, rising to a clattering climax under the

window, and dying away slowly in the distance. Close on the rear of

this came a couple of cabs, the forerunners of a long procession of

flying vehicles, going for the most part to Chalk Farm station, where

the North-Western special trains were loading up, instead of coming

down the gradient into Euston.

For a long time my brother stared out of the window in blank

astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after door, and

delivering their incomprehensible message. Then the door behind him

opened, and the man who lodged across the landing came in, dressed

only in shirt, trousers, and slippers, his braces loose about his

waist, his hair disordered from his pillow.

"What the devil is it?" he asked. "A fire? What a devil of a

row!"

They both craned their heads out of the window, straining to hear

what the policemen were shouting. People were coming out of the side

streets, and standing in groups at the corners talking.

"What the devil is it all about?" said my brother's fellow lodger.

My brother answered him vaguely and began to dress, running with

each garment to the window in order to miss nothing of the growing

excitement. And presently men selling unnaturally early newspapers

came bawling into the street:

"London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond

defences forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!"

And all about him--in the rooms below, in the houses on each side

and across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the

hundred other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the Westbourne

Park district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kilburn

and St. John's Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and

Highbury and Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the

vastness of London from Ealing to East Ham--people were rubbing their

eyes, and opening windows to stare out and ask aimless questions,

dressing hastily as the first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew

through the streets. It was the dawn of the great panic. London,

which had gone to bed on Sunday night oblivious and inert, was

awakened, in the small hours of Monday morning, to a vivid sense of

danger.

Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother went

down and out into the street, just as the sky between the parapets of

the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying people on foot

and in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. "Black Smoke!" he

heard people crying, and again "Black Smoke!" The contagion of such

a unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on the

door-step, he saw another news vender approaching, and got a paper

forthwith. The man was running away with the rest, and selling his

papers for a shilling each as he ran--a grotesque mingling of profit

and panic.

And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic dispatch of

the Commander-in-Chief:

"The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a black and

poisonous vapour by means of rockets. They have smothered our

batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are

advancing slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way. It

is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Black Smoke

but in instant flight."

That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the great

six-million city was stirring, slipping, running; presently it would

be pouring _en masse_ northward.

"Black Smoke!" the voices cried. "Fire!"

The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, a cart

carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks and curses, against the water

trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights went to and fro in the

houses, and some of the passing cabs flaunted unextinguished lamps.

And overhead the dawn was growing brighter, clear and steady and calm.

He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down

stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in

dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating.

As my brother began to realise the import of all these things, he

turned hastily to his own room, put all his available money--some ten

pounds altogether--into his pockets, and went out again into the

streets.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY

It was while the curate had sat and talked so wildly to me under

the hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford, and while my brother was

watching the fugitives stream over Westminster Bridge, that the

Martians had resumed the offensive. So far as one can ascertain from

the conflicting accounts that have been put forth, the majority of

them remained busied with preparations in the Horsell pit until nine

that night, hurrying on some operation that disengaged huge volumes of

green smoke.

But three certainly came out about eight o'clock and, advancing

slowly and cautiously, made their way through Byfleet and Pyrford

towards Ripley and Weybridge, and so came in sight of the expectant

batteries against the setting sun. These Martians did not advance in

a body, but in a line, each perhaps a mile and a half from his nearest

fellow. They communicated with one another by means of sirenlike

howls, running up and down the scale from one note to another.

It was this howling and firing of the guns at Ripley and St.

George's Hill that we had heard at Upper Halliford. The Ripley

gunners, unseasoned artillery volunteers who ought never to have been

placed in such a position, fired one wild, premature, ineffectual

volley, and bolted on horse and foot through the deserted village,

while the Martian, without using his Heat-Ray, walked serenely over

their guns, stepped gingerly among them, passed in front of them, and

so came unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, which he

destroyed.

The St. George's Hill men, however, were better led or of a better

mettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they were, they seem to have been

quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to them. They laid their

guns as deliberately as if they had been on parade, and fired at about

a thousand yards' range.

The shells flashed all round him, and he was seen to advance a few

paces, stagger, and go down. Everybody yelled together, and the guns

were reloaded in frantic haste. The overthrown Martian set up a

prolonged ululation, and immediately a second glittering giant,

answering him, appeared over the trees to the south. It would seem

that a leg of the tripod had been smashed by one of the shells. The

whole of the second volley flew wide of the Martian on the ground,

and, simultaneously, both his companions brought their Heat-Rays to

bear on the battery. The ammunition blew up, the pine trees all about

the guns flashed into fire, and only one or two of the men who were

already running over the crest of the hill escaped.

After this it would seem that the three took counsel together and

halted, and the scouts who were watching them report that they

remained absolutely stationary for the next half hour. The Martian

who had been overthrown crawled tediously out of his hood, a small

brown figure, oddly suggestive from that distance of a speck of

blight, and apparently engaged in the repair of his support. About

nine he had finished, for his cowl was then seen above the trees

again.

It was a few minutes past nine that night when these three

sentinels were joined by four other Martians, each carrying a thick

black tube. A similar tube was handed to each of the three, and the

seven proceeded to distribute themselves at equal distances along a

curved line between St. George's Hill, Weybridge, and the village of

Send, southwest of Ripley.

A dozen rockets sprang out of the hills before them so soon as they

began to move, and warned the waiting batteries about Ditton and

Esher. At the same time four of their fighting machines, similarly

armed with tubes, crossed the river, and two of them, black against

the western sky, came into sight of myself and the curate as we

hurried wearily and painfully along the road that runs northward out

of Halliford. They moved, as it seemed to us, upon a cloud, for a

milky mist covered the fields and rose to a third of their height.