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BOOK ONE THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS 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 *** 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 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.