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.
At this sight the curate cried faintly in his throat, and
began running; but I knew it was no good running from a
Martian, and I turned aside and crawled through dewy nettles
and brambles into the broad ditch by the side of the road.
He looked back, saw what I was doing, and turned to join
me.
The two halted, the nearer to us standing and facing Sunbury,
the remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the
evening star, away towards Staines.
The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they
took up their positions in the huge crescent about their
cylinders in absolute silence. It was a crescent with twelve
miles between its horns. Never since the devising of gun-powder
was the beginning of a battle so still. To us and to
an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the
same effect -- the Martians seemed in solitary possession of
the darkling night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the
stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from
St. George's Hill and the woods of Painshill.
But facing that crescent everywhere -- at Staines, Hounslow,
Ditton, Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the
river, and across the flat grass meadows to the north of it,
wherever a cluster of trees or village houses gave sufficient
cover -- the guns were waiting. The signal rockets burst and
rained their sparks through the night and vanished, and the
spirit of all those watching batteries rose to a tense expectation.
The Martians had but to advance into the line of fire,
and instantly those motionless black forms of men, those
guns glittering so darkly in the early night, would explode
into a thunderous fury of battle.
No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand
of those vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in mine,
was the riddle -- how much they understood of us. Did they
grasp that we in our millions were organized, disciplined,
working together? Or did they interpret our spurts of fire,
the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady investment of
their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of
onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they
might exterminate us? (At that time no one knew what food
they needed.) A hundred such questions struggled together
in my mind as I watched that vast sentinel shape. And in
the back of my mind was the sense of all the huge unknown
and hidden forces Londonward. Had they prepared pitfalls?
Were the powder mills at Hounslow ready as a snare? Would
the Londoners have the heart and courage to make a greater
Moscow of their mighty province of houses?
Then, after an interminable time, as it seemed to us,
crouching and peering through the hedge, came a sound
like the distant concussion of a gun. Another nearer, and
then another. And then the Martian beside us raised his tube
on high and discharged it, gunwise, with a heavy report that
made the ground heave. The one towards Staines answered
him. There was no flash, no smoke, simply that loaded
detonation.
I was so excited by these heavy minute-guns following one
another that I so far forgot my personal safety and my
scalded hands as to clamber up into the hedge and stare
towards Sunbury. As I did so a second report followed, and
a big projectile hurtled overhead towards Hounslow. I expected
at least to see smoke or fire, or some such evidence
of its work. But all I saw was the deep blue sky above, with
one solitary star, and the white mist spreading wide and low
beneath. And there had been no crash, no answering explosion.
The silence was restored; the minute lengthened to
three.
"What has happened?" said the curate, standing up beside
me.
"Heaven knows!" said I.
A bat flickered by and vanished. A distant tumult of
shouting began and ceased. I looked again at the Martian,
and saw he was now moving eastward along the riverbank,
with a swift, rolling motion,
Every moment I expected the fire of some hidden battery
to spring upon him; but the evening calm was unbroken.
The figure of the Martian grew smaller as he receded, and
presently the mist and the gathering night had swallowed
him up. By a common impulse we clambered higher. Towards
Sunbury was a dark appearance, as though a conical hill
had suddenly come into being there, hiding our view of the
farther country; and then, remoter across the river, over
Walton, we saw another such summit. These hill-like forms
grew lower and broader even as we stared.
Moved by a sudden thought, I looked northward, and
there I perceived a third of these cloudy black kopjes had
risen.
Everything had suddenly become very still. Far away to
the southeast, marking the quiet, we heard the Martians
hooting to one another, and then the air quivered again with
the distant thud of their guns. But the earthly artillery made
no reply.
Now at the time we could not understand these things, but
later I was to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes that
gathered in the twilight. Each of the Martians, standing in
the great crescent I have described, had discharged, by
means of the gunlike tube he carried, a huge canister over
whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other possible cover
for guns, chanced to be in front of him. Some fired only one
of these, some two -- as in the case of the one we had seen;
the one at Ripley is said to have discharged no fewer than
five at that time. These canisters smashed on striking the
ground -- they did not explode -- and incontinently disengaged
an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour, coiling and pouring
upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous
hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding
country. And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its
pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes.
It was heavy, this vapour, heavier than the densest smoke,
so that, after the first tumultuous uprush and outflow of its
impact, it sank down through the air and poured over the
ground in a manner rather liquid than gaseous, abandoning
the hills, and streaming into the valleys and ditches and
watercourses even as I have heard the carbonic-acid gas that
pours from volcanic clefts is wont to do. And where it came
upon water some chemical action occurred, and the surface
would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank
slowly and made way for more. The scum was absolutely
insoluble, and it is a strange thing, seeing the instant effect
of the gas, that one could drink without hurt the water from
which it had been strained. The vapour did not diffuse as a
true gas would do. It hung together in banks, flowing sluggishly
down the slope of the land and driving reluctantly
before the wind, and very slowly it combined with the mist
and moisture of the air, and sank to the earth in the form
of dust. Save that an unknown element giving a group of
four lines in the blue of the spectrum is concerned, we are
still entirely ignorant of the nature of this substance.
Once the tumultuous upheaval of its dispersion was over,
the black smoke clung so closely to the ground, even before
its precipitation, that fifty feet up in the air, on the roofs
and upper stories of high houses and on great trees, there was
a chance of escaping its poison altogether, as was proved even
that night at Street Cobham and Ditton.
The man who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful
story of the strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he looked
down from the church spire and saw the houses of the village
rising like ghosts out of its inky nothingness. For a day and
a half he remained there, weary, starving and sun-scorched,
the earth under the blue sky and against the prospect of the
distant hills a velvet-black expanse, with red roofs, green
trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns, outhouses,
and walls, rising here and there into the sunlight.
But that was at Street Cobham, where the black vapour
was allowed to remain until it sank of its own accord into
the ground. As a rule the Martians, when it had served its
purpose, cleared the air of it again by wading into it and
directing a jet of steam upon it.
This they did with the vapour banks near us, as we saw
in the starlight from the window of a deserted house at Upper
Halliford, whither we had returned. From there we could
see the searchlights on Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill
going to and fro, and about eleven the windows rattled, and
we heard the sound of the huge siege guns that had been put
in position there. These continued intermittently for the space
of a quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the invisible
Martians at Hampton and Ditton, and then the pale beams
of the electric light vanished, and were replaced by a bright
red glow.
Then the fourth cylinder fell -- a brilliant green meteor -- as
I learned afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the
Richmond and Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful
cannonade far away in the southwest, due, I believe, to guns
being fired haphazard before the black vapour could overwhelm
the gunners.
So, setting about it as methodically as men might smoke
out a wasps' nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling
vapour over the Londonward country. The horns of the
crescent slowly moved apart, until at last they formed a line
from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden. All night through their
destructive tubes advanced. Never once, after the Martian
at St. George's Hill was brought down, did they give the
artillery the ghost of a chance against them. Wherever there
was a possibility of guns being laid for them unseen, a fresh
canister of the black vapour was discharged, and where the
guns were openly displayed the Heat-Ray was brought to
bear.
By midnight the blazing trees along the slopes of Richmond
Park and the glare of Kingston Hill threw their light
upon a network of black smoke, blotting out the whole valley
of the Thames and extending as far as the eye could reach.
And through this two Martians slowly waded, and turned
their hissing steam jets this way and that.
They were sparing of the Heat-Ray that night, either because
they had but a limited supply of material for its
production or because they did not wish to destroy the
country but only to crush and overawe the opposition they
had aroused. In the latter aim they certainly succeeded. Sunday
night was the end of the organised opposition to their
movements. After that no body of men would stand against
them, so hopeless was the enterprise. Even the crews of the
torpedo-boats and destroyers that had brought their quickfirers
up the Thames refused to stop, mutinied, and went
down again. The only offensive operation men ventured upon
after that night was the preparation of mines and pitfalls,
and even in that their energies were frantic and spasmodic.
One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those
batteries towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the twilight.
Survivors there were none. One may picture the orderly
expectation, the officers alert and watchful, the gunners ready,
the ammunition piled to hand, the limber gunners with their
horses and waggons, the groups of civilian spectators standing
as near as they were permitted, the evening stillness, the
ambulances and hospital tents with the burned and wounded
from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of the shots the
Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling over the
trees and houses and smashing amid the neighbouring fields.
One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention,
the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness
advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight
to a palpable darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist
of vapour striding upon its victims, men and horses near it
seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling headlong, shouts of
dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking and
writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the
opaque cone of smoke. And then night and extinction --
nothing but a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its
dead.
Before dawn the black vapour was pouring through the
streets of Richmond, and the disintegrating organism of
government was, with a last expiring effort, rousing the
population of London to the necessity of flight.