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The War of the Worlds
Chapter 11. AT THE WINDOW
I have already said that my storms of emotion have a trick of exhausting themselves.
After a time I discovered that I was cold and wet, and with little pools of water about me on the stair carpet.
I got up almost mechanically, went into the dining room and drank some whisky, and then I was moved to change my clothes.
After I had done that I went upstairs to my study, but why I did so I don't know.
The window of my study looks over the trees and the railway towards Horsell Common.
In the hurry of our departure this window had been left open.
The passage was dark, and, by contrast with the picture the window frame enclosed, the side of the room seemed impenetrably dark.
I stopped short in the doorway, caught by the sudden darkness and the strange view.
The thunderstorm had passed, leaving the air cool and the ground dripping.
The towers of the Oriental College and the pine trees about it had gone.
Very far away, lit by a vivid red glare, the common about the sand-pits was visible.
Across the light huge black shapes, grotesque and strange, moved busily to and fro.
The whole country in that direction seemed to be on fire.
A broad hillside was set with tiny tongues of flame.
They swayed and writhed with gusts of the dying storm.
The flames threw a red reflection upon the cloud scud above.
Every now and then a haze of smoke from some nearer fire drove across the window and hid the Martian shapes.
I couldn't see what they were doing, nor the clear form of them, nor recognise the black objects they were busy with.
Neither could I see the nearer fire, though the reflections of it danced on the wall and ceiling of the study.
A sharp, resinous smell of burning was in the air.
I closed the door noiselessly and crept towards the window.
As I did so, the view opened out until it reached the houses about Woking station.
On the other side it reached to the charred, blackened pine woods of Byfleet.
There was a light down below the hill on the railway near the arch.
Several houses along the Maybury road and the streets near the station were glowing ruins.
The light on the railway puzzled me, a black heap with a vivid glare, and to its right a row of yellow oblongs.
Then I saw this was a wrecked train, the front part smashed and on fire, the back carriages still upon the rails.
Between these three main centres of light, the houses, the train, and the burning county towards Chobham, stretched irregular patches of dark country, broken here.
There by intervals of dimly glowing and smoking ground.
It was the strangest sight, that black expanse set with fire.
It reminded me, more than anything else, of the Potteries at night.
At first I could see no people at all, though I looked hard for them.
Later I saw against the light of Woking station a number of black figures hurrying one after the other across the line.
And this was the little world in which I had been living safely for years, this fiery chaos!
I still didn't know what had happened in the last seven hours.
I was beginning to guess the relation between these mechanical giants and the slow lumps from the cylinder.
I turned my desk chair to the window with a strange feeling of impersonal interest.
I sat down and stared at the blackened country.
I looked particularly at the three gigantic black things moving in the glare about the sand-pits.
They seemed amazingly busy, I began to ask myself what they could be.
Were they intelligent machines? Such a thing I felt was impossible.
Or did a Martian sit within each one, ruling, directing, using, much as a man's brain sits and rules in his body?
I began to compare the things to human machines.
For the first time in my life I asked how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.
The storm had left the sky clear over the smoke of the burning land.
The little fading point of Mars dropped into the west when a soldier came into my garden.
I heard scraping at the fence, roused from my tiredness, looked down and dimly saw him climbing over.
At the sight of another human being my tiredness passed, and I leaned out of the window eagerly.
"Hist!" I said, in a whisper.
He stopped astride of the fence in doubt.
Then he came over and across the lawn to the corner of the house, he bent down and stepped softly.
"Who's there?" he said, also whispering, standing under the window and looking up.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"God knows."
"Are you trying to hide?"
"That's it."
"Come into the house," I said.
I went down, unlocked the door, and let him in, and locked the door again.
I couldn't see his face, he was hatless, and his coat was unbuttoned.
"My God!" he said, as I drew him in.
"What has happened?" I asked.
"What hasn't?" In the darkness I could see he made a gesture of despair.
"They wiped us out, simply wiped us out," he repeated again and again.
He followed me, almost mechanically, into the dining room.
"Take some whisky," I said, pouring out a strong dose.
He drank it, he sat down before the table.
He put his head on his arms.
He began to sob and weep like a little boy.
I stood beside him, wondering, forgetting my own recent despair.
It was a long time before he could steady his nerves to answer my questions, and then he answered in a confused and broken way.
He was a driver in the artillery, and had only come into action about seven.
At that time firing was going on across the common.
And it was said the first party of Martians were crawling slowly towards their second cylinder under cover of a metal shield.
Later this shield staggered up on tripod legs and became the first of the fighting-machines I had seen.
The gun he drove had been unlimbered near Horsell, in order to command the sand-pits, and its arrival it was that had caused the action.
As the limber gunners went to the rear, his horse stepped in a rabbit hole and came down, throwing him into a depression of the ground.
At the same moment the gun exploded behind him, the ammunition blew up, there was fire all about him.
And he found himself lying under a heap of charred dead men and dead horses.
"I lay still," he said, "scared out of my wits, with the front part of a horse on top of me".
We'd been wiped out, and the smell, good God! Like burnt meat!
I was hurt across the back by the fall of the horse, and there I had to lie until I felt better.
Just like a parade it had been a minute before, then stumble, bang, swish!
"Wiped out!" he said.
He had hidden under the dead horse for a long time, peeping out secretly across the common.
The Cardigan men had tried a rush, in skirmishing order, at the pit, simply to be swept out of existence.
The monster rose to its feet, it began to walk slowly across the common.
People were running away, its hood turned about like a human head.
A kind of arm carried a complicated metal case, about which green flashes shone, and out of the funnel of this there smoked the Heat-Ray.
In a few minutes, there wasn't a living thing left upon the common.
Every bush and tree that wasn't already a blackened skeleton was burning.
The hussars had been on the road beyond the curve of the ground, and he saw nothing of them.
He heard the Maxims rattle for a time and then become still.
The giant saved Woking station and its group of houses until the last.
Then in a moment the Heat-Ray was brought to bear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins.
Then the Thing stopped its Heat-Ray, turning back on the artilleryman, waddled away toward the smouldering pine woods sheltering the second cylinder.
As it did so a second shining Titan built itself up out of the pit.
The second monster followed the first, and at that the artilleryman began to crawl very carefully across the hot heather ash towards Horsell.
He managed to get alive into the ditch by the side of the road, and so escaped to Woking.
There his story became broken, the place was impassable.
It seems there were a few people alive there, frantic for the most part and many burned and scalded.
He was turned aside by the fire, and hid among some almost scorching heaps of broken wall as one of the Martian giants returned.
He saw this one chase a man, catch him in one of its steely tentacles, and knock his head against a pine trunk.
At last, after nightfall, the artilleryman made a rush for it and got over the railway embankment.
Since then he had been hiding along towards Maybury, in the hope of getting out of danger towards London.
People were hiding in trenches and cellars, and many of the survivors had made off towards Woking village and Send.
He was thirsty until he found a water main near the railway arch smashed, water bubbling out like a spring on the road.
That was the story I got from him, bit by bit.
He grew calmer telling me and trying to make me see the things he had seen.
He had eaten no food since midday, he told me early in his story.
And I found some mutton and bread in the pantry and brought it into the room.
We lit no lamp for fear of attracting the Martians, and ever and again our hands would touch upon bread or meat.
As he talked, things about us came darkly out of the darkness, and the trampled bushes and broken rose trees outside the window grew clear.
It would seem that a number of men or animals had rushed across the lawn.
I began to see his face, blackened and tired, as no doubt mine was also.
When we had finished eating we went softly upstairs to my study, and I looked again out of the open window.
In one night the valley had become a valley of ashes.
The fires had died down now, Flames had been replaced by streamers of smoke.
The countless ruins of shattered and gutted houses now stood out.
Blasted and blackened trees, hidden by night, were thin and terrible in the dawn's pitiless light.
Yet here and there an object had escaped, a white railway signal, the end of a greenhouse, white and fresh among the wreckage.
Never before in the history of war had destruction been so random and so complete.
Three of the metal giants stood about the pit, shining in the growing light of the east.
Their cowls turned as though they were looking at the destruction they had made.
The pit seemed to have been made bigger.
Puffs of bright green vapour streamed up and out of it towards the brightening dawn, they whirled, broke, and vanished.
Beyond were the pillars of fire about Chobham.
They became pillars of bloodshot smoke at the first touch of day.