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The War of the Worlds
Chapter 15. What Had Happened in Surrey
The curate sat and talked wildly to me under the hedge.
We were in the flat meadows near Halliford.
Meanwhile, my brother watched the fugitives stream over Westminster Bridge.
The Martians had started their attack again.
From the different reports that have been given, most of them stayed busy with preparations in the Horsell pit until nine that night.
They hurried on an operation which released huge amounts of green smoke.
Three certainly came out around eight o'clock.
They moved slowly and carefully through Byfleet and Pyrford.
They headed towards Ripley and Weybridge, then they came in sight of the waiting guns against the setting sun.
These Martians didn't advance in a group, but in a line, each perhaps a mile and a half from his nearest fellow.
They communicated with one another by means of siren-like howls, going up and down the musical 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 were untrained artillery volunteers.
They should never have been put in such a position.
They fired one wild, early, useless volley.
Then they ran away on horse and foot through the empty village.
The Martian didn't use his Heat-Ray, he walked calmly over their guns.
He stepped carefully among them and passed in front of them.
He came unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, he destroyed them.
The St. George's Hill men, however, were better led or of better spirit.
Hidden by a pine wood, they seem to have been quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to them.
They aimed their guns as carefully as if they had been on parade, and fired at about a thousand yards' range.
The shells flashed all around him, and he was seen to advance a few steps, stagger, and go down.
Everybody shouted together, and the guns were reloaded in frantic haste.
The fallen Martian set up a long howl, and immediately a second shining giant, answering him, appeared over the trees to the south.
It seems that a leg of the tripod had been broken by one of the shells.
The whole of the second volley missed the Martian on the ground, and at the same time, both his companions aimed their Heat-Rays at the battery.
The ammunition blew up and the pine trees around the guns burst into flame.
Only one or two of the men who were already running over the top of the hill escaped.
After this, the three took counsel and stopped, the scouts watching them reported they stayed completely still for the next half-hour.
The Martian who had fallen crawled slowly out of his hood.
He was a small brown figure, oddly suggesting from that distance a spot of disease, and apparently worked on repairing his support.
Around nine he had finished, for his hood 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 given to each of the three.
The seven went to place themselves at equal distances along a curved line.
This line ran between St. George's Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of Ripley.
A dozen rockets shot out of the hills before them as soon as they began to move, and warned the waiting batteries around Ditton and Esher.
Four of their fighting machines crossed the river.
They were armed with tubes like the others.
Two of them appeared black against the western sky.
The curate and I saw them as we hurried north 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 out 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 wide ditch by the side of the road.
He looked back, saw what I was doing, and turned to join me.
The two stopped, the nearer to us standing and facing Sunbury, the farther one being a grey unclear shape towards the evening star, away towards Staines.
The occasional howling of the Martians had stopped.
They took up their positions in the huge crescent around their cylinders in complete silence.
It was a crescent with twelve miles between its ends.
Never since the invention of gunpowder was the start of a battle so still.
To us and to an observer around Ripley, it would have had exactly the same effect.
The Martians seemed to be alone in the dark night.
They were lit only by the thin moon, the stars, and the afterglow of daylight.
A red glare came from St. George's Hill and the woods of Painshill.
The guns were waiting wherever trees or village houses gave cover.
They faced that crescent everywhere, at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton, Esher, and Ockham.
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 only to advance into the line of fire.
Instantly, those still black forms of men would explode into a thunderous fury of battle.
Those guns shone so darkly in the early night.
No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those watchful minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the question.
How much did they understand of us?
Did they grasp that we in our millions were organized, disciplined, working together?
Or did they interpret our bursts of fire, the sudden sting of our shells?
Did they see our steady surrounding of their camp as the furious attack of a disturbed hive of bees?
Did they dream they might destroy us?
At that time, no one knew what food they needed.
A hundred such questions struggled together in my mind as I watched that huge sentinel shape.
And in the back of my mind was the sense of all the huge unknown and hidden forces towards London.
Had they prepared traps? 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 what seemed like an endless time to us, crouching and peering through the hedge, came a sound like the distant crash of a gun.
Another sounded nearer still, and then yet another followed, echoing across the fields.
And then the Martian beside us raised his tube on high and fired it, like a gun, with a heavy report that made the ground shake.
The one towards Staines answered him, there was no flash, no smoke, just that heavy explosion.
I was so excited by the heavy, minute-guns following one another that I forgot my personal safety and my burned hands.
I climbed up into the hedge and stared towards Sunbury.
As I did so, a second report followed, and a big projectile flew overhead towards Hounslow.
I expected at least to see smoke or fire, or some such sign of its work.
But all I saw was the deep blue sky above, with one single star, and the white mist spreading wide and low beneath.
And there had been no crash, no answering explosion.
The silence returned, the minute stretched to three.
"What has happened?" said the curate, standing up beside me.
"Heaven knows!" said I.
A bat flew by and vanished, a distant noise of shouting began and stopped.
I looked again at the Martian, and saw he was now moving eastward along the riverbank, with a fast, 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 moved away, and soon the mist and the gathering night had swallowed him up.
By a common impulse, we climbed higher.
Towards Sunbury was a dark shape, as though a cone-shaped hill had suddenly appeared there, hiding our view of the farther country.
And then, farther away 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 saw a third of these cloudy black hills had risen.
Everything had suddenly become very still, as if the whole world held its breath.
Far to the southeast we heard the Martians hooting to one another, then the air shook with the distant thud of their guns.
But the earthly artillery made no reply.
Now at the time we couldn't understand these things, but later I was to learn the meaning of these threatening hills that gathered in the twilight.
Each of the Martians stood in the great crescent I have described.
They fired a huge canister from the gun-like tube they carried.
The canister went over any hill, wood, or houses in front of them.
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 fired no fewer than five at that time.
These canisters smashed on hitting the ground, they didn't explode.
Immediately they released an enormous volume of heavy black vapour that coiled and poured upward into a huge dark cloud.
This gaseous hill sank and slowly spread itself over the surrounding country.
And the touch of that vapour, the breathing of its sharp wisps, was death to all that breathes.
It was heavy, this vapour, heavier than the thickest smoke.
After the first wild rush and outflow of its impact, it sank down through the air.
It poured over the ground in a way more liquid than gas.
It left the hills and streamed into the valleys, ditches, and watercourses.
Where it reached water a chemical action occurred, and the surface was instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank slowly.
The scum was completely insoluble.
Strangely, despite the gas's instant effect, one could drink without harm the water from which it had been strained.
The vapour didn't spread out like a true gas would do.
It stayed together in banks, flowing slowly down the slope of the land.
It moved unwillingly before the wind, Very slowly, it combined with the mist and moisture of the air.
Then it sank to the earth in the form of dust.
Except for an unknown element that gives four lines in the blue spectrum, we remain ignorant of this substance's nature.
The wild upheaval of the black smoke's spreading was over.
It clung so closely to the ground that fifty feet up, escape was possible.
On roofs, upper floors, and great trees, the poison could be avoided.
This was proved that night at Street Cobham and Ditton.
The man who escaped from the former place tells a wonderful story.
He describes the strangeness of its coiling flow.
He looked down from the church spire.
He saw the village houses rising like ghosts out of its black nothingness.
He stayed there for a day and a half.
He was tired, starving, and sun-scorched, the earth stretched under the blue sky.
Against the distant hills, there was a velvet-black expanse.
Red roofs, green trees, and later black-covered shrubs appeared.
Gates, barns, outhouses, and walls rose 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.
The Martians, when it had served its purpose, cleared the air by wading into it and directing a jet of steam upon it.
We saw them do this to vapour banks from the starlit window of the empty house at Upper Halliford, where we had returned.
From there, we could see the searchlights on Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill moving back and forth.
Around eleven, the windows rattled, we heard the sound of the huge siege guns that had been put in position there.
These continued on and off for a quarter of an hour.
They sent chance shots at the invisible Martians at Hampton and Ditton.
Then the pale beams of electric light vanished.
They 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 an irregular cannonade far away in the southwest.
I believe this was due to guns being fired at random 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 suffocating vapour over the country towards London.
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 slightest chance against them.
Wherever guns could be aimed at them unseen, they fired a fresh canister of black vapour.
Where guns were openly displayed, they brought the Heat-Ray to bear.
By midnight, the burning trees along the slopes of Richmond Park threw their light.
The glare of Kingston Hill also lit a network of black smoke.
This smoke covered the whole valley of the Thames.
It extended 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.
Perhaps they had only a limited supply of material for its production.
Or perhaps they didn't wish to destroy the country.
They only wanted to crush and overawe the opposition they had raised.
In the latter aim, they certainly succeeded.
Sunday night was the end of the organized opposition to their movements.
After that, no body of men would stand against them, so hopeless was the effort.
Even the crews of the torpedo-boats and destroyers that had brought their quick-firing guns up the Thames refused to stay, mutinied, and went back down.
The only offensive operation men dared after that night was the preparation of mines and traps, and even in that, their efforts were frantic and irregular.
One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those batteries towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the twilight.
There were no survivors, One may picture the orderly expectation.
The officers were alert and watchful, the gunners ready.
Ammunition was piled to hand, the limber gunners stood with their horses and wagons.
Groups of civilian spectators stood as near as they were allowed.
The evening was still, Ambulances and hospital tents held the burned and wounded from Weybridge.
Then the dull sound of the shots the Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile spinning over the trees and houses and smashing among the nearby fields.
One may picture the sudden shift of attention.
The blackness advanced headlong, rising to heaven.
It turned twilight into real darkness, this strange, horrible enemy of vapour strode upon its victims.
Men and horses near it were seen dimly, running and screaming.
They fell headlong, shouting in fear, the guns were suddenly abandoned.
Men choked and twisted on the ground.
The dark cone of smoke widened fast.
And then night and destruction, nothing but a silent mass of thick vapour hiding its dead.
Before dawn, the black vapour poured through the streets of Richmond.
The falling-apart organism of government, with a last dying effort, woke the population of London to the need for flight.