Book 1 · Chapter 11

I’d already said that my emotional outbursts have a way of burning themselves out. After a while, I realized I was cold and soaked, with little puddles of water on the stair carpet.

I got up almost robotically, went into the dining room, and had some whiskey, and then I felt like changing my clothes. Once I’d done that, I went upstairs to my study, but I don’t know why. The window in my study overlooks the trees and the railway towards Horsell Common.

When we rushed to leave, we’d left this window open. The hallway was dark, and compared to the view the window showed, the rest of the room seemed totally black. I stopped dead in the doorway. The thunderstorm had passed.

The towers of the Oriental College and the pine trees around it were gone, and far away, lit by a bright red glow, the common area near the sand pits was visible. Across the light, huge, dark shapes, weird and strange, moved busily back and forth.

It really seemed like the whole area in that direction was on fire - a wide hillside covered with tiny flames, swaying and twisting with the dying wind, and reflecting a red glow on the clouds above.

Now and then, a haze of smoke from a nearby fire drifted across the window and hid the Martian shapes. I couldn’t see what they were doing, or what they looked like, or recognize the black things they were working on.

I couldn’t see the closer fire either, though its reflections danced on the walls and ceiling of the study. A strong, piney smell of burning filled the air. I closed the door quietly and crept towards the window.

As I did, the view opened up, stretching to the houses near Woking station, and to the charred and blackened pine woods of Byfleet. There was a light down below the hill, on the railway, near the arch, and several of the houses along Maybury Road and the streets near the station were glowing ruins.

The light on the railway confused me at first; there was a dark heap and a bright glare, and to the right of that, a row of yellow rectangles. Then I realized it was a wrecked train, the front smashed and on fire, the back carriages still on the tracks.

Between these three main areas of light - the houses, the train, and the burning countryside towards Chobham - stretched uneven patches of dark land, broken here and there by dimly glowing and smoking ground. It was the weirdest sight, that black area dotted with fire.

It reminded me, more than anything else, of the Potteries at night. At first, I could see no people at all, even though I peered intently. Later, I saw against the light of Woking station a bunch of dark figures hurrying across the tracks.

And this was the little world I’d been living in safely for years, this fiery chaos! What had happened in the last seven hours, I still didn’t know; nor did I know, though I was starting to guess, the connection between these giant machines and the slow, heavy lumps I’d seen come out of the cylinder.

With a strange, detached feeling, I turned my desk chair to the window, sat down, and stared at the blackened country, and especially at the three gigantic black things moving back and forth in the glare near the sand pits. They seemed incredibly busy. I started to ask myself what they could be.

Could they be intelligent machines? I felt that was impossible. Or did a Martian sit inside each, controlling, directing, using, just like a brain sits and controls a body?

I started to compare the things to human machines, and for the first time in my life, I wondered what an ironclad or a steam engine would seem like to an intelligent animal.

The storm had cleared the sky, and over the smoke of the burning land, the tiny, fading speck of Mars was sinking into the west, when a soldier came into my garden.

I heard a quiet scrape at the fence, and shaking off the deep tiredness that had settled over me, I looked down and saw him climbing over the boards. Seeing another person, my daze vanished, and I leaned out the window eagerly. "Hey! I whispered. He stopped, balanced on the fence, looking unsure.

Then he came over the fence and across the lawn to the corner of the house. He bent down and stepped softly. "Who’s there?" he whispered, standing under the window and looking up. "Where are you going? I asked. "Who knows? "Are you trying to hide? "Yeah. "Come inside," I said.

I went downstairs, unlocked the door, and let him in, locking it again behind him. I couldn't see his face. He wasn't wearing a hat, and his coat was open. "Oh my God!" he said, as I pulled him inside. "What happened? I asked. "What didn’t?"

In the dim light, I could see he made a gesture of complete despair. "They wiped us out - totally wiped us out," he repeated over and over. He followed me, almost mechanically, into the dining room. "Take some whiskey," I said, pouring out a generous shot. He drank it.

Then suddenly, he sat down at the table, put his head in his hands, and started to cry and sob like a little kid, completely overcome with emotion, while I, forgetting my own recent despair, stood beside him, wondering.

It was a long time before he could calm down enough to answer my questions, and then he answered in a confused and broken way. He was a driver in the artillery, and had only been in action for about seven hours.

At that time, there was shooting across the field, and it was said the first group of Martians were slowly moving towards their second cylinder, hidden behind a metal shield. Later, this shield stood up on legs and became the first of the fighting machines I had seen.

The gun he drove had been set up near Horsell to command the sand pits, and its arrival started the fight. As the gunners went to the back, his horse stepped in a rabbit hole and fell, throwing him to the ground.

At the same moment, the gun exploded behind him, the ammunition blew up, there was fire everywhere, and he found himself lying under a pile of charred bodies and dead horses. I lay still, he said, terrified, with the front quarter of a horse on top of me. We’d been wiped out.

"And the smell - good God! Like burnt meat! I was hurt across my back from the horse falling, and I had to lie there until I felt better. It was just like 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, peeking out nervously across the field. The Cardigan men had tried to rush the pit, in a scattered formation, only to be destroyed instantly.

Then the monster had risen to its feet and had started to walk slowly back and forth across the field among the few people who were running away, with its head, like a hood, turning around exactly like the head of a person in a robe.

A kind of arm carried a complicated metal case, around which green flashes sparkled, and from the funnel of this came the Heat-Ray's smoke.

In just a few minutes, as far as the soldier could tell, there wasnn't a single living thing left on the common . Every bush and tree that wasn’t already a blackened skeleton was burning up. The hussars had been down the road, around the curve, and he didn’t see them.

He heard the machine guns chattering for a while, then going silent. The giant saved Woking station and all the houses around it, holding out until the last second. Then, with a blast, the Heat-Ray turned the town into a pile of fiery ruins.

After that, the Thing switched off the Heat-Ray and, turning its back on the artilleryman, started to waddle towards the smoky pine woods where the second cylinder was hidden. As it did, a second, gleaming giant rose out of the pit.

The second monster followed the first, and the artilleryman started to crawl really carefully across the hot, ashy ground towards Horsell. He managed to get alive into the ditch beside the road and escaped to Woking. His story came out in bursts. The place was a mess, totally impassable.

It seemed like a few people were still alive, mostly freaking out, with lots of people burned and badly scalded. He got pushed aside by the fire and hid among some almost scorching piles of broken walls as one of the Martian giants returned.

He saw this one chase a man, grab him with one of its metal tentacles, and smash his head against a pine tree. Finally, after nightfall, the artilleryman made a dash for it and got over the railway embankment.

Since then, he’s been sneaking along towards Maybury, hoping to get out of danger towards London. People were hiding in trenches and cellars, and many of the survivors had run off towards Woking village and Send.

He was so thirsty until he found one of the water mains near the railway arch that was smashed, and water was bubbling out like a spring on the road. That’s the story he told me, bit by bit. He calmed down as he talked, trying to make me see what he’d seen.

He hadn’t eaten anything since noon, he told me early on, and I found some mutton and bread in the pantry and brought it into the room. We didn’t light any lamps, afraid of attracting the Martians, and every so often our hands would brush against each other as we reached for bread or meat.

As he talked, things around us started to come into focus in the darkness - the trampled bushes and broken rose trees outside the window. It seemed like a bunch of people or animals had rushed across the lawn. I started to see his face, blackened and exhausted, just as I was probably looking.

When we finished eating, we went quietly upstairs to my study, and I looked out the open window again. In one night, the valley had become a valley of ashes. The fires had died down now.

Where flames had been, there were now trails of smoke, but the countless ruins of shattered and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees that the night had hidden stood out stark and terrible in the harsh light of dawn.

But here and there, something had been lucky enough to survive - a white railway signal here, the end of a greenhouse there, looking clean and fresh among all the wreckage. Never before in the history of fighting had destruction been so random and so complete. And

shining in the growing light of the east, three of the metal giants stood around the pit, their hoods spinning as if they were looking over the destruction they had caused.

It seemed to me that the pit had gotten bigger, and every so often bursts of bright green vapor streamed up and out of it towards the brightening dawn - streamed up, swirled, broke apart, and disappeared. Beyond were the pillars of fire around Chobham.

They turned into pillars of bloodshot smoke when the first light of day touched them.