Book 1 · Chapter 14

My younger brother was in London when the Martians landed near Woking. He was a med student, totally focused on an upcoming exam, and didnn't hear anything about it until Saturday morning.

The Saturday papers had long articles about Mars and life on other planets, but also a short, vague telegram that stood out because it was so brief. The telegram said the Martians had killed a bunch of people with a quick-firing gun, because a crowd had gotten too close.

It ended with: "Even though they seem powerful, the Martians haven’t moved from the pit they landed in, and don’t seem able to. Probably because Earth’s gravity is so strong." The newspaper’s editorial writer reassured everyone.

Of course, all the students in my brother’s biology class were really interested, but there wasn’t any unusual excitement in the streets. The afternoon papers had short news snippets under big headlines.

They didn’t have anything new to report besides troops gathering on the common and pine woods burning between Woking and Weybridge, until eight o’clock. Then, the St. James’s Gazette released a special edition announcing that telegraph lines were down.

People figured it was because burning pine trees had fallen across the lines. Nothing more was known about the fighting that night, the night I drove to Leatherhead and back.

My brother wasn’t worried about us, because the newspapers said the cylinder - where the Martians were - was two miles from my house. He decided to come over that night to see the Things before they were destroyed.

He sent a telegram, which never reached me, around four o’clock, and spent the evening at a music hall. In London, too, there was a thunderstorm on Saturday night, and my brother got to Waterloo in a cab.

At the platform where the midnight train usually leaves, he learned after waiting that trains weren’t going to Woking that night because of an accident. He couldn’t figure out what happened; even the railway officials didn’t know for sure.

There wasn’t much excitement at the station, because the officials, thinking it was just a problem between Byfleet and Woking junction, were running the theater trains that usually went through Woking around Virginia Water or Guildford.

They were busy making plans to change the route for the Southampton and Portsmouth Sunday League trips. A nighttime newspaper reporter, mistaking my brother for the traffic manager (they looked a little alike), tried to interview him.

Few people, except for the railway workers, connected the breakdown with the Martians. I’ve read in another account that on Sunday morning "all of London was buzzing with the news from Woking." Actually, that was a bit of an exaggeration.

Lots of Londoners didn’t hear about the Martians until the panic on Monday morning. Those who did took a while to understand what the short telegrams in the Sunday papers really meant. Most people in London don’t even read the Sunday papers.

Londoners were so used to worrying about their safety, and the papers constantly reported on crazy stuff, that they could read about anything without freaking out too much.

"Around seven last night, the Martians popped out of the cylinder, and, protected by metal armor, totally wrecked Woking station and the houses around it, plus massacred an entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment. No details yet. Their armor stopped the Maxims cold; they disabled the field guns."

"Horse cavalry was galloping toward Chertsey. The Martians seem to be moving slowly toward Chertsey or Windsor. Everyone in West Surrey is seriously worried, and they're building defenses to stop them from heading toward London."

That’s how the Sunday Sun put it, and a clever article in the Referee compared the whole thing to a zoo suddenly being let loose in a town.

Nobody in London really knew what the armored Martians were like, and most people still thought they’d be slow - "crawling," "moving painfully" - those kinds of words showed up in almost all the early reports. None of the telegrams could have been written by someone who actually saw them moving.

The Sunday papers even printed different editions as news came in, some even when there wasn't much to report. But there wasn't much more to tell people until late afternoon, when the government gave the news agencies what they knew.

They said people from Walton and Weybridge, and the surrounding area, were flooding the roads toward London, and that was it. My brother went to church at the Foundling Hospital that morning, still clueless about what happened the night before.

There, he heard people talking about the invasion, and they said a special prayer for peace. When he came out, he bought a Referee. The news in that paper really freaked him out, so he went back to Waterloo station to see if things were back to normal.

The buses, carriages, cyclists, and tons of people dressed up for a nice day out didn’t seem to notice the crazy news the newsboys were shouting. People were interested, or, if they were worried, they were only worried about the people living nearby.

At the station, he heard for the first time that the Windsor and Chertsey lines were shut down. The porters told him they’d received some wild telegrams that morning from Byfleet and Chertsey stations, but they had suddenly stopped. My brother couldn't get many details out of them.

"There’s fighting going on near Weybridge," was all they could tell him. The train service was a total mess. Lots of people who were waiting for friends from somewhere on the South-Western line were hanging around the station.

One older guy with gray hair came up to my brother and totally ripped on the South-Western Company. "This is ridiculous," he said.

One or two trains came in from Richmond, Putney, and Kingston, carrying people who’s gone out for a day of boating and found the locks closed and a feeling of panic in the air. A guy in a blue and white blazer talked to my brother, full of strange news.

"Tons of people are driving into Kingston in carts and wagons, with boxes of valuables and everything," he said. "They’re coming from Molesey, Weybridge, and Walton, and they say they heard guns at Chertsey, heavy firing, and mounted soldiers told them to get off because the Martians are coming."

"We heard guns firing at Hampton Court station, but we thought it was thunder. What the heck is going on? Can’t the Martians even get out of their pit?" My brother didn't know what to tell him.

He noticed that a weird feeling of worry had spread to the people using the underground trains, and that folks taking weekend trips from all over the South-Western area - places like Barnes, Wimbledon, Richmond Park, and Kew - were heading back way earlier than usual.

But nobody had anything solid to say, just rumors. Everyone working at the train station seemed super grumpy. Around five o'clock, the crowd at the station got really hyped when they opened the line that usually connects the South-Eastern and South-Western stations.

Then, they saw train cars packed with huge guns and soldiers rolling through. Those were the guns brought from Woolwich and Chatham to protect Kingston. People were joking around: "You’ll get wrecked!" "We’re here to tame the beast!"

A little while later, police showed up and started clearing people off the platforms, and my brother went back out onto the street. Church bells were ringing for evening prayers, and a group of Salvation Army singers came walking down Waterloo Road.

On the bridge, a bunch of people were watching a strange brown scum floating down the river in patches. The sun was just setting, and the Clock Tower and the Houses of Parliament stood out against the most peaceful sky you could imagine - a sky of gold, with long streaks of reddish-purple clouds.

People were talking about a body floating in the water. One of the guys there, a reservist, told my brother he’d seen the heliograph flashing in the west.

On Wellington Street, my brother ran into a couple of tough-looking guys who’s just been hustled out of Fleet Street with still-wet newspapers and eye-catching posters. Total disaster! they yelled to each other down Wellington Street. Fighting at Weybridge! Full story! Martians repelled!

London in danger! He had to pay a few coins for a copy of that paper. That’s when it hit him - the full power and terror of these monsters. He learned they weren’t just a few slow, clumsy things, but huge minds controlling massive mechanical bodies."

They could move fast and hit with so much force that even the biggest guns couldn’t stop them. They were described as "giant spider-like machines, almost a hundred feet tall, as fast as a speeding train, and able to shoot out a beam of intense heat."

Hidden batteries, mostly field guns, had been set up in the countryside around Horsell Common, especially between the Woking area and London. Five of the machines had been seen heading towards the Thames, and luckily, one had been destroyed.

In the other cases, the shells had missed, and the batteries had been instantly wiped out by the Heat-Rays. Lots of soldiers were reported missing, but the news report sounded hopeful. The Martians had been pushed back; they weren’t unbeatable.

They’d retreated to their circle of cylinders around Woking. Signallers with heliographs were closing in on them from all directions. Guns were being rushed from Windsor, Portsmouth, Aldershot, Woolwich - even from the north; including huge wire-guns weighing ninety-five tons from Woolwich.

Altogether, one hundred and sixteen were in place or being quickly set up, mostly covering London. Never before in England had there been such a massive or rapid buildup of military equipment.

Any other cylinders that fell, it was hoped, could be blown up right away with powerful explosives, which were being quickly made and shared. The report said, basically, that the situation was super weird and serious, but people were asked not to freak out.

Sure, the Martians were probably strange and scary, but there couldn't be more than twenty of them against our millions. The authorities figured, based on the size of the cylinders, that there couldn’t be more than five inside each - fifteen total. And at least one was taken care of - maybe more.

People would get a heads-up about any danger coming, and big plans were being made to protect people in the threatened southwestern suburbs. So, with repeated promises that London was safe and the authorities could handle the problem, this announcement ended.

It was printed in huge letters on paper that was still wet, and there hadn't been time to add any extra comments. My brother thought it was wild how the usual stuff in the paper had been cut out so quickly to make room for this.

All down Wellington Street, people were grabbing the pink sheets and reading, and the Strand was suddenly loud with the voices of a bunch of news vendors following the first readers. Guys were jumping off buses to get copies.

For sure, this news got people really hyped up, no matter how bored they'd been before. The shutters of a map shop in the Strand were coming down, my brother said, and a guy in his Sunday best, even lemon-yellow gloves, was visible inside the window quickly taping maps of Surrey to the window.

Walking along the Strand towards Trafalgar Square, my brother saw some of the people escaping from West Surrey. There was a man with his wife and two boys, and some furniture in a cart like the ones greengrocers use.

He was driving from the direction of Westminster Bridge, and right behind him came a hay wagon with five or six people who looked pretty respectable, plus some boxes and bundles.

These people’s faces were pale, and their whole look stood out against the people on the buses, who were dressed up for Sunday. People in fancy clothes were glancing at them from cabs. They stopped in the Square, looking unsure which way to go, and finally turned east along the Strand.

A little behind them was a man in work clothes, riding one of those old-fashioned tricycles with a tiny front wheel. He was covered in dirt and looked really pale. My brother headed towards Victoria, and he met a bunch of people like that. He had a feeling he might see me.

He noticed a lot more police directing traffic. Some of the refugees were sharing news with the people on the buses. One was claiming he’d seen the Martians. "Boilers on legs, I tell you, walking around like people. Most of them were excited and energized by what they’d been through.

Past Victoria, the bars were doing a booming business with these new arrivals. At every street corner, groups of people were reading papers, talking excitedly, or staring at these unusual Sunday visitors.

They seemed to get more and more as night fell, until, my brother said, the roads were like Epsom High Street on Derby Day. My brother talked to a few of these people and got pretty vague answers from most.

None of them knew anything about Woking except one man, who told him that Woking had been completely destroyed the night before.

"I’m from Byfleet," he said. "A guy on a bike came through earlier this morning, running from door to door telling us to get out. Then the soldiers showed up. We went to check it out, and there were just clouds of smoke to the south - nothing but smoke, and nobody coming that way."

Then we heard the guns at Chertsey, and people coming from Weybridge. So I locked up my house and came on. At that point, everyone in the streets was mad that the authorities were messing up and causing so much trouble trying to deal with the invaders."

Around eight o’clock, you could definitely hear heavy firing all over the south of London. My brother couldn’t hear it over the traffic on the main streets, but he could hear it clearly by cutting through the quiet back streets to the river.

He walked from Westminster to his place near Regent’s Park, about two miles. He was really worried about me now, and freaked out by how big the problem was. He started thinking about military stuff, just like I had on Saturday.

He pictured all those silent, waiting guns, the suddenly empty countryside; he tried to imagine "giant cranes" a hundred feet high.

There were a couple of carts full of people leaving down Oxford Street, and a few in the Marylebone Road, but the news was spreading so slowly that Regent Street and Portland Place were still full of people out for a Sunday night stroll, though they were talking in small groups.

And along the edge of Regent’s Park, there were just as many couples "hanging out" together under the dim gas lamps as there ever had been. The night was warm and still, kind of heavy; the sound of guns kept coming, and after midnight, there seemed to be flashes of lightning in the south.

He read and re-read the newspaper, afraid something terrible had happened to me. He couldn’t relax, and after dinner, he wandered around aimlessly. He came back and tried to focus on his exam notes, but couldn't.

He went to bed a little after midnight, and was woken up in the early hours of Monday by a bunch of noise - door knockers, people running in the street, distant drumming, and a ringing of bells. Red light danced on the ceiling.

For a moment, he just lay there, shocked, wondering if it was morning or if the world had gone crazy. Then he jumped out of bed and ran to the window.

His room was an attic, and as he peeked his head out, there were a dozen echoes in the street to the sound of his window opening, and heads in every kind of messy night clothes appeared. People were shouting questions.

"They’re coming!" yelled a policeman, banging on the door; "the Martians are coming!" and he ran to the next house. The sound of drumming and trumpets came from the Albany Street Barracks, and every church nearby was going crazy, trying to wake everyone up with a loud, chaotic ringing.

There was a noise of doors opening, and one window after another in the houses across the street flashed from darkness into bright light.

A closed carriage came galloping up the street, bursting into noise at the corner, rising to a clattering peak under the window, and dying away slowly in the distance.

Close behind it came a couple of cabs, the first of a long line of flying vehicles, mostly heading for Chalk Farm station, where the North-Western special trains were loading up, instead of coming down into Euston.

For a long time, my brother just stared out the window in stunned silence, watching the police pounding on door after door, delivering their confusing message.

Then the door behind him opened, and the guy who lived across the landing came in, wearing just a shirt, pants, and slippers, his suspenders loose around his waist, his hair messed up from his pillow. "What the heck is going on?" he asked. "A fire? What a racket!"

They both leaned out the window, straining to hear what the police were yelling. People were spilling out of side streets and standing in groups at the corners, talking. "What’s going on?" asked my brother’s roommate.

"My brother answered vaguely and started getting dressed, rushing to the window with each piece of clothing so he wouldn’t miss anything. Soon, guys selling newspapers way too early were shouting into the street: "London’s in danger of being suffocated! The Kingston and Richmond defenses have fallen!

"Terrible massacres in the Thames Valley!"

All around - 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, throughout all of London from Ealing to East Ham - people were rubbing their eyes, opening windows to stare, and asking random questions, getting dressed quickly as the first wave of fear blew through the streets.

It was the start of a huge panic. London, which had gone to bed on Sunday night without a clue and totally relaxed, was woken up in the early hours of Monday morning with a strong sense of danger.

Unable to find out what was happening from his window, my brother went downstairs and out into the street, just as the sky between the tops of the houses turned pink with the early dawn. The number of people on foot and in cars grew more and more every minute.

"Black Smoke!" he heard people yelling, and again "Black Smoke!" It was unavoidable that everyone would be scared. As my brother hesitated on the doorstep, he saw another news vendor approaching and grabbed a paper.

The guy was running with everyone else, selling his papers for a pound each as he ran - a weird mix of making money and being scared.

"And from this paper, my brother read the disastrous message from the Commander-in-Chief: "The Martians can shoot enormous clouds of a black and poisonous gas using rockets.

"They’ve smothered our batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are slowly moving toward London, destroying everything in their path. It’s impossible to stop them. There’s no safety from the Black Smoke except to run for your lives. That was all, but it was enough.

The entire population of the huge six-million city was stirring, moving, running; soon it would be pouring north in a mass exodus. "Black Smoke!" the voices cried. "Fire!"

The bells of the nearby church were making a chaotic racket, a car carelessly driven smashed, amid screams and curses, against the water trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights flashed on and off in the houses, and some of the passing taxis had unextinguished lamps.

And above, the dawn was getting brighter, clear, steady, and calm. He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down the stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in a dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed, blurting things out.

As my brother started to understand what was happening, he quickly turned to his own room, put all the money he had - about ten pounds total - into his pockets, and went back out into the streets.