Book 1 · Chapter 15

It was while the priest and I were chatting wildly under the hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford, and while my brother was watching people flee across Westminster Bridge, that the Martians had started their attack again.

As far as I can tell from all the different stories that have come out, most of them were busy preparing something in the Horsell pit until nine that night, rushing to complete a task that released huge clouds of green smoke.

But around eight o’clock, three of them definitely came out, moving slowly and cautiously. They made their way through Byfleet and Pyrford towards Ripley and Weybridge, eventually coming into view of the waiting artillery batteries against the setting sun.

These Martians didn't move as a group, but in a line, each maybe a mile and a half from the one next to him. They talked to each other with siren-like howls, changing notes up and down the scale.

It was this howling and the sound of the guns firing at Ripley and St. George’s Hill that we had heard at Upper Halliford.

The Ripley gunners - inexperienced volunteers who really shouldn't have been put in that situation - fired one wild, premature, and useless volley, then scattered on horseback and on foot through the empty village.

Meanwhile, the Martian, without using his Heat-Ray, calmly walked over their guns, carefully stepping around them, and unexpectedly came upon the guns in Painshill Park, which he destroyed. The men at St. George’s Hill, however, were better led or tougher.

Hidden by a pine forest, they seemed completely unnoticed by the Martian closest to them. They aimed their guns deliberately, as if they were on parade, and fired from about a thousand yards away. Shells flashed all around him, and he was seen to move forward a few steps, stumble, and fall.

Everyone yelled together, and the guns were reloaded in a frantic rush. The fallen Martian let out a long, wailing cry, and immediately another glittering giant appeared over the trees to the south, answering him. It seemed that one of the legs of his tripod had been smashed by a shell.

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 exploded, the pine trees around the guns burst into flames, and only a few of the men who were already running over the crest of the hill managed to escape.

After that, it seems they talked things over and stopped, and the scouts watching them reported that they stayed absolutely still for the next half hour.

The Martian who had been knocked over slowly crawled out from under his hood, a small brown figure, looking oddly like a tiny spot of disease from that distance, and apparently trying to fix his support. Around nine, he seemed to have finished, because his hood was then seen above the trees again.

It was a few minutes after nine that night when these three sentries 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 started to spread out at equal distances along a curved line between St. George’s Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of Ripley.

A dozen rockets shot out of the hills as soon as they started to move, warning the waiting batteries near Ditton and Esher.

At the same time, four of their fighting machines, also armed with tubes, crossed the river, and two of them, black against the western sky, came into view of myself and the priest as we limped wearily and painfully along the road running north out of Halliford.

They seemed to be moving on a cloud, because a milky mist covered the fields and rose to a third of their height.

I saw it and the curate let out a choked sound, then started running. But I knew it was useless to run from a Martian, so I turned and crawled through wet nettles and thorny bushes into the ditch beside the road. He looked back, saw what I was doing, and followed me.

The two of them stopped, the one closer to us standing and facing Sunbury, the other a gray blur toward the evening star, over toward Staines. The occasional howling of the Martians had stopped; they’d settled into their positions around their cylinders in total silence.

It was like a huge, curved line, with about twelve miles between the ends. It was the quietest start to a battle anyone had ever seen, ever.

To us, and to someone watching near Ripley, it would have looked the same - the Martians seemed to own the dark night, lit only by the thin moon, the stars, the fading daylight, and the red glow from St. George’s Hill and the woods of Painshill.

But facing that curve everywhere - at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton, Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and across the flat meadows to the north - the guns were waiting.

Signal rockets burst and rained sparks through the night before disappearing, and everyone watching the batteries felt a surge of tense anticipation.

The Martians just had to move into the line of fire, and instantly those dark, still shapes of men, those guns gleaming so darkly in the early night, would erupt into a furious explosion of battle.

I was sure that a thousand people were wondering the same thing I was: how much did they understand about us? Did they get that we, in the millions, were organized, disciplined, working together?

Or did they see our bursts of fire, the sudden sting of our shells, our steady buildup around their camp, like the furious attack of a disturbed hive of bees? Did they think they could wipe us out? (No one knew what they even needed to eat.)

A hundred questions like that swirled around in my mind as I watched that huge, mysterious shape. And in the back of my mind was the feeling of all the massive, unknown forces to the east, toward London. Had they set traps? Were the powder mills at Hounslow ready to blow up?

Would Londoners have the guts to turn their city into a second Moscow? Then, after what felt like forever, crouching and peering through the hedge, we heard a sound like a distant explosion. Another, closer this time, and then another.

And then the Martian next to us raised his tube high and fired it, like a gun, with a loud boom that shook the ground. The one toward Staines answered him. There was no flash, no smoke, just that heavy, muffled sound.

I was so pumped up by all those rapid-fire guns going off that I forgot about my own safety and my burned hands and climbed up into the hedge to stare towards Sunbury. As I did, a second boom echoed, and a huge projectile shot overhead towards Hounslow.

I expected to see smoke or fire, or some sign of what it had done. But all I saw was the deep blue sky above, with one solitary star, and a white mist spreading wide and low beneath. And there was no crash, no answering explosion. The silence returned; the seconds stretched.

"What happened?" the curate asked, standing up beside me. "No idea," I said. A bat flitted by and disappeared. A distant shouting started and stopped. I looked again at the Martian, and saw he was now moving eastward along the riverbank, with a quick, rolling motion.

Every moment I braced myself for some hidden weapon to suddenly appear, but the evening was eerily calm. The Martian got smaller as he walked away, and soon the mist and the coming night had swallowed him up. We instinctively climbed higher.

Towards Sunbury was a dark shape, like a cone-shaped hill had suddenly popped up, blocking our view of the countryside beyond; and then, farther across the river, over Walton, we saw another one. These hill-like shapes grew flatter and wider as we stared.

Moved by a sudden thought, I looked northward, and there I saw a third of these dark, cloud-like mounds had risen up. Everything had suddenly gone totally still.

Far away to the southeast, marking the silence, we heard the Martians hooting to each other, and then the air trembled again with the distant thud of their guns. But our artillery didn’t fire back.

At the time, we couldn’t understand what was happening, but later I would learn the meaning of these ominous mounds that gathered in the twilight.

Each of the Martians, standing in the big crescent I described, had fired, using the tube-like gun he carried, a huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other potential cover for guns, happened to be in front of him.

Some fired just one, some two - like the one we’s seen; the one at Ripley supposedly fired no fewer than five that night.

These canisters smashed on impact - they didn’t explode - and instantly released a massive amount of thick, black vapor, coiling and pouring upward in a huge, ebony cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread slowly over the surrounding country.

And breathing in that vapor, even just a whiff of its sharp smell, was deadly.

It was heavy, this vapor, heavier than the densest smoke, so that, after the initial rush and release, it sank through the air and flowed over the ground like a liquid, bypassing the hills and pouring into the valleys, ditches, and streams, just like I’s heard carbonic-acid gas from volcanic vents does.

And when it hit water, a chemical reaction happened, and the surface would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank slowly, making way for more.

The scum was totally undissolvable, and it’s weird, considering how quickly the gas worked, that you could drink water that had been filtered without getting hurt. The vapor didn’t spread out like a true gas would.

It stuck together in banks, flowing sluggishly down the slope and reluctantly moving with the wind, and very slowly it mixed with the mist and moisture in the air, and sank to the earth as dust.

Besides the fact that it contained an unknown element that creates a group of four lines in the blue of the spectrum, we still have no clue what this stuff is.

Once the initial chaos of its release was over, the black smoke clung so closely to the ground, even before it settled, that fifty feet up in the air, on roofs and upper floors of tall buildings and on big trees, there was a chance of escaping its poison altogether, as was proven even that night at Street Cobham and Ditton.

The guy who got away at the first place told a wild story about how strange it flowed, and how he looked down from the church spire and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts out of its inky darkness.

For a day and a half, he stayed up there, tired, starving, and sunburned, the earth under the blue sky and against the view of the distant hills a velvety-black expanse, with red roofs, green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns, outbuildings, and walls, rising here and there into the sunlight.

That was back at Street Cobham, where they let the black smoke hang around until it just sank into the ground. Usually, though, the Martians would clear the air once it had done its job, wading into the smoke and blasting it away with a jet of steam.

They did that with the smoke clouds near us, and we saw it from the window of an empty house in Upper Halliford, where we’d gone back.

From there, we could see the searchlights on Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill moving around, and around eleven, the windows shook, and we heard the rumble of those huge siege guns they'd set up there.

They fired off and on for about fifteen minutes, sending random shots at the invisible Martians in Hampton and Ditton, then the bright electric lights disappeared, replaced by a weird, bright red glow. Then the fourth cylinder fell - a bright green meteor - as I later learned, in Bushey Park.

Before the guns on the Richmond and Kingston hills started, there was a scattered cannonade way off in the southwest, probably because gunners were firing before the black smoke could get to them.

So, they went about it methodically, like you would smoke out a wasps’ nest, spreading this strange, choking vapor across the country towards London. The horns of the crescent slowly moved apart, until they formed a line from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden.

All night long, their destructive machines advanced. After the Martian at St. George’s Hill was shot down, they never gave the artillery a chance - seriously.

Whenever there was a chance someone could aim a gun at them without being seen, they’d blast out another canister of that black vapor, and where the guns were out in the open, they’d just zap them with the Heat-Ray.

By midnight, the burning trees on the slopes of Richmond Park and the bright lights from Kingston Hill lit up a huge network of black smoke, blocking out the whole valley of the Thames and stretching as far as you could see.

And through this smoke, two Martians slowly walked, turning their hissing steam jets this way and that.

They barely used the Heat-Ray that night, maybe because they were running low on what it took to make it, or because they didn’t want to destroy the countryside, just crush and scare everyone who was fighting back. They definitely succeeded at that.

Sunday night was the end of any organized resistance to their movements. After that, no group of people would stand up to them - it was hopeless.

Even the crews of the torpedo boats and destroyers who had brought their quick-firing guns up the Thames refused to fight, mutinied, and headed back downriver. The only thing people tried after that night was setting up mines and traps, and even that was just a frantic, half-hearted effort.

You can only imagine what happened to those batteries near Esher, waiting so anxiously in the twilight. There were no survivors.

You can picture it: the quiet anticipation, the officers alert and watchful, the gunners ready, the ammunition stacked nearby, the drivers with their horses and wagons, the groups of regular people watching as close as they were allowed, the peaceful evening, the ambulances and hospital tents filled with the burned and wounded from Weybridge; then the dull thud of the shots the Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile spinning over the trees and houses and crashing into the nearby fields.

You could totally imagine the sudden shift in everyone's focus, the way that blackness just surged forward, growing huge and towering over everything.

It turned the fading light into a thick, real darkness - like a creepy, scary force moving in on people and horses nearby, barely visible, running, screaming, and tumbling down. You could hear shouts of panic, guns suddenly dropped, and people choking and writhing on the ground.

Then, the smoke cone just kept getting wider and thicker. And then, just...night and nothingness - just a silent, solid wall of vapor hiding all the dead.

Before sunrise, that black vapor was rolling through the streets of Richmond, and the government, basically falling apart, made one last push to get everyone in London to get out of there, like, now.