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1Near the top I stumbled upon something soft, and, by a flash of lightning, saw between my feet a heap of black
2broadcloth and a pair of boots. Before I could distinguish clearly how the man lay, the flicker of light had passed. I
3stood over him waiting for the next flash. When it came, I saw that he was a sturdy man, cheaply but not shabbily
4dressed; his head was bent under his body, and he lay crumpled up close to the fence, as though he had been flung
5violently against it. Overcoming the repugnance natural to one who had never before touched a dead body, I stooped and
6turned him over to feel for his heart. He was quite dead. Apparently his neck had been broken. The lightning flashed for
7a third time, and his face leaped upon me. I sprang to my feet. It was the landlord of the Spotted Dog, whose conveyance
8I had taken. I stepped over him gingerly and pushed on up the hill. I made my way by the police station and the College
9Arms towards my own house. Nothing was burning on the hillside, though from the common there still came a red glare and
10a rolling tumult of ruddy smoke beating up against the drenching hail. So far as I could see by the flashes, the houses
11about me were mostly uninjured. By the College Arms a dark heap lay in the road. Down the road towards Maybury Bridge
12there were voices and the sound of feet, but I had not the courage to shout or to go to them. I let myself in with my
13latchkey, closed, locked and bolted the door, staggered to the foot of the staircase, and sat down. My imagination was
14full of those striding metallic monsters, and of the dead body smashed against the fence. I crouched at the foot of the
15staircase with my back to the wall, shivering violently. XI. AT THE WINDOW. I have already said that my storms of
16emotion have a trick of exhausting themselves. After a time I discovered that I was cold and wet, and with little pools
17of water about me on the stair carpet. I got up almost mechanically, went into the dining room and drank some whisky,
18and 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 do not
19know. The window of my study looks over the trees and the railway towards Horsell Common. In the hurry of our departure
20this window had been left open. The passage was dark, and, by contrast with the picture the window frame enclosed, the
21side of the room seemed impenetrably dark. I stopped short in the doorway. The thunderstorm had passed. The towers of
22the Oriental College and the pine trees about it had gone, and very far away, lit by a vivid red glare, the common about
23the sand-pits was visible. Across the light huge black shapes, grotesque and strange, moved busily to and fro. It seemed
24indeed as if the whole country in that direction was on fire--a broad hillside set with minute tongues of flame, swaying
25and writhing with the gusts of the dying storm, and throwing a red reflection upon the cloud scud above. Every now and
26then a haze of smoke from some nearer conflagration drove across the window and hid the Martian shapes. I could not see
27what they were doing, nor the clear form of them, nor recognise the black objects they were busied upon. Neither could I
28see the nearer fire, though the reflections of it danced on the wall and ceiling of the study. A sharp, resinous tang of
29burning was in the air. I closed the door noiselessly and crept towards the window. As I did so, the view opened out
30until, on the one hand, it reached to the houses about Woking station, and on the other to the charred and blackened
31pine woods of Byfleet. There was a light down below the hill, on the railway, near the arch, and several of the houses
32along the Maybury road and the streets near the station were glowing ruins. The light upon the railway puzzled me at
33first; there were a black heap and a vivid glare, and to the right of that a row of yellow oblongs. Then I perceived
34this was a wrecked train, the fore part smashed and on fire, the hinder carriages still upon the rails. Between these
35three main centres of light--the houses, the train, and the burning county towards Chobham--stretched irregular patches
36of dark country, broken here and there by intervals of dimly glowing and smoking ground. It was the strangest spectacle,
37that black expanse set with fire. It reminded me, more than anything else, of the Potteries at night. At first I could
38distinguish no people at all, though I peered intently for them. Later I saw against the light of Woking station a
39number of black figures hurrying one after the other across the line. And this was the little world in which I had been
40living securely for years, this fiery chaos! What had happened in the last seven hours I still did not know; nor did I
41know, though I was beginning to guess, the relation between these mechanical colossi and the sluggish lumps I had seen
42disgorged from the cylinder. With a queer feeling of impersonal interest I turned my desk chair to the window, sat down,
43and stared at the blackened country, and particularly at the three gigantic black things that were going to and fro in
44the glare about the sand-pits. They seemed amazingly busy. I began to ask myself what they could be. Were they
45intelligent mechanisms? Such a thing I felt was impossible. Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using,
46much as a man's brain sits and rules in his body? I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the
47first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal. The storm had left
48the sky clear, and over the smoke of the burning land the little fading pinpoint of Mars was dropping into the west,
49when a soldier came into my garden. I heard a slight scraping at the fence, and rousing myself from the lethargy that
50had fallen upon me, I looked down and saw him dimly, clambering over the palings. At the sight of another human being my
51torpor passed, and I leaned out of the window eagerly. "Hist!" said I, in a whisper. He stopped astride of the fence in
52doubt. Then he came over and across the lawn to the corner of the house. He bent down and stepped softly. "Who's there?"
53he said, also whispering, standing under the window and peering up. "Where are you going?" I asked. "God knows." "Are
54you trying to hide?" "That's it." "Come into the house," I said. I went down, unfastened the door, and let him in, and
55locked the door again. I could not see his face. He was hatless, and his coat was unbuttoned. "My God!" he said, as I
56drew him in. "What has happened?" I asked. "What hasn't?" In the obscurity I could see he made a gesture of despair.
57"They wiped us out--simply wiped us out," he repeated again and again. He followed me, almost mechanically, into the
58dining room. "Take some whisky," I said, pouring out a stiff dose. He drank it. Then abruptly he sat down before the
59table, put his head on his arms, and began to sob and weep like a little boy, in a perfect passion of emotion, while I,
60with a curious forgetfulness of my own recent despair, stood beside him, wondering. It was a long time before he could
61steady his nerves to answer my questions, and then he answered perplexingly and brokenly. He was a driver in the
62artillery, and had only come into action about seven. At that time firing was going on across the common, and it was
63said the first party of Martians were crawling slowly towards their second cylinder under cover of a metal shield. Later
64this shield staggered up on tripod legs and became the first of the fighting-machines I had seen. The gun he drove had
65been unlimbered near Horsell, in order to command the sand-pits, and its arrival it was that had precipitated the
66action. As the limber gunners went to the rear, his horse trod in a rabbit hole and came down, throwing him into a
67depression of the ground. At the same moment the gun exploded behind him, the ammunition blew up, there was fire all
68about him, and he found himself lying under a heap of charred dead men and dead horses.
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