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1Beyond Victoria the public-houses were doing a lively trade with these arrivals. At all the street corners groups of
2people were reading papers, talking excitedly, or staring at these unusual Sunday visitors. They seemed to increase as
3night drew on, until at last the roads, my brother said, were like Epsom High Street on a Derby Day. My brother
4addressed several of these fugitives and got unsatisfactory answers from most. None of them could tell him any news of
5Woking except one man, who assured him that Woking had been entirely destroyed on the previous night. "I come from
6Byfleet," he said; "a man on a bicycle came through the place in the early morning, and ran from door to door warning us
7to come away. Then came soldiers. We went out to look, and there were clouds of smoke to the south--nothing but smoke,
8and not a soul coming that way. Then we heard the guns at Chertsey, and folks coming from Weybridge. So I've locked up
9my house and come on." At that time there was a strong feeling in the streets that the authorities were to blame for
10their incapacity to dispose of the invaders without all this inconvenience. About eight o'clock a noise of heavy firing
11was distinctly audible all over the south of London. My brother could not hear it for the traffic in the main
12thoroughfares, but by striking through the quiet back streets to the river he was able to distinguish it quite plainly.
13He walked from Westminster to his apartments near Regent's Park, about two. He was now very anxious on my account, and
14disturbed at the evident magnitude of the trouble. His mind was inclined to run, even as mine had run on Saturday, on
15military details. He thought of all those silent, expectant guns, of the suddenly nomadic countryside; he tried to
16imagine "boilers on stilts" a hundred feet high. There were one or two cartloads of refugees passing along Oxford
17Street, and several in the Marylebone Road, but so slowly was the news spreading that Regent Street and Portland Place
18were full of their usual Sunday-night promenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and along the edge of Regent's Park
19there were as many silent couples "walking out" together under the scattered gas lamps as ever there had been. The night
20was warm and still, and a little oppressive; the sound of guns continued intermittently, and after midnight there seemed
21to be sheet lightning in the south. He read and re-read the paper, fearing the worst had happened to me. He was
22restless, and after supper prowled out again aimlessly. He returned and tried in vain to divert his attention to his
23examination notes. He went to bed a little after midnight, and was awakened from lurid dreams in the small hours of
24Monday by the sound of door knockers, feet running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour of bells. Red
25reflections danced on the ceiling. For a moment he lay astonished, wondering whether day had come or the world gone mad.
26Then he jumped out of bed and ran to the window. His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up and down the
27street there were a dozen echoes to the noise of his window sash, and heads in every kind of night disarray appeared.
28Enquiries were being shouted. "They are coming!" bawled a policeman, hammering at the door; "the Martians are coming!"
29and hurried to the next door. The sound of drumming and trumpeting came from the Albany Street Barracks, and every
30church within earshot was hard at work killing sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin. There was a noise of doors
31opening, and window after window in the houses opposite flashed from darkness into yellow illumination. Up the street
32came galloping a closed carriage, bursting abruptly into noise at the corner, rising to a clattering climax under the
33window, and dying away slowly in the distance. Close on the rear of this came a couple of cabs, the forerunners of a
34long procession of flying vehicles, going for the most part to Chalk Farm station, where the North-Western special
35trains were loading up, instead of coming down the gradient into Euston. For a long time my brother stared out of the
36window in blank astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after door, and delivering their incomprehensible
37message. Then the door behind him opened, and the man who lodged across the landing came in, dressed only in shirt,
38trousers, and slippers, his braces loose about his waist, his hair disordered from his pillow. "What the devil is it?"
39he asked. "A fire? What a devil of a row!" They both craned their heads out of the window, straining to hear what the
40policemen were shouting. People were coming out of the side streets, and standing in groups at the corners talking.
41"What the devil is it all about?" said my brother's fellow lodger. My brother answered him vaguely and began to dress,
42running with each garment to the window in order to miss nothing of the growing excitement. And presently men selling
43unnaturally early newspapers came bawling into the street: "London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond
44defences forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!" And all about him--in the rooms below, in the houses on each
45side and across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the hundred other streets of that part of Marylebone,
46and the Westbourne Park district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kilburn and St. John's Wood and
47Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and Highbury and Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the vastness of
48London from Ealing to East Ham--people were rubbing their eyes, and opening windows to stare out and ask aimless
49questions, dressing hastily as the first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It was the dawn of
50the great panic. London, which had gone to bed on Sunday night oblivious and inert, was awakened, in the small hours of
51Monday morning, to a vivid sense of danger. Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother went down and
52out into the street, just as the sky between the parapets of the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying people
53on foot and in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. "Black Smoke!" he heard people crying, and again "Black Smoke!"
54The contagion of such a unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on the door-step, he saw another
55newsvendor approaching, and got a paper forthwith. The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a
56shilling each as he ran--a grotesque mingling of profit and panic. And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic
57dispatch of the Commander-in-Chief: "The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a black and poisonous vapour
58by means of rockets. They have smothered our batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are advancing
59slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way. It is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the
60Black Smoke but in instant flight." That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the great six-million city
61was stirring, slipping, running; presently it would be pouring en masse northward. "Black Smoke!" the voices cried.
62"Fire!" The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, a cart carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks and
63curses, against the water trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights went to and fro in the houses, and some of the
64passing cabs flaunted unextinguished lamps. And overhead the dawn was growing brighter, clear and steady and calm. He
65heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door,
66loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed, ejaculating. As my brother began to realise the import
67of all these things, he turned hastily to his own room, put all his available money--some ten pounds altogether--into
68his pockets, and went out again into the streets. XV. WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY. It was while the curate had sat and
69talked so wildly to me under the hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford, and while my brother was watching the
70fugitives stream over Westminster Bridge, that the Martians had resumed the offensive. So far as one can ascertain from
71the conflicting accounts that have been put forth, the majority of them remained busied with preparations in the Horsell
72pit until nine that night, hurrying on some operation that disengaged huge volumes of green smoke.
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