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1"Out of the way, there!" bawled a coachman, towering high; and my brother saw a closed carriage turning into the lane.
2The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. My brother pushed the pony and chaise back into the hedge,
3and the man drove by and stopped at the turn of the way. It was a carriage, with a pole for a pair of horses, but only
4one was in the traces. My brother saw dimly through the dust that two men lifted out something on a white stretcher and
5put it gently on the grass beneath the privet hedge. One of the men came running to my brother. "Where is there any
6water?" he said. "He is dying fast, and very thirsty. It is Lord Garrick." "Lord Garrick!" said my brother; "the Chief
7Justice?" "The water?" he said. "There may be a tap," said my brother, "in some of the houses. We have no water. I dare
8not leave my people." The man pushed against the crowd towards the gate of the corner house. "Go on!" said the people,
9thrusting at him. "They are coming! Go on!" Then my brother's attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced man
10lugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother's eyes rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that
11seemed to break up into separate coins as it struck the ground. They rolled hither and thither among the struggling feet
12of men and horses. The man stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his shoulder and sent
13him reeling. He gave a shriek and dodged back, and a cartwheel shaved him narrowly. "Way!" cried the men all about him.
14"Make way!" So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both hands open, upon the heap of coins, and began
15thrusting handfuls in his pocket. A horse rose close upon him, and in another moment, half rising, he had been borne
16down under the horse's hoofs. "Stop!" screamed my brother, and pushing a woman out of his way, tried to clutch the bit
17of the horse. Before he could get to it, he heard a scream under the wheels, and saw through the dust the rim passing
18over the poor wretch's back. The driver of the cart slashed his whip at my brother, who ran round behind the cart. The
19multitudinous shouting confused his ears. The man was writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to rise,
20for the wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp and dead. My brother stood up and yelled at the next
21driver, and a man on a black horse came to his assistance. "Get him out of the road," said he; and, clutching the man's
22collar with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. But he still clutched after his money, and regarded my
23brother fiercely, hammering at his arm with a handful of gold. "Go on! Go on!" shouted angry voices behind. "Way! Way!"
24There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the cart that the man on horseback stopped. My brother looked
25up, and the man with the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist that held his collar. There was a concussion, and
26the black horse came staggering sideways, and the carthorse pushed beside it. A hoof missed my brother's foot by a
27hair's breadth. He released his grip on the fallen man and jumped back. He saw anger change to terror on the face of the
28poor wretch on the ground, and in a moment he was hidden and my brother was borne backward and carried past the entrance
29of the lane, and had to fight hard in the torrent to recover it. He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little
30child, with all a child's want of sympathetic imagination, staring with dilated eyes at a dusty something that lay black
31and still, ground and crushed under the rolling wheels. "Let us go back!" he shouted, and began turning the pony round.
32"We cannot cross this--hell," he said and they went back a hundred yards the way they had come, until the fighting crowd
33was hidden. As they passed the bend in the lane my brother saw the face of the dying man in the ditch under the privet,
34deadly white and drawn, and shining with perspiration. The two women sat silent, crouching in their seat and shivering.
35Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again. Miss Elphinstone was white and pale, and her sister-in-law sat weeping,
36too wretched even to call upon "George." My brother was horrified and perplexed. So soon as they had retreated he
37realised how urgent and unavoidable it was to attempt this crossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone, suddenly resolute.
38"We must go that way," he said, and led the pony round again. For the second time that day this girl proved her quality.
39To force their way into the torrent of people, my brother plunged into the traffic and held back a cab horse, while she
40drove the pony across its head. A waggon locked wheels for a moment and ripped a long splinter from the chaise. In
41another moment they were caught and swept forward by the stream. My brother, with the cabman's whip marks red across his
42face and hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the reins from her. "Point the revolver at the man behind," he said,
43giving it to her, "if he presses us too hard. No!--point it at his horse." Then he began to look out for a chance of
44edging to the right across the road. But once in the stream he seemed to lose volition, to become a part of that dusty
45rout. They swept through Chipping Barnet with the torrent; they were nearly a mile beyond the centre of the town before
46they had fought across to the opposite side of the way. It was din and confusion indescribable; but in and beyond the
47town the road forks repeatedly, and this to some extent relieved the stress. They struck eastward through Hadley, and
48there on either side of the road, and at another place farther on they came upon a great multitude of people drinking at
49the stream, some fighting to come at the water. And farther on, from a lull near East Barnet, they saw two trains
50running slowly one after the other without signal or order--trains swarming with people, with men even among the coals
51behind the engines--going northward along the Great Northern Railway. My brother supposes they must have filled outside
52London, for at that time the furious terror of the people had rendered the central termini impossible. Near this place
53they halted for the rest of the afternoon, for the violence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three of them.
54They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger; the night was cold, and none of them dared to sleep. And in the evening
55many people came hurrying along the road nearby their stopping place, fleeing from unknown dangers before them, and
56going in the direction from which my brother had come. XVII. THE "THUNDER CHILD". Had the Martians aimed only at
57destruction, they might on Monday have annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself slowly through
58the home counties. Not only along the road through Barnet, but also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the
59roads eastward to Southend and Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames to Deal and Broadstairs, poured the same frantic
60rout. If one could have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London every northward and
61eastward road running out of the tangled maze of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives,
62each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress. I have set forth at length in the last chapter my brother's
63account of the road through Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise how that swarming of black dots
64appeared to one of those concerned. Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and
65suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would have been but a
66drop in that current. And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede--a stampede gigantic and terrible--without
67order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the
68rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.
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