XI.

von H. G. Wells

AT THE WINDOW

I've mentioned before that my emotional storms have a way of wearing themselves out. Eventually, I realized I was cold and soaked, with little puddles forming on the stair carpet. I stood up almost on autopilot, made my way to the dining room, poured myself a drink of whisky, and felt compelled to change my clothes.

Once I was dressed, I headed upstairs to my study, though I couldn’t quite say why. The window in my study overlooked the trees and the railway toward Horsell Common. In the rush to leave, the window had been left wide open. The hallway was dark, and in contrast to the vivid scene framed by the window, the rest of the room felt impenetrably shadowy. I paused in the doorway.

The thunderstorm had passed. The towers of the Oriental College and the surrounding pine trees had vanished, and far in the distance, illuminated by a fierce red glow, the common near the sand-pits was visible. Massive black shapes, bizarre and unsettling, moved busily across the light.

It truly looked as if the entire landscape in that direction was ablaze—a wide hillside dotted with tiny flickering flames, swaying and twisting in the gusts of the dying storm, casting a crimson reflection on the clouds above. Occasionally, a haze of smoke from a nearby fire swept across the window, obscuring the Martian figures. I couldn’t make out what they were doing, nor could I clearly see their forms or recognize the dark objects they were focused on. I also couldn’t see the closer fire, although its reflections danced on the walls and ceiling of my study. The air was thick with the sharp, resinous scent of burning.

I quietly closed the door and moved toward the window. As I approached, the view expanded, revealing the houses around Woking station on one side and the charred remains of the pine woods in Byfleet on the other. There was a light down below the hill, near the railway arch, and several houses along Maybury Road and the streets near the station were glowing ruins. At first, the light on the railway puzzled me; it was a dark mass with a bright glare, and to its right, a row of yellow rectangles. Then I realized it was a wrecked train, the front half smashed and ablaze, while the rear carriages remained on the tracks.

Between these three main sources of light—the houses, the train, and the burning landscape toward Chobham—stretched uneven patches of dark land, interrupted here and there by smoldering ground. It was the strangest sight, that black expanse set aflame. It reminded me, more than anything else, of the Potteries at night. At first, I couldn’t see any people, no matter how intently I searched. But soon, against the light from Woking station, I spotted several dark figures hurrying across the tracks.

And this was the little world I had lived in so securely for years—this fiery chaos! I still didn’t know what had happened in the last seven hours, nor did I fully grasp the connection between those mechanical giants and the sluggish masses I had seen ejected from the cylinder. With a strange sense of detached curiosity, I turned my desk chair to face the window, sat down, and stared at the scorched landscape, particularly at the three enormous black shapes moving around the sand-pits.

They seemed incredibly busy. I began to wonder what they could be. Were they intelligent machines? That seemed impossible. Or was there a Martian inside each one, controlling and directing it, much like a human brain governs a body? I started to compare these things to human inventions, pondering for the first time how an ironclad or a steam engine might appear to an intelligent lower animal.

The storm had cleared the sky, and as the little fading point of Mars sank into the west above the smoke of the burning land, a soldier appeared in my garden. I heard a faint scraping at the fence, and shaking off the lethargy that had settled over me, I looked down to see him clambering over the fence. The sight of another human being jolted me from my stupor, and I leaned out of the window eagerly.

“Hey!” I whispered.

He hesitated, straddling the fence in uncertainty. Then he crossed the lawn to the corner of the house, bending down and moving quietly.

“Who’s there?” he asked, also in a whisper, standing beneath the window and peering up.

“Where are you going?” I inquired.

“God knows.”

“Are you trying to hide?”

“That’s it.”

“Come inside,” I urged.

I went downstairs, unlatched the door, and let him in, locking it behind him. I couldn’t see his face clearly. He was without a hat, and his coat hung open.

“My God!” he exclaimed as I pulled him inside.

“What happened?” I asked.

“What hasn’t?” In the dim light, I could see him gesture in despair. “They wiped us out—simply wiped us out,” he repeated, his voice heavy with disbelief.

He followed me into the dining room, almost like a machine.

“Have some whisky,” I said, pouring him a generous glass.

He took it down in one go. Then, without warning, he slumped over the table, resting his head on his arms, and began to cry like a small child, overwhelmed with emotion. I stood beside him, momentarily forgetting my own recent despair, and watched in bewilderment.

It took him a long time to gather himself enough to answer my questions, and when he finally spoke, his words came out in a jumbled, broken manner. He was a driver in the artillery and had only just come into action around seven o'clock. At that moment, there was firing across the common, and it was rumored that the first group of Martians was slowly approaching their second cylinder, shielded by a metal cover.

Soon after, that shield rose up on tripod legs, transforming into the first fighting machine I had ever seen. The gun he drove had been unlimbered near Horsell to command the sand pits, and its arrival had triggered the chaos. As the limber gunners retreated, his horse stumbled into a rabbit hole and fell, throwing him into a dip in the ground. At that instant, the gun exploded behind him, the ammunition ignited, and he found himself buried beneath a pile of charred bodies and dead horses.

“I lay still,” he recounted, “terrified, with the forequarter of a horse on top of me. We’d been wiped out. And the smell—God, it was like burnt meat! I hurt my back when the horse fell, and I had to lie there until I felt well enough to move. Just a minute before, everything had been fine—then it was chaos: stumble, bang, swish!

“Wiped out!” he repeated.

He had hidden under the dead horse for what felt like ages, peeking out cautiously across the common. The Cardigan men had attempted a rush toward the pit, only to be annihilated. Then the monster stood up and began to stroll leisurely across the common, its head-like hood swiveling around like a cowled figure. One of its arms carried a complex metallic device, shimmering with green flashes, from which the Heat-Ray emanated.

In just a few minutes, as far as the soldier could see, there was nothing alive left on the common. Every bush and tree that wasn’t already a blackened skeleton was now ablaze. The hussars had been positioned beyond the curve of the ground, and he couldn’t see them. He heard the Maxims rattle for a while before falling silent. The giant spared Woking station and its cluster of houses until the very end; then, in an instant, the Heat-Ray was unleashed, and the town was reduced to a pile of fiery ruins. After that, the creature turned away from the artilleryman and waddled off toward the smoldering pine woods that concealed the second cylinder. As it did, a second gleaming Titan emerged from the pit.

The second monster followed the first, prompting the artilleryman to crawl cautiously across the hot, ashy heather toward Horsell. He managed to reach the ditch by the roadside and escaped to Woking. There, his story spilled out in fragments. The place was a disaster zone. A few people were alive, most of them frantic, many burned and scalded. He was forced to dodge the flames, hiding among the almost scorching ruins of a wall as one of the Martian giants returned. He witnessed this one chase down a man, snatch him up in one of its metallic tentacles, and smash his head against a pine tree. Finally, after night fell, the artilleryman made a desperate dash and climbed over the railway embankment.

Since then, he had been sneaking toward Maybury, hoping to escape the danger and get closer to London. People were hiding in trenches and cellars, and many survivors had fled toward Woking village and Send. He had been parched with thirst until he stumbled upon a broken water main near the railway arch, with water bubbling out like a spring onto the road.

That was the story he shared with me, piece by piece. He grew calmer as he spoke, trying to help me visualize the horrors he had witnessed. He hadn’t eaten since midday, he mentioned early on, so I went to the pantry and found some mutton and bread, bringing it into the room. We didn’t light a lamp for fear of attracting the Martians, and every now and then our hands brushed against the bread or meat. As he talked, shapes around us emerged from the darkness, and the trampled bushes and broken rose trees outside the window became clearer. I began to see his face, blackened and haggard, just as mine must have looked.

After we finished eating, we quietly made our way upstairs to my study. I looked out the open window once more. In just one night, the valley had transformed into a wasteland of ashes. The fires had died down, and where flames had once danced, only wisps of smoke lingered. The countless ruins of shattered homes and charred trees, hidden in the darkness, now stood stark and haunting in the unforgiving light of dawn.

Yet, amidst the devastation, a few objects had somehow escaped the destruction—a white railway signal here, the end of a greenhouse there, both pristine and bright against the backdrop of ruin. Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so random and all-encompassing. As the light grew stronger, three metallic giants loomed over the pit, their rotating cowls seeming to survey the havoc they had wrought.

It felt to me as if the pit had expanded. Every now and then, puffs of vivid green vapor surged up and out toward the brightening sky—rising, swirling, breaking apart, and disappearing.

In the distance, the pillars of fire around Chobham transformed into columns of bloodshot smoke at the first light of day.