XV.

von H. G. Wells

WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY

While the curate and I were deep in conversation under the hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford, my brother was keeping an eye on the stream of people fleeing over Westminster Bridge. It was during this time that the Martians decided to launch their next attack. From the various accounts that have emerged, it seems that most of them were still busy with preparations in the Horsell pit until around nine that night, working on something that released thick clouds of green smoke.

However, three of them emerged around eight o'clock. They moved slowly and cautiously, making their way through Byfleet and Pyrford toward Ripley and Weybridge, eventually coming into view of the waiting artillery against the backdrop of the setting sun. These Martians didn’t advance together but in a line, each about a mile and a half apart. They communicated with each other through eerie howls that rose and fell in pitch.

It was this howling, combined with the sound of gunfire from Ripley and St. George’s Hill, that we had heard back at Upper Halliford. The gunners in Ripley, inexperienced volunteers who should never have been placed in such a situation, fired a hasty, ineffective volley before fleeing on foot and horseback through the empty village. The Martian, without even using its Heat-Ray, calmly walked over their abandoned guns, stepping carefully among them, and unexpectedly came upon the artillery in Painshill Park, which he promptly destroyed.

The men at St. George’s Hill, however, were better organized or perhaps braver. Hidden by a pine wood, they seemed to go unnoticed by the nearest Martian. They set up their guns with the precision of a military parade and fired from about a thousand yards away.

The shells exploded all around the Martian, and we saw it stagger and fall. A collective cheer erupted, and the gunners frantically reloaded. The fallen Martian let out a long, haunting wail, and almost immediately, a second shimmering giant appeared over the trees to the south. It looked like one of the tripod’s legs had been damaged by one of the shells. The next volley, however, missed the downed Martian completely, and at the same moment, both of its companions unleashed their Heat-Rays on the battery. The ammunition exploded, flames engulfed the pine trees surrounding the guns, and only a couple of the men who were already fleeing over the hill managed to escape.

After this, it seemed the three Martians conferred and came to a halt. Scouts reported that they remained completely still for the next half hour. The Martian that had been knocked down slowly crawled out from under its hood, a small brown figure that, from a distance, looked like a speck of blight, seemingly focused on repairing its support. By around nine, it had finished, as its cowl reappeared above the treetops.

Just a few minutes past nine, these three sentinels were joined by four more Martians, each carrying a thick black tube. They handed similar tubes to the three and arranged themselves at equal distances along a curved line stretching between St. George’s Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of Ripley.

As soon as they began to move, a dozen rockets shot up from the hills ahead, alerting the waiting batteries at Ditton and Esher. At the same time, four of their fighting machines, also armed with tubes, crossed the river. Two of them, silhouetted against the western sky, came into view of the curate and me as we trudged wearily along the road leading north out of Halliford. They seemed to glide on a cloud, as a milky mist enveloped the fields and rose to a third of their height.

At this sight, the curate gasped and started to run, but I knew it was pointless to flee from a Martian, so I ducked into the dewy nettles and brambles, crawling into the wide ditch beside the road. He glanced back, saw what I was doing, and decided to join me.

We paused, with one Martian closer to us facing Sunbury, while the other loomed as a gray blur toward the evening star, further out toward Staines.

The eerie howling of the Martians had stopped; they took their positions in a massive crescent around their cylinders, enveloped in complete silence. This crescent stretched twelve miles between its ends. Never in the history of gunpowder had the start of a battle been so quiet. To us, and to anyone watching from Ripley, it felt as if the Martians owned the darkening night, illuminated only by the slender moon, the stars, the fading daylight, and the fiery glow from St. George’s Hill and the woods of Painshill.

Everywhere we looked, that crescent shape loomed—at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton, Esher, Ockham, hidden behind hills and woods to the south of the river, and across the flat, grassy meadows to the north. Wherever there was a cluster of trees or village houses providing cover, the guns lay in wait. Signal rockets shot into the night sky, bursting and showering sparks before fading away, and the tension among the watching batteries grew palpable. All it would take was for the Martians to move into the line of fire, and those still, dark silhouettes of men and their gleaming guns would erupt into a cacophony of battle.

In that moment, a question loomed in the minds of countless watchers, just as it did in mine: how much did the Martians truly understand about us? Did they realize that we were organized, disciplined, and working together as a unified force? Or did they interpret our sporadic bursts of fire, the sharp sting of our shells, and our steady encirclement of their camp as one might perceive the furious, collective attack of a disturbed hive of bees? Did they believe they could wipe us out? (At that time, no one knew what sustenance they required.) A hundred such questions swirled in my mind as I gazed at that vast, looming shape. And in the back of my thoughts lingered the sense of all the immense, hidden forces moving toward London. Had they set traps? Were the powder mills at Hounslow prepared to ensnare us? Would the people of London find the courage to turn their sprawling city into a fortress like Moscow?

After what felt like an eternity of crouching and peering through the hedge, a sound like distant thunder reached our ears. Another followed, closer this time, and then yet another. Suddenly, the Martian beside us raised his tube high and fired it with a heavy report that shook the ground. The one near Staines responded, echoing the sound without a flash or smoke—just that deep, resonant boom.

Caught up in the excitement of those heavy, rhythmic blasts, I momentarily forgot my own safety and the pain in my scalded hands. I climbed up into the hedge to get a better look toward Sunbury. Just then, another report rang out, and a large projectile soared overhead toward Hounslow. I expected to see smoke or flames, some sign of its impact. Instead, all I saw was the deep blue sky above, punctuated by a solitary star, and the white mist spreading low and wide beneath. There was no crash, no answering explosion. Silence returned, stretching out into what felt like an eternity.

“What’s happening?” the curate asked, standing beside me.

“Who knows?” I replied.

A bat flitted by and disappeared into the night. A distant clamor of shouting rose and fell. I turned my gaze back to the Martian, who was now moving eastward along the riverbank with a swift, rolling motion.

Every moment, I expected hidden artillery to spring into action against him, but the evening calm remained unbroken. The Martian’s figure grew smaller as he receded, and soon the mist and encroaching night swallowed him whole. By some shared instinct, we climbed higher. Toward Sunbury, a dark shape loomed, as if a conical hill had suddenly emerged, blocking our view of the landscape beyond; and further across the river, over Walton, we spotted another such summit. These hill-like forms grew lower and broader the longer we stared.

Suddenly struck by a thought, I looked northward and saw a third of these ominous, dark mounds rising.

Everything had become eerily still. Far away to the southeast, we heard the Martians hooting to one another, and then the air vibrated again with the distant thud of their guns. But our earthly artillery remained silent.

At that moment, we couldn’t grasp the significance of what was happening, but later I would come to understand the meaning of those foreboding kopjes that gathered in the twilight. Each Martian, standing in the great crescent I had described, had fired a massive canister from the gun-like tube they carried, launching it over whatever hills, thickets, clusters of houses, or other potential hiding spots for our guns lay ahead. Some fired just one, some two—like the one we had seen; the Martian at Ripley reportedly discharged no fewer than five at that time. These canisters smashed upon impact—they didn’t explode—but released a vast volume of thick, inky vapor that billowed upward in a dark, swirling cloud, spreading slowly over the surrounding land. The touch of that vapor, the inhalation of its pungent tendrils, was lethal to all living things.

The air was thick with a heavy mist, denser than the thickest smoke. After its initial chaotic surge, it settled down, flowing over the ground like a liquid rather than a gas. It abandoned the hills, spilling into valleys, ditches, and streams, much like the carbonic acid gas that seeps from volcanic cracks. When it met water, a strange chemical reaction occurred, creating a powdery scum that quickly formed on the surface, sinking slowly and making way for more. This scum was completely insoluble, and oddly enough, the water from which it had been filtered was still safe to drink.

The vapor didn’t disperse like a true gas; it clung together in thick banks, sluggishly moving down the slopes and reluctantly pushed by the wind. Gradually, it mixed with the mist and moisture in the air, settling to the ground as dust. Aside from an unknown element that produced a distinct group of four lines in the blue spectrum, we were still completely in the dark about the nature of this substance.

Once the tumult of its release had passed, the black smoke clung tightly to the ground. Even before it settled, there was a chance to escape its poison if you were fifty feet up, on the roofs of tall houses or in the branches of large trees, as was proven that night in Street Cobham and Ditton.

A man who escaped from Street Cobham shared a remarkable story about the strange way the smoke coiled and flowed. From the church spire, he looked down and saw the village houses rising like ghosts from the inky void. He remained there for a day and a half, exhausted, starving, and scorched by the sun, with the earth beneath the blue sky and the distant hills appearing as a velvet-black expanse. Red roofs, green trees, and later, darkened shrubs and gates, barns, outhouses, and walls emerged here and there into the sunlight.

But in Street Cobham, the black vapor lingered until it eventually sank into the ground. Typically, the Martians, once it had served its purpose, would clear the air by wading into it and directing jets of steam at it.

We witnessed this from a deserted house in Upper Halliford, where we had returned. From our vantage point, we could see the searchlights sweeping across Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill. Around eleven, the windows rattled, and we heard the sound of massive siege guns being positioned. They fired intermittently for about fifteen minutes, sending random shots at the unseen Martians in Hampton and Ditton. Then, the pale beams of electric light disappeared, replaced by a bright red glow.

That was when the fourth cylinder fell—a brilliant green meteor, as I later learned, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on Richmond and Kingston hills began firing, there was a sporadic cannonade far off to the southwest, likely due to gunners firing blindly before the black vapor could engulf them.

So, methodically, like men trying to smoke out a wasp nest, the Martians spread this suffocating vapor across the countryside heading toward London. The horns of their crescent formation slowly pulled apart, eventually forming a line stretching from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden. All night, their destructive tubes advanced. After the Martian at St. George’s Hill was brought down, they never gave the artillery a chance to retaliate. Whenever there was a possibility of hidden guns being aimed at them, they discharged another canister of the black vapor, and where the guns were visible, they unleashed the Heat-Ray.

By midnight, the blazing trees along the slopes of Richmond Park and the glare from Kingston Hill illuminated a web of black smoke, obscuring the entire Thames valley as far as the eye could see. Two Martians waded slowly through this darkness, directing their hissing steam jets in various directions.

That night, they were sparing with the Heat-Ray, perhaps because their supply of materials was limited or because they didn’t want to destroy the land but simply to crush any opposition they faced. In that, they certainly succeeded. Sunday night marked the end of organized resistance to their advance. After that, no group of men dared to stand against them; the task seemed utterly hopeless. Even the crews of the torpedo boats and destroyers that had brought their quick-firing guns up the Thames refused to engage, mutinied, and retreated. The only offensive actions men attempted after that night were the frantic and sporadic preparations of mines and traps.

Imagine, if you can, the fate of those artillery units near Esher, tense and waiting in the fading light. There were no survivors. Picture the scene: officers alert and watchful, gunners poised and ready, ammunition stacked nearby, limber gunners with their horses and wagons, and groups of civilians standing as close as they were allowed. The evening was still, with ambulances and hospital tents set up for the burned and wounded from Weybridge. Then came the dull thud of the Martian shots, their clumsy projectiles soaring over trees and houses, crashing down into the fields beyond.

Now envision the sudden shift in focus, the dark mass advancing rapidly, rising high into the sky, turning twilight into an oppressive darkness. This strange, terrifying cloud moved like a predator, claiming its victims. Men and horses were seen dimly, running in panic, screaming, collapsing to the ground. Shouts of terror filled the air as the guns were abandoned, and men writhed in agony on the earth, the thick smoke expanding around them. Then came the night, swallowing everything—an impenetrable fog hiding the dead.

Before dawn, that black mist swept through the streets of Richmond, and the crumbling government made one last desperate attempt to warn the people of London: it was time to flee.