IX.

by H. G. Wells

THE FIGHTING BEGINS

Saturday is etched in my memory as a day filled with tension. It was a hot, muggy day, and I later learned that the barometer was fluctuating wildly. I hadn’t slept much, but my wife managed to find some rest, so I got up early. I wandered into my garden before breakfast, listening intently, but the only sound was a lark singing somewhere near the common.

The milkman arrived as usual, the familiar rattle of his cart breaking the morning stillness. I went to the side gate to catch up on the latest news. He informed me that during the night, troops had surrounded the Martians, and artillery was expected soon. Then, I heard the reassuring sound of a train approaching Woking.

“They’re not supposed to be killed,” the milkman said, “if it can be avoided.”

I spotted my neighbor tending to his garden and chatted with him for a bit before heading inside for breakfast. It felt like an ordinary morning. My neighbor believed the troops would manage to capture or destroy the Martians by the end of the day.

“It’s a shame they’re so unapproachable,” he remarked. “I’d love to know how they survive on another planet; we might learn something valuable.”

He came over to the fence and offered me a handful of strawberries, a testament to his generous gardening spirit. He also mentioned the fire in the pine woods near the Byfleet Golf Links.

“They say,” he continued, “that another one of those cursed things has fallen there—number two. But one is more than enough, surely. This will cost the insurance companies a fortune before it’s all over.” He laughed, his good humor shining through, but then his expression turned serious as he spoke of “poor Ogilvy.”

After breakfast, instead of working, I decided to take a walk toward the common. Under the railway bridge, I encountered a group of soldiers—sappers, I think. They wore small round caps and dirty red jackets, unbuttoned to reveal blue shirts underneath, paired with dark trousers and boots that came up to their calves. They informed me that no one was allowed to cross the canal, and I noticed a soldier from the Cardigan regiment standing guard at the bridge. I talked with the sappers for a while, sharing my account of seeing the Martians the night before. They hadn’t seen them themselves and had only the faintest idea of what they were, so they bombarded me with questions. They were unsure who had ordered the troop movements, speculating that there had been some disagreement at the Horse Guards.

The ordinary sapper is often better educated than the average soldier, and they debated the unusual circumstances of the impending battle with keen insight. I described the Heat-Ray to them, and they began to argue among themselves.

“Crawl up under cover and rush them, that’s what I say,” suggested one.

“Get out of here!” another replied. “What good is cover against that heat? It’ll cook you alive! We need to get as close as we can and dig a trench.”

“Forget your trenches! You always want trenches; you should have been born a rabbit, Snippy.”

“Aren’t they supposed to have necks?” a third soldier chimed in, a small, thoughtful man with a pipe.

I repeated my description.

“Octopuses,” he said. “That’s what I call them. Talk about fishers of men—this time it’s fighters of fish!”

“It’s not murder to kill creatures like that,” the first soldier insisted.

“Why not just shell the damned things right away and be done with it?” the little man suggested. “You can’t tell what they might do.”

“Where are your shells?” the first soldier retorted. “There’s no time. We need to act quickly, that’s my advice, and do it now.”

They continued to debate. After a while, I excused myself and headed to the railway station to grab as many morning papers as I could find.

But I won’t bore you with the details of that long morning and the even longer afternoon. I didn’t manage to catch a glimpse of the common, as even the church towers of Horsell and Chobham were under military control. The soldiers I spoke to were clueless, and the officers were both busy and cryptic. In town, people seemed to feel secure again with the military presence, but I heard for the first time from Marshall, the tobacconist, that his son was among the dead on the common. The soldiers had ordered those living on the outskirts of Horsell to lock up and leave their homes.

I returned home for lunch around two, feeling completely drained. The day was oppressively hot and dull, so I decided to take a cold bath to refresh myself. By half past four, I made my way to the railway station to grab an evening paper. The morning papers had offered only a wildly inaccurate account of the deaths of Stent, Henderson, Ogilvy, and the others. Still, I was already aware of most of the details. The Martians hadn’t revealed themselves at all. They seemed preoccupied in their pit, with the sounds of hammering echoing and a constant stream of smoke rising into the air. It was clear they were preparing for something significant. The papers reported, "Fresh attempts have been made to signal, but without success," as if it were a standard line. A sapper informed me that the signaling was being attempted by a man in a ditch with a flag on a long pole. The Martians paid as much attention to those efforts as we would to the mooing of a cow.

I must admit, the sight of all that military preparation stirred something within me. My imagination ran wild, envisioning heroic battles where I triumphed over the invaders in a dozen different ways. A flicker of my childhood dreams of valor and glory returned. At that moment, it hardly felt like a fair fight; the Martians seemed so vulnerable in their pit.

Around three o’clock, I began to hear the distant thud of a gun, firing at regular intervals from Chertsey or Addlestone. I learned that the smoldering pine woods where the second cylinder had landed were being shelled in hopes of destroying it before it opened. It wasn’t until about five that a field gun finally arrived in Chobham, intended for use against the first group of Martians.

By six in the evening, as I sat with my wife in the summerhouse, discussing the impending battle over tea, I heard a muffled explosion from the common, followed by a sudden burst of gunfire. Almost immediately, a violent crash shook the ground beneath us. I rushed out onto the lawn and saw the tops of the trees around the Oriental College erupt into smoky red flames, while the tower of the nearby church crumbled into ruins. The pinnacle of the mosque had disappeared, and the roofline of the college looked as if it had been battered by a hundred-ton cannon. One of our chimneys cracked and fell, sending a piece tumbling down the tiles and creating a pile of broken red fragments on the flower bed by my study window.

My wife and I stood there, stunned. Then it hit me: the crest of Maybury Hill must now be within range of the Martians’ Heat-Ray, now that the college was out of the way.

I grabbed my wife’s arm and, without hesitation, pulled her out into the road. I ran to fetch the servant, telling her I would go upstairs myself for the box she was calling for.

“We can’t possibly stay here,” I insisted, just as the gunfire erupted again on the common.

“But where are we supposed to go?” my wife asked, panic creeping into her voice.

I thought for a moment, then remembered her cousins in Leatherhead.

“Leatherhead!” I shouted above the noise.

She glanced downhill, where people were emerging from their homes, bewildered.

“How are we going to get to Leatherhead?” she asked.

I spotted a group of hussars riding under the railway bridge; three galloped through the open gates of the Oriental College, while two others dismounted and began running from house to house. The sun, filtering through the smoke rising from the treetops, appeared blood-red, casting an eerie glow over everything.

“Stay here,” I said firmly; “you’ll be safe here.” Then I took off toward the Spotted Dog, knowing the landlord had a horse and dog cart. I ran, realizing that soon everyone on this side of the hill would be trying to escape. When I reached the bar, the landlord was completely unaware of the chaos unfolding just beyond his property. A man stood with his back to me, talking to him.

“I need a pound,” the landlord said, “but I have no one to drive it.”

“I’ll give you two,” I said, leaning over the stranger’s shoulder.

“What for?” he asked, surprised.

“I’ll bring it back by midnight,” I promised.

“Good Lord!” the landlord exclaimed. “What’s the rush? I’m trying to sell my pig. Two pounds, and you’ll bring it back? What’s happening?”

I quickly explained that I needed to leave my home, and he reluctantly agreed to let me take the dog cart. At that moment, it didn’t seem nearly as urgent that the landlord should leave his own place. I made sure to have the cart ready, drove it down the road, and left it in the care of my wife and the servant. Then I rushed back into my house to gather a few valuables, some silverware, and other essentials. As I did, I noticed the beech trees below my house were ablaze, and the fencing along the road glowed ominously red.

While I was packing, one of the dismounted hussars came running up, going from house to house to warn people to evacuate. He was passing by just as I emerged from my front door, struggling with my belongings wrapped in a tablecloth. I called out to him, “What’s the news?”

He turned, stared, and shouted something about “crawling out in a thing like a dish cover,” before dashing toward the gate of the house at the top of the hill. A sudden swirl of black smoke swept across the road, obscuring him for a moment. I hurried to my neighbor’s door and knocked, just to confirm what I already knew: his wife had gone to London with him, and they had locked up their house.

I went back inside, as I had promised, to retrieve my servant’s box. I dragged it out, placed it next to her on the back of the dog cart, then took the reins and hopped into the driver’s seat beside my wife. In no time, we were free from the smoke and noise, racing down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill toward Old Woking.

Ahead of us lay a peaceful, sunlit landscape, with wheat fields stretching out on either side of the road and the Maybury Inn with its swinging sign in view. I spotted the doctor’s cart ahead of me. As we reached the bottom of the hill, I glanced back at the hillside we were leaving. Thick streams of black smoke, laced with flickers of red fire, shot up into the still air, casting dark shadows over the green treetops to the east. The smoke stretched far away, both east toward the Byfleet pine woods and west toward Woking. The road was filled with people rushing toward us.

In the hot, quiet air, I could faintly hear the whirr of a machine gun, soon silenced, along with the sporadic crack of rifles. It seemed the Martians were setting fire to everything within range of their Heat-Ray.

I wasn’t an experienced driver, so I quickly focused on the horse. When I looked back again, the second hill had concealed the black smoke. I cracked the whip and loosened the reins until Woking and Send lay between us and that chaotic scene. I passed the doctor’s cart as we moved between Woking and Send.