Bab Bab 15 · WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY.

. WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY.

It was while the curate had sat and talked so wildly to me under the

hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford, and while my brother was

watching the fugitives stream over Westminster Bridge, that the

Martians had resumed the offensive. So far as one can ascertain from

the conflicting accounts that have been put forth, the majority of them

remained busied with preparations in the Horsell pit until nine that

night, hurrying on some operation that disengaged huge volumes of green

smoke.

But three certainly came out about eight o’clock and, advancing slowly

and cautiously, made their way through Byfleet and Pyrford towards

Ripley and Weybridge, and so came in sight of the expectant batteries

against the setting sun. These Martians did not advance in a body, but

in a line, each perhaps a mile and a half from his nearest fellow. They

communicated with one another by means of sirenlike howls, running up

and down the scale from one note to another.

It was this howling and firing of the guns at Ripley and St. George’s

Hill that we had heard at Upper Halliford. The Ripley gunners,

unseasoned artillery volunteers who ought never to have been placed in

such a position, fired one wild, premature, ineffectual volley, and

bolted on horse and foot through the deserted village, while the

Martian, without using his Heat-Ray, walked serenely over their guns,

stepped gingerly among them, passed in front of them, and so came

unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, which he destroyed.

The St. George’s Hill men, however, were better led or of a better

mettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they were, they seem to have been

quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to them. They laid their guns

as deliberately as if they had been on parade, and fired at about a

thousand yards’ range.

The shells flashed all round him, and he was seen to advance a few

paces, stagger, and go down. Everybody yelled together, and the guns

were reloaded in frantic haste. The overthrown Martian set up a

prolonged ululation, and immediately a second glittering giant,

answering him, appeared over the trees to the south. It would seem that

a leg of the tripod had been smashed by one of the shells. The whole of

the second volley flew wide of the Martian on the ground, and,

simultaneously, both his companions brought their Heat-Rays to bear on

the battery. The ammunition blew up, the pine trees all about the guns

flashed into fire, and only one or two of the men who were already

running over the crest of the hill escaped.

After this it would seem that the three took counsel together and

halted, and the scouts who were watching them report that they remained

absolutely stationary for the next half hour. The Martian who had been

overthrown crawled tediously out of his hood, a small brown figure,

oddly suggestive from that distance of a speck of blight, and

apparently engaged in the repair of his support. About nine he had

finished, for his cowl was then seen above the trees again.

It was a few minutes past nine that night when these three sentinels

were joined by four other Martians, each carrying a thick black tube. A

similar tube was handed to each of the three, and the seven proceeded

to distribute themselves at equal distances along a curved line between

St. George’s Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of

Ripley.

A dozen rockets sprang out of the hills before them so soon as they

began to move, and warned the waiting batteries about Ditton and Esher.

At the same time four of their fighting machines, similarly armed with

tubes, crossed the river, and two of them, black against the western

sky, came into sight of myself and the curate as we hurried wearily and

painfully along the road that runs northward out of Halliford. They

moved, as it seemed to us, upon a cloud, for a milky mist covered the

fields and rose to a third of their height.

At this sight the curate cried faintly in his throat, and began

running; but I knew it was no good running from a Martian, and I turned

aside and crawled through dewy nettles and brambles into the broad

ditch by the side of the road. He looked back, saw what I was doing,

and turned to join me.

The two halted, the nearer to us standing and facing Sunbury, the

remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the evening star, away

towards Staines.

The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took up their

positions in the huge crescent about their cylinders in absolute

silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never

since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still.

To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the

same effect—the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling

night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the stars, the afterglow

of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St. George’s Hill and the

woods of Painshill.

But facing that crescent everywhere—at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton,

Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and across

the flat grass meadows to the north of it, wherever a cluster of trees

or village houses gave sufficient cover—the guns were waiting. The

signal rockets burst and rained their sparks through the night and

vanished, and the spirit of all those watching batteries rose to a

tense expectation. The Martians had but to advance into the line of

fire, and instantly those motionless black forms of men, those guns

glittering so darkly in the early night, would explode into a

thunderous fury of battle.

No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant

minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle—how much they

understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions were

organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret our

spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady

investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of

onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might

exterminate us? (At that time no one knew what food they needed.) A

hundred such questions struggled together in my mind as I watched that

vast sentinel shape. And in the back of my mind was the sense of all

the huge unknown and hidden forces Londonward. Had they prepared

pitfalls? Were the powder mills at Hounslow ready as a snare? Would the

Londoners have the heart and courage to make a greater Moscow of their

mighty province of houses?

Then, after an interminable time, as it seemed to us, crouching and

peering through the hedge, came a sound like the distant concussion of

a gun. Another nearer, and then another. And then the Martian beside us

raised his tube on high and discharged it, gunwise, with a heavy report

that made the ground heave. The one towards Staines answered him. There

was no flash, no smoke, simply that loaded detonation.

I was so excited by these heavy minute-guns following one another that

I so far forgot my personal safety and my scalded hands as to clamber

up into the hedge and stare towards Sunbury. As I did so a second

report followed, and a big projectile hurtled overhead towards

Hounslow. I expected at least to see smoke or fire, or some such

evidence of its work. But all I saw was the deep blue sky above, with

one solitary star, and the white mist spreading wide and low beneath.

And there had been no crash, no answering explosion. The silence was

restored; the minute lengthened to three.

“What has happened?” said the curate, standing up beside me.

“Heaven knows!” said I.

A bat flickered by and vanished. A distant tumult of shouting began and

ceased. I looked again at the Martian, and saw he was now moving

eastward along the riverbank, with a swift, rolling motion.

Every moment I expected the fire of some hidden battery to spring upon

him; but the evening calm was unbroken. The figure of the Martian grew

smaller as he receded, and presently the mist and the gathering night

had swallowed him up. By a common impulse we clambered higher. Towards

Sunbury was a dark appearance, as though a conical hill had suddenly

come into being there, hiding our view of the farther country; and

then, remoter across the river, over Walton, we saw another such

summit. These hill-like forms grew lower and broader even as we stared.

Moved by a sudden thought, I looked northward, and there I perceived a

third of these cloudy black kopjes had risen.

Everything had suddenly become very still. Far away to the southeast,

marking the quiet, we heard the Martians hooting to one another, and

then the air quivered again with the distant thud of their guns. But

the earthly artillery made no reply.

Now at the time we could not understand these things, but later I was

to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes that gathered in the

twilight. Each of the Martians, standing in the great crescent I have

described, had discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he carried, a

huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other

possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of him. Some fired only

one of these, some two—as in the case of the one we had seen; the one

at Ripley is said to have discharged no fewer than five at that time.

These canisters smashed on striking the ground—they did not explode—and

incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour,

coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous

hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country.

And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was

death to all that breathes.

It was heavy, this vapour, heavier than the densest smoke, so that,

after the first tumultuous uprush and outflow of its impact, it sank

down through the air and poured over the ground in a manner rather

liquid than gaseous, abandoning the hills, and streaming into the

valleys and ditches and watercourses even as I have heard the

carbonic-acid gas that pours from volcanic clefts is wont to do. And

where it came upon water some chemical action occurred, and the surface

would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank slowly and

made way for more. The scum was absolutely insoluble, and it is a

strange thing, seeing the instant effect of the gas, that one could

drink without hurt the water from which it had been strained. The

vapour did not diffuse as a true gas would do. It hung together in

banks, flowing sluggishly down the slope of the land and driving

reluctantly before the wind, and very slowly it combined with the mist

and moisture of the air, and sank to the earth in the form of dust.

Save that an unknown element giving a group of four lines in the blue

of the spectrum is concerned, we are still entirely ignorant of the

nature of this substance.

Once the tumultuous upheaval of its dispersion was over, the black

smoke clung so closely to the ground, even before its precipitation,

that fifty feet up in the air, on the roofs and upper stories of high

houses and on great trees, there was a chance of escaping its poison

altogether, as was proved even that night at Street Cobham and Ditton.

The man who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful story of the

strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he looked down from the church

spire and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts out of its

inky nothingness. For a day and a half he remained there, weary,

starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and against the

prospect of the distant hills a velvet-black expanse, with red roofs,

green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns,

outhouses, and walls, rising here and there into the sunlight.

But that was at Street Cobham, where the black vapour was allowed to

remain until it sank of its own accord into the ground. As a rule the

Martians, when it had served its purpose, cleared the air of it again

by wading into it and directing a jet of steam upon it.

This they did with the vapour banks near us, as we saw in the starlight

from the window of a deserted house at Upper Halliford, whither we had

returned. From there we could see the searchlights on Richmond Hill and

Kingston Hill going to and fro, and about eleven the windows rattled,

and we heard the sound of the huge siege guns that had been put in

position there. These continued intermittently for the space of a

quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the invisible Martians at

Hampton and Ditton, and then the pale beams of the electric light

vanished, and were replaced by a bright red glow.

Then the fourth cylinder fell—a brilliant green meteor—as I learned

afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the Richmond and

Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful cannonade far away in

the southwest, due, I believe, to guns being fired haphazard before the

black vapour could overwhelm the gunners.

So, setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out a wasps’

nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling vapour over the

Londonward country. The horns of the crescent slowly moved apart, until

at last they formed a line from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden. All night

through their destructive tubes advanced. Never once, after the Martian

at St. George’s Hill was brought down, did they give the artillery the

ghost of a chance against them. Wherever there was a possibility of

guns being laid for them unseen, a fresh canister of the black vapour

was discharged, and where the guns were openly displayed the Heat-Ray

was brought to bear.

By midnight the blazing trees along the slopes of Richmond Park and the

glare of Kingston Hill threw their light upon a network of black smoke,

blotting out the whole valley of the Thames and extending as far as the

eye could reach. And through this two Martians slowly waded, and turned

their hissing steam jets this way and that.

They were sparing of the Heat-Ray that night, either because they had

but a limited supply of material for its production or because they did

not wish to destroy the country but only to crush and overawe the

opposition they had aroused. In the latter aim they certainly

succeeded. Sunday night was the end of the organised opposition to

their movements. After that no body of men would stand against them, so

hopeless was the enterprise. Even the crews of the torpedo-boats and

destroyers that had brought their quick-firers up the Thames refused to

stop, mutinied, and went down again. The only offensive operation men

ventured upon after that night was the preparation of mines and

pitfalls, and even in that their energies were frantic and spasmodic.

One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those batteries

towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the twilight. Survivors there were

none. One may picture the orderly expectation, the officers alert and

watchful, the gunners ready, the ammunition piled to hand, the limber

gunners with their horses and waggons, the groups of civilian

spectators standing as near as they were permitted, the evening

stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents with the burned and

wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of the shots the

Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling over the trees and

houses and smashing amid the neighbouring fields.

One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly

spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong,

towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a

strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims,

men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling

headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking

and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque

cone of smoke. And then night and extinction—nothing but a silent mass

of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.

Before dawn the black vapour was pouring through the streets of

Richmond, and the disintegrating organism of government was, with a

last expiring effort, rousing the population of London to the necessity

of flight.