Bab Bab 12 · WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON.

. WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON.

As the dawn grew brighter we withdrew from the window from which we had

watched the Martians, and went very quietly downstairs.

The artilleryman agreed with me that the house was no place to stay in.

He proposed, he said, to make his way Londonward, and thence rejoin his

battery—No. 12, of the Horse Artillery. My plan was to return at once

to Leatherhead; and so greatly had the strength of the Martians

impressed me that I had determined to take my wife to Newhaven, and go

with her out of the country forthwith. For I already perceived clearly

that the country about London must inevitably be the scene of a

disastrous struggle before such creatures as these could be destroyed.

Between us and Leatherhead, however, lay the third cylinder, with its

guarding giants. Had I been alone, I think I should have taken my

chance and struck across country. But the artilleryman dissuaded me:

“It’s no kindness to the right sort of wife,” he said, “to make her a

widow;” and in the end I agreed to go with him, under cover of the

woods, northward as far as Street Cobham before I parted with him.

Thence I would make a big detour by Epsom to reach Leatherhead.

I should have started at once, but my companion had been in active

service and he knew better than that. He made me ransack the house for

a flask, which he filled with whisky; and we lined every available

pocket with packets of biscuits and slices of meat. Then we crept out

of the house, and ran as quickly as we could down the ill-made road by

which I had come overnight. The houses seemed deserted. In the road lay

a group of three charred bodies close together, struck dead by the

Heat-Ray; and here and there were things that people had dropped—a

clock, a slipper, a silver spoon, and the like poor valuables. At the

corner turning up towards the post office a little cart, filled with

boxes and furniture, and horseless, heeled over on a broken wheel. A

cash box had been hastily smashed open and thrown under the debris.

Except the lodge at the Orphanage, which was still on fire, none of the

houses had suffered very greatly here. The Heat-Ray had shaved the

chimney tops and passed. Yet, save ourselves, there did not seem to be

a living soul on Maybury Hill. The majority of the inhabitants had

escaped, I suppose, by way of the Old Woking road—the road I had taken

when I drove to Leatherhead—or they had hidden.

We went down the lane, by the body of the man in black, sodden now from

the overnight hail, and broke into the woods at the foot of the hill.

We pushed through these towards the railway without meeting a soul. The

woods across the line were but the scarred and blackened ruins of

woods; for the most part the trees had fallen, but a certain proportion

still stood, dismal grey stems, with dark brown foliage instead of

green.

On our side the fire had done no more than scorch the nearer trees; it

had failed to secure its footing. In one place the woodmen had been at

work on Saturday; trees, felled and freshly trimmed, lay in a clearing,

with heaps of sawdust by the sawing-machine and its engine. Hard by was

a temporary hut, deserted. There was not a breath of wind this morning,

and everything was strangely still. Even the birds were hushed, and as

we hurried along I and the artilleryman talked in whispers and looked

now and again over our shoulders. Once or twice we stopped to listen.

After a time we drew near the road, and as we did so we heard the

clatter of hoofs and saw through the tree stems three cavalry soldiers

riding slowly towards Woking. We hailed them, and they halted while we

hurried towards them. It was a lieutenant and a couple of privates of

the 8th Hussars, with a stand like a theodolite, which the artilleryman

told me was a heliograph.

“You are the first men I’ve seen coming this way this morning,” said

the lieutenant. “What’s brewing?”

His voice and face were eager. The men behind him stared curiously. The

artilleryman jumped down the bank into the road and saluted.

“Gun destroyed last night, sir. Have been hiding. Trying to rejoin

battery, sir. You’ll come in sight of the Martians, I expect, about

half a mile along this road.”

“What the dickens are they like?” asked the lieutenant.

“Giants in armour, sir. Hundred feet high. Three legs and a body like

’luminium, with a mighty great head in a hood, sir.”

“Get out!” said the lieutenant. “What confounded nonsense!”

“You’ll see, sir. They carry a kind of box, sir, that shoots fire and

strikes you dead.”

“What d’ye mean—a gun?”

“No, sir,” and the artilleryman began a vivid account of the Heat-Ray.

Halfway through, the lieutenant interrupted him and looked up at me. I

was still standing on the bank by the side of the road.

“It’s perfectly true,” I said.

“Well,” said the lieutenant, “I suppose it’s my business to see it too.

Look here”—to the artilleryman—“we’re detailed here clearing people out

of their houses. You’d better go along and report yourself to

Brigadier-General Marvin, and tell him all you know. He’s at Weybridge.

Know the way?”

“I do,” I said; and he turned his horse southward again.

“Half a mile, you say?” said he.

“At most,” I answered, and pointed over the treetops southward. He

thanked me and rode on, and we saw them no more.

Farther along we came upon a group of three women and two children in

the road, busy clearing out a labourer’s cottage. They had got hold of

a little hand truck, and were piling it up with unclean-looking bundles

and shabby furniture. They were all too assiduously engaged to talk to

us as we passed.

By Byfleet station we emerged from the pine trees, and found the

country calm and peaceful under the morning sunlight. We were far

beyond the range of the Heat-Ray there, and had it not been for the

silent desertion of some of the houses, the stirring movement of

packing in others, and the knot of soldiers standing on the bridge over

the railway and staring down the line towards Woking, the day would

have seemed very like any other Sunday.

Several farm waggons and carts were moving creakily along the road to

Addlestone, and suddenly through the gate of a field we saw, across a

stretch of flat meadow, six twelve-pounders standing neatly at equal

distances pointing towards Woking. The gunners stood by the guns

waiting, and the ammunition waggons were at a business-like distance.

The men stood almost as if under inspection.

“That’s good!” said I. “They will get one fair shot, at any rate.”

The artilleryman hesitated at the gate.

“I shall go on,” he said.

Farther on towards Weybridge, just over the bridge, there were a number

of men in white fatigue jackets throwing up a long rampart, and more

guns behind.

“It’s bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow,” said the

artilleryman. “They ’aven’t seen that fire-beam yet.”

The officers who were not actively engaged stood and stared over the

treetops southwestward, and the men digging would stop every now and

again to stare in the same direction.

Byfleet was in a tumult; people packing, and a score of hussars, some

of them dismounted, some on horseback, were hunting them about. Three

or four black government waggons, with crosses in white circles, and an

old omnibus, among other vehicles, were being loaded in the village

street. There were scores of people, most of them sufficiently

sabbatical to have assumed their best clothes. The soldiers were having

the greatest difficulty in making them realise the gravity of their

position. We saw one shrivelled old fellow with a huge box and a score

or more of flower pots containing orchids, angrily expostulating with

the corporal who would leave them behind. I stopped and gripped his

arm.

“Do you know what’s over there?” I said, pointing at the pine tops that

hid the Martians.

“Eh?” said he, turning. “I was explainin’ these is vallyble.”

“Death!” I shouted. “Death is coming! Death!” and leaving him to digest

that if he could, I hurried on after the artillery-man. At the corner I

looked back. The soldier had left him, and he was still standing by his

box, with the pots of orchids on the lid of it, and staring vaguely

over the trees.

No one in Weybridge could tell us where the headquarters were

established; the whole place was in such confusion as I had never seen

in any town before. Carts, carriages everywhere, the most astonishing

miscellany of conveyances and horseflesh. The respectable inhabitants

of the place, men in golf and boating costumes, wives prettily dressed,

were packing, river-side loafers energetically helping, children

excited, and, for the most part, highly delighted at this astonishing

variation of their Sunday experiences. In the midst of it all the

worthy vicar was very pluckily holding an early celebration, and his

bell was jangling out above the excitement.

I and the artilleryman, seated on the step of the drinking fountain,

made a very passable meal upon what we had brought with us. Patrols of

soldiers—here no longer hussars, but grenadiers in white—were warning

people to move now or to take refuge in their cellars as soon as the

firing began. We saw as we crossed the railway bridge that a growing

crowd of people had assembled in and about the railway station, and the

swarming platform was piled with boxes and packages. The ordinary

traffic had been stopped, I believe, in order to allow of the passage

of troops and guns to Chertsey, and I have heard since that a savage

struggle occurred for places in the special trains that were put on at

a later hour.

We remained at Weybridge until midday, and at that hour we found

ourselves at the place near Shepperton Lock where the Wey and Thames

join. Part of the time we spent helping two old women to pack a little

cart. The Wey has a treble mouth, and at this point boats are to be

hired, and there was a ferry across the river. On the Shepperton side

was an inn with a lawn, and beyond that the tower of Shepperton

Church—it has been replaced by a spire—rose above the trees.

Here we found an excited and noisy crowd of fugitives. As yet the

flight had not grown to a panic, but there were already far more people

than all the boats going to and fro could enable to cross. People came

panting along under heavy burdens; one husband and wife were even

carrying a small outhouse door between them, with some of their

household goods piled thereon. One man told us he meant to try to get

away from Shepperton station.

There was a lot of shouting, and one man was even jesting. The idea

people seemed to have here was that the Martians were simply formidable

human beings, who might attack and sack the town, to be certainly

destroyed in the end. Every now and then people would glance nervously

across the Wey, at the meadows towards Chertsey, but everything over

there was still.

Across the Thames, except just where the boats landed, everything was

quiet, in vivid contrast with the Surrey side. The people who landed

there from the boats went tramping off down the lane. The big ferryboat

had just made a journey. Three or four soldiers stood on the lawn of

the inn, staring and jesting at the fugitives, without offering to

help. The inn was closed, as it was now within prohibited hours.

“What’s that?” cried a boatman, and “Shut up, you fool!” said a man

near me to a yelping dog. Then the sound came again, this time from the

direction of Chertsey, a muffled thud—the sound of a gun.

The fighting was beginning. Almost immediately unseen batteries across

the river to our right, unseen because of the trees, took up the

chorus, firing heavily one after the other. A woman screamed. Everyone

stood arrested by the sudden stir of battle, near us and yet invisible

to us. Nothing was to be seen save flat meadows, cows feeding

unconcernedly for the most part, and silvery pollard willows motionless

in the warm sunlight.

“The sojers’ll stop ’em,” said a woman beside me, doubtfully. A

haziness rose over the treetops.

Then suddenly we saw a rush of smoke far away up the river, a puff of

smoke that jerked up into the air and hung; and forthwith the ground

heaved under foot and a heavy explosion shook the air, smashing two or

three windows in the houses near, and leaving us astonished.

“Here they are!” shouted a man in a blue jersey. “Yonder! D’yer see

them? Yonder!”

Quickly, one after the other, one, two, three, four of the armoured

Martians appeared, far away over the little trees, across the flat

meadows that stretched towards Chertsey, and striding hurriedly towards

the river. Little cowled figures they seemed at first, going with a

rolling motion and as fast as flying birds.

Then, advancing obliquely towards us, came a fifth. Their armoured

bodies glittered in the sun as they swept swiftly forward upon the

guns, growing rapidly larger as they drew nearer. One on the extreme

left, the remotest that is, flourished a huge case high in the air, and

the ghostly, terrible Heat-Ray I had already seen on Friday night smote

towards Chertsey, and struck the town.

At sight of these strange, swift, and terrible creatures the crowd near

the water’s edge seemed to me to be for a moment horror-struck. There

was no screaming or shouting, but a silence. Then a hoarse murmur and a

movement of feet—a splashing from the water. A man, too frightened to

drop the portmanteau he carried on his shoulder, swung round and sent

me staggering with a blow from the corner of his burden. A woman thrust

at me with her hand and rushed past me. I turned with the rush of the

people, but I was not too terrified for thought. The terrible Heat-Ray

was in my mind. To get under water! That was it!

“Get under water!” I shouted, unheeded.

I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching Martian, rushed

right down the gravelly beach and headlong into the water. Others did

the same. A boatload of people putting back came leaping out as I

rushed past. The stones under my feet were muddy and slippery, and the

river was so low that I ran perhaps twenty feet scarcely waist-deep.

Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely a couple of hundred

yards away, I flung myself forward under the surface. The splashes of

the people in the boats leaping into the river sounded like

thunderclaps in my ears. People were landing hastily on both sides of

the river. But the Martian machine took no more notice for the moment

of the people running this way and that than a man would of the

confusion of ants in a nest against which his foot has kicked. When,

half suffocated, I raised my head above water, the Martian’s hood

pointed at the batteries that were still firing across the river, and

as it advanced it swung loose what must have been the generator of the

Heat-Ray.

In another moment it was on the bank, and in a stride wading halfway

across. The knees of its foremost legs bent at the farther bank, and in

another moment it had raised itself to its full height again, close to

the village of Shepperton. Forthwith the six guns which, unknown to

anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the outskirts of that

village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near concussion, the last

close upon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was already

raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the first shell burst six

yards above the hood.

I gave a cry of astonishment. I saw and thought nothing of the other

four Martian monsters; my attention was riveted upon the nearer

incident. Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the

body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to

dodge, the fourth shell.

The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged,

flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh and

glittering metal.

“Hit!” shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.

I heard answering shouts from the people in the water about me. I could

have leaped out of the water with that momentary exultation.

The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did not

fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer

heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now

rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living

intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to

the four winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate

device of metal whirling to destruction. It drove along in a straight

line, incapable of guidance. It struck the tower of Shepperton Church,

smashing it down as the impact of a battering ram might have done,

swerved aside, blundered on and collapsed with tremendous force into

the river out of my sight.

A violent explosion shook the air, and a spout of water, steam, mud,

and shattered metal shot far up into the sky. As the camera of the

Heat-Ray hit the water, the latter had immediately flashed into steam.

In another moment a huge wave, like a muddy tidal bore but almost

scaldingly hot, came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw people

struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and shouting faintly

above the seething and roar of the Martian’s collapse.

For a moment I heeded nothing of the heat, forgot the patent need of

self-preservation. I splashed through the tumultuous water, pushing

aside a man in black to do so, until I could see round the bend. Half a

dozen deserted boats pitched aimlessly upon the confusion of the waves.

The fallen Martian came into sight downstream, lying across the river,

and for the most part submerged.

Thick clouds of steam were pouring off the wreckage, and through the

tumultuously whirling wisps I could see, intermittently and vaguely,

the gigantic limbs churning the water and flinging a splash and spray

of mud and froth into the air. The tentacles swayed and struck like

living arms, and, save for the helpless purposelessness of these

movements, it was as if some wounded thing were struggling for its life

amid the waves. Enormous quantities of a ruddy-brown fluid were

spurting up in noisy jets out of the machine.

My attention was diverted from this death flurry by a furious yelling,

like that of the thing called a siren in our manufacturing towns. A

man, knee-deep near the towing path, shouted inaudibly to me and

pointed. Looking back, I saw the other Martians advancing with gigantic

strides down the riverbank from the direction of Chertsey. The

Shepperton guns spoke this time unavailingly.

At that I ducked at once under water, and, holding my breath until

movement was an agony, blundered painfully ahead under the surface as

long as I could. The water was in a tumult about me, and rapidly

growing hotter.

When for a moment I raised my head to take breath and throw the hair

and water from my eyes, the steam was rising in a whirling white fog

that at first hid the Martians altogether. The noise was deafening.

Then I saw them dimly, colossal figures of grey, magnified by the mist.

They had passed by me, and two were stooping over the frothing,

tumultuous ruins of their comrade.

The third and fourth stood beside him in the water, one perhaps two

hundred yards from me, the other towards Laleham. The generators of the

Heat-Rays waved high, and the hissing beams smote down this way and

that.

The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing conflict of

noises—the clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of falling houses,

the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into flame, and the crackling

and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up to mingle with

the steam from the river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and fro over

Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent white, that

gave place at once to a smoky dance of lurid flames. The nearer houses

still stood intact, awaiting their fate, shadowy, faint and pallid in

the steam, with the fire behind them going to and fro.

For a moment perhaps I stood there, breast-high in the almost boiling

water, dumbfounded at my position, hopeless of escape. Through the reek

I could see the people who had been with me in the river scrambling out

of the water through the reeds, like little frogs hurrying through

grass from the advance of a man, or running to and fro in utter dismay

on the towing path.

Then suddenly the white flashes of the Heat-Ray came leaping towards

me. The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and darted out

flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar. The Ray flickered up and

down the towing path, licking off the people who ran this way and that,

and came down to the water’s edge not fifty yards from where I stood.

It swept across the river to Shepperton, and the water in its track

rose in a boiling weal crested with steam. I turned shoreward.

In another moment the huge wave, well-nigh at the boiling-point had

rushed upon me. I screamed aloud, and scalded, half blinded, agonised,

I staggered through the leaping, hissing water towards the shore. Had

my foot stumbled, it would have been the end. I fell helplessly, in

full sight of the Martians, upon the broad, bare gravelly spit that

runs down to mark the angle of the Wey and Thames. I expected nothing

but death.

I have a dim memory of the foot of a Martian coming down within a score

of yards of my head, driving straight into the loose gravel, whirling

it this way and that and lifting again; of a long suspense, and then of

the four carrying the debris of their comrade between them, now clear

and then presently faint through a veil of smoke, receding

interminably, as it seemed to me, across a vast space of river and

meadow. And then, very slowly, I realised that by a miracle I had

escaped.