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The world of the War

AT THE WINDOW.

By Daily RunTwo Published about a year ago 10 min read
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I have already said that my storms of emotion have a trick of exhausting

themselves. After a time I discovered that I was cold and wet, and with little

pools of water about me on the stair carpet. I got up almost mechanically, went

into the dining room and drank some whisky, and then I was moved to change

my clothes.

After I had done that I went upstairs to my study, but why I did so I do not

know. The window of my study looks over the trees and the railway towards

Horsell Common. In the hurry of our departure this window had been left open.

The passage was dark, and, by contrast with the picture the window frame

enclosed, the side of the room seemed impenetrably dark. I stopped short in the

doorway.

The thunderstorm had passed. The towers of the Oriental College and the pine

trees about it had gone, and very far away, lit by a vivid red glare, the common

about the sand-pits was visible. Across the light huge black shapes, grotesque

and strange, moved busily to and fro.

It seemed indeed as if the whole country in that direction was on fire—a broad

hillside set with minute tongues of flame, swaying and writhing with the gusts of

the dying storm, and throwing a red reflection upon the cloud scud above. Every

now and then a haze of smoke from some nearer conflagration drove across the

window and hid the Martian shapes. I could not see what they were doing, nor

the clear form of them, nor recognise the black objects they were busied upon.

Neither could I see the nearer fire, though the reflections of it danced on the wall

and ceiling of the study. A sharp, resinous tang of burning was in the air.

I closed the door noiselessly and crept towards the window. As I did so, the

view opened out until, on the one hand, it reached to the houses about Woking

station, and on the other to the charred and blackened pine woods of Byfleet.

There was a light down below the hill, on the railway, near the arch, and several

of the houses along the Maybury road and the streets near the station were

glowing ruins. The light upon the railway puzzled me at first; there were a black

heap and a vivid glare, and to the right of that a row of yellow oblongs. Then I perceived this was a wrecked train, the fore part smashed and on fire, the hinder

carriages still upon the rails.

Between these three main centres of light—the houses, the train, and the

burning county towards Chobham—stretched irregular patches of dark country,

broken here and there by intervals of dimly glowing and smoking ground. It was

the strangest spectacle, that black expanse set with fire. It reminded me, more

than anything else, of the Potteries at night. At first I could distinguish no people

at all, though I peered intently for them. Later I saw against the light of Woking

station a number of black figures hurrying one after the other across the line.

And this was the little world in which I had been living securely for years, this

fiery chaos! What had happened in the last seven hours I still did not know; nor

did I know, though I was beginning to guess, the relation between these

mechanical colossi and the sluggish lumps I had seen disgorged from the

cylinder. With a queer feeling of impersonal interest I turned my desk chair to

the window, sat down, and stared at the blackened country, and particularly at

the three gigantic black things that were going to and fro in the glare about the

sand-pits.

They seemed amazingly busy. I began to ask myself what they could be. Were

they intelligent mechanisms? Such a thing I felt was impossible. Or did a

Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a man’s brain sits and

rules in his body? I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask

myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would

seem to an intelligent lower animal.

The storm had left the sky clear, and over the smoke of the burning land the

little fading pinpoint of Mars was dropping into the west, when a soldier came

into my garden. I heard a slight scraping at the fence, and rousing myself from

the lethargy that had fallen upon me, I looked down and saw him dimly,

clambering over the palings. At the sight of another human being my torpor

passed, and I leaned out of the window eagerly.

“Hist!” said I, in a whisper.

He stopped astride of the fence in doubt. Then he came over and across the

lawn to the corner of the house. He bent down and stepped softly.

“Who’s there?” he said, also whispering, standing under the window and

peering up.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“God knows.”

“Are you trying to hide?”

“That’s it.”

“Come into the house,” I said.

I went down, unfastened the door, and let him in, and locked the door again. I

could not see his face. He was hatless, and his coat was unbuttoned.

“My God!” he said, as I drew him in.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“What hasn’t?” In the obscurity I could see he made a gesture of despair.

“They wiped us out—simply wiped us out,” he repeated again and again.

He followed me, almost mechanically, into the dining room.

“Take some whisky,” I said, pouring out a stiff dose.

He drank it. Then abruptly he sat down before the table, put his head on his

arms, and began to sob and weep like a little boy, in a perfect passion of

emotion, while I, with a curious forgetfulness of my own recent despair, stood

beside him, wondering.

It was a long time before he could steady his nerves to answer my questions,

and then he answered perplexingly and brokenly. He was a driver in the artillery,

and had only come into action about seven. At that time firing was going on

across the common, and it was said the first party of Martians were crawling

slowly towards their second cylinder under cover of a metal shield.

Later this shield staggered up on tripod legs and became the first of the

fighting-machines I had seen. The gun he drove had been unlimbered near

Horsell, in order to command the sand-pits, and its arrival it was that had

precipitated the action. As the limber gunners went to the rear, his horse trod in a

rabbit hole and came down, throwing him into a depression of the ground. At the

same moment the gun exploded behind him, the ammunition blew up, there was

fire all about him, and he found himself lying under a heap of charred dead men

and dead horses.

“I lay still,” he said, “scared out of my wits, with the fore quarter of a horse

atop of me. We’d been wiped out. And the smell—good God! Like burnt meat! I

was hurt across the back by the fall of the horse, and there I had to lie until I felt

better. Just like parade it had been a minute before—then stumble, bang, swish!”

“Wiped out!” he said.

He had hid under the dead horse for a long time, peeping out furtively across

the common. The Cardigan men had tried a rush, in skirmishing order, at the pit,

simply to be swept out of existence. Then the monster had risen to its feet and had begun to walk leisurely to and fro across the common among the few

fugitives, with its headlike hood turning about exactly like the head of a cowled

human being. A kind of arm carried a complicated metallic case, about which

green flashes scintillated, and out of the funnel of this there smoked the Heat-

Ray.

In a few minutes there was, so far as the soldier could see, not a living thing

left upon the common, and every bush and tree upon it that was not already a

blackened skeleton was burning. The hussars had been on the road beyond the

curvature of the ground, and he saw nothing of them. He heard the Maxims rattle

for a time and then become still. The giant saved Woking station and its cluster

of houses until the last; then in a moment the Heat-Ray was brought to bear, and

the town became a heap of fiery ruins. Then the Thing shut off the Heat-Ray, and

turning its back upon the artilleryman, began to waddle away towards the

smouldering pine woods that sheltered the second cylinder. As it did so a second

glittering Titan built itself up out of the pit.

The second monster followed the first, and at that the artilleryman began to

crawl very cautiously across the hot heather ash towards Horsell. He managed to

get alive into the ditch by the side of the road, and so escaped to Woking. There

his story became ejaculatory. The place was impassable. It seems there were a

few people alive there, frantic for the most part and many burned and scalded.

He was turned aside by the fire, and hid among some almost scorching heaps of

broken wall as one of the Martian giants returned. He saw this one pursue a man,

catch him up in one of its steely tentacles, and knock his head against the trunk

of a pine tree. At last, after nightfall, the artilleryman made a rush for it and got

over the railway embankment.

Since then he had been skulking along towards Maybury, in the hope of

getting out of danger Londonward. People were hiding in trenches and cellars,

and many of the survivors had made off towards Woking village and Send. He

had been consumed with thirst until he found one of the water mains near the

railway arch smashed, and the water bubbling out like a spring upon the road.

That was the story I got from him, bit by bit. He grew calmer telling me and

trying to make me see the things he had seen. He had eaten no food since

midday, he told me early in his narrative, and I found some mutton and bread in

the pantry and brought it into the room. We lit no lamp for fear of attracting the

Martians, and ever and again our hands would touch upon bread or meat. As he

talked, things about us came darkly out of the darkness, and the trampled bushes

and broken rose trees outside the window grew distinct. It would seem that a

number of men or animals had rushed across the lawn. I began to see his face, blackened and haggard, as no doubt mine was also.

When we had finished eating we went softly upstairs to my study, and I

looked again out of the open window. In one night the valley had become a

valley of ashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where flames had been there were

now streamers of smoke; but the countless ruins of shattered and gutted houses

and blasted and blackened trees that the night had hidden stood out now gaunt

and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn. Yet here and there some object had had

the luck to escape—a white railway signal here, the end of a greenhouse there,

white and fresh amid the wreckage. Never before in the history of warfare had

destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal. And shining with the

growing light of the east, three of the metallic giants stood about the pit, their

cowls rotating as though they were surveying the desolation they had made.

It seemed to me that the pit had been enlarged, and ever and again puffs of

vivid green vapour streamed up and out of it towards the brightening dawn—

streamed up, whirled, broke, and vanished.

Beyond were the pillars of fire about Chobham. They became pillars of

bloodshot smoke at the first touch of day.

Adventure
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Daily RunTwo

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