War of the Worlds

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IN LONDON


My younger brother was in London when the Martians fell at Woking.
He was a medical student working for an imminent examination, and he
heard nothing of the arrival until Saturday morning.  The morning
papers on Saturday contained, in addition to lengthy special articles
on the planet Mars, on life in the planets, and so forth, a brief and
vaguely worded telegram, all the more striking for its brevity.

The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd, had killed a
number of people with a quick-firing gun, so the story ran.  The
telegram concluded with the words: "Formidable as they seem to be, the
Martians have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen, and,
indeed, seem incapable of doing so.  Probably this is due to the
relative strength of the earth's gravitational energy."  On that last
text their leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.

Of course all the students in the crammer's biology class, to which
my brother went that day, were intensely interested, but there were no
signs of any unusual excitement in the streets.  The afternoon papers
puffed scraps of news under big headlines.  They had nothing to tell
beyond the movements of troops about the common, and the burning of
the pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, until eight.  Then the
_St. James's Gazette_, in an extra-special edition, announced the bare
fact of the interruption of telegraphic communication.  This was
thought to be due to the falling of burning pine trees across the
line.  Nothing more of the fighting was known that night, the night of
my drive to Leatherhead and back.

My brother felt no anxiety about us, as he knew from the
description in the papers that the cylinder was a good two miles from
my house.  He made up his mind to run down that night to me, in order,
as he says, to see the Things before they were killed.  He dispatched
a telegram, which never reached me, about four o'clock, and spent the
evening at a music hall.

In London, also, on Saturday night there was a thunderstorm, and my
brother reached Waterloo in a cab.  On the platform from which the
midnight train usually starts he learned, after some waiting, that an
accident prevented trains from reaching Woking that night.  The nature
of the accident he could not ascertain; indeed, the railway
authorities did not clearly know at that time.  There was very little
excitement in the station, as the officials, failing to realise that
anything further than a breakdown between Byfleet and Woking junction
had occurred, were running the theatre trains which usually passed
through Woking round by Virginia Water or Guildford.  They were busy
making the necessary arrangements to alter the route of the
Southampton and Portsmouth Sunday League excursions.  A nocturnal
newspaper reporter, mistaking my brother for the traffic manager, to
whom he bears a slight resemblance, waylaid and tried to interview
him.  Few people, excepting the railway officials, connected the
breakdown with the Martians.

I have read, in another account of these events, that on Sunday
morning "all London was electrified by the news from Woking."  As a
matter of fact, there was nothing to justify that very extravagant
phrase.  Plenty of Londoners did not hear of the Martians until the
panic of Monday morning.  Those who did took some time to realise all
that the hastily worded telegrams in the Sunday papers conveyed.  The
majority of people in London do not read Sunday papers.

The habit of personal security, moreover, is so deeply fixed in the
Londoner's mind, and startling intelligence so much a matter of course
in the papers, that they could read without any personal tremors:
"About seven o'clock last night the Martians came out of the cylinder,
and, moving about under an armour of metallic shields, have completely
wrecked Woking station with the adjacent houses, and massacred an
entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment.  No details are known.
Maxims have been absolutely useless against their armour; the field
guns have been disabled by them.  Flying hussars have been galloping
into Chertsey.  The Martians appear to be moving slowly towards
Chertsey or Windsor.  Great anxiety prevails in West Surrey, and
earthworks are being thrown up to check the advance Londonward."  That
was how the Sunday _Sun_ put it, and a clever and remarkably prompt
"handbook" article in the _Referee_ compared the affair to a menagerie
suddenly let loose in a village.

No one in London knew positively of the nature of the armoured
Martians, and there was still a fixed idea that these monsters must be
sluggish: "crawling," "creeping painfully"--such expressions occurred
in almost all the earlier reports.  None of the telegrams could have
been written by an eyewitness of their advance.  The Sunday papers
printed separate editions as further news came to hand, some even in
default of it.  But there was practically nothing more to tell people
until late in the afternoon, when the authorities gave the press
agencies the news in their possession.  It was stated that the people
of Walton and Weybridge, and all the district were pouring along the
roads Londonward, and that was all.

My brother went to church at the Foundling Hospital in the morning,
still in ignorance of what had happened on the previous night.  There
he heard allusions made to the invasion, and a special prayer for
peace.  Coming out, he bought a _Referee_.  He became alarmed at the
news in this, and went again to Waterloo station to find out if
communication were restored.  The omnibuses, carriages, cyclists, and