Chapter Seventeen
The “Thunder Child”
HAD the Martians aimed only at destruction, they
might on Monday have annihilated the entire
population of London, as it spread itself slowly
through the home counties. Not only along the road
through Barnet, but also through Edgware and Waltham
Abbey, and along the roads eastward to Southend and
Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames to Deal and
Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one
could have hung that June morning in a balloon in
the blazing blue above London every northward and
eastward road running out of the tangled maze of
streets would have seemed stippled black with the
streaming fugitives, each dot a human agony of
terror and physical distress. I have set forth at
length in the last chapter my brother’s account of
the road through Chipping Barnet, in order that my
readers may realise how that swarming of black dots
appeared to one of those concerned. Never before in
the history of the world had such a mass of human
beings moved and suffered together. The legendary
hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia has
ever seen, would have been but a drop in that
current. And this was no disciplined march; it was a
stampede—a stampede gigantic and terrible—without
order and without a goal, six million people unarmed
and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the
beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the
massacre of mankind. 1
Directly below him the balloonist would have seen
the network of streets far and wide, houses,
churches, squares, crescents, gardens—already
derelict—spread out like a huge map, and in the
southward blotted. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon,
it would have seemed as if some monstrous pen had
flung ink upon the chart. Steadily, incessantly,
each black splash grew and spread, shooting out
ramifications this way and that, now banking itself
against rising ground, now pouring swiftly over a
crest into a new-found valley, exactly as a gout of
ink would spread itself upon blotting paper. 2
And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward
of the river, the glittering Martians went to and
fro, calmly and methodically spreading their poison
cloud over this patch of country and then over that,
laying it again with their steam jets when it had
served its purpose, and taking possession of the
conquered country. They do not seem to have aimed at
extermination so much as at complete demoralisation
and the destruction of any opposition. They exploded
any stores of powder they came upon, cut every
telegraph, and wrecked the railways here and there.
They were hamstringing mankind. They seemed in no
hurry to extend the field of their operations, and
did not come beyond the central part of London all
that day. It is possible that a very considerable
number of people in London stuck to their houses
through Monday morning. Certain it is that many died
at home suffocated by the Black Smoke. 3
Until about midday the Pool of London was an
astonishing scene. Steamboats and shipping of all
sorts lay there, tempted by the enormous sums of
money offered by fugitives, and it is said that many
who swam out to these vessels were thrust off with
boathooks and drowned. About one o’clock in the
afternoon the thinning remnant of a cloud of the
black vapour appeared between the arches of
Blackfriars Bridge. At that the Pool became a scene
of mad confusion, fighting, and collision, and for
some time a multitude of boats and barges jammed in
the northern arch of the Tower Bridge, and the
sailors and lightermen had to fight savagely against
the people who swarmed upon them from the
riverfront. People were actually clambering down the
piers of the bridge from above. 4
When, an hour later, a Martian appeared beyond the
Clock Tower and waded down the river, nothing but
wreckage floated above Limehouse. 5
Of the falling of the fifth cylinder I have
presently to tell. The sixth star fell at Wimbledon.
My brother, keeping watch beside the women in the
chaise in a meadow, saw the green flash of it far
beyond the hills. On Tuesday the little party, still
set upon getting across the sea, made its way
through the swarming country towards Colchester. The
news that the Martians were now in possession of the
whole of London was confirmed. They had been seen at
Highgate, and even, it was said, at Neasden. But
they did not come into my brother’s view until the
morrow. 6
That day the scattered multitudes began to realise
the urgent need of provisions. As they grew hungry
the rights of property ceased to be regarded.
Farmers were out to defend their cattle-sheds,
granaries, and ripening root crops with arms in
their hands. A number of people now, like my
brother, had their faces eastward, and there were
some desperate souls even going back towards London
to get food. These were chiefly people from the
northern suburbs, whose knowledge of the Black Smoke
came by hearsay. He heard that about half the
members of the government had gathered at
Birmingham, and that enormous quantities of high
explosives were being prepared to be used in
automatic mines across the Midland counties. 7
He was also told that the Midland Railway Company
had replaced the desertions of the first day’s
panic, had resumed traffic, and was running
northward trains from St. Albans to relieve the
congestion of the home counties. There was also a
placard in Chipping Ongar announcing that large
stores of flour were available in the northern towns
and that within twenty-four hours bread would be
distributed among the starving people in the
neighbourhood. But this intelligence did not deter
him from the plan of escape he had formed, and the
three pressed eastward all day, and heard no more of
the bread distribution than this promise. Nor, as a
matter of fact, did anyone else hear more of it.
That night fell the seventh star, falling upon
Primrose Hill. It fell while Miss Elphinstone was
watching, for she took that duty alternately with my
brother. She saw it. 8
On Wednesday the three fugitives—they had passed the
night in a field of unripe wheat—reached Chelmsford,
and there a body of the inhabitants, calling itself
the Committee of Public Supply, seized the pony as
provisions, and would give nothing in exchange for
it but the promise of a share in it the next day.
Here there were rumours of Martians at Epping, and
news of the destruction of Waltham Abbey Powder
Mills in a vain attempt to blow up one of the
invaders. 9
People were watching for Martians here from the
church towers. My brother, very luckily for him as
it chanced, preferred to push on at once to the
coast rather than wait for food, although all three
of them were very hungry. By midday they passed
through Tillingham, which, strangely enough, seemed
to be quite silent and deserted, save for a few
furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham
they suddenly came in sight of the sea, and the most
amazing crowd of shipping of all sorts that it is
possible to imagine. 10
For after the sailors could no longer come up the
Thames, they came on to the Essex coast, to Harwich
and Walton and Clacton, and afterwards to Foulness
and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They lay in a
huge sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at
last towards the Naze. Close inshore was a multitude
of fishing smacks—English, Scotch, French, Dutch,
and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts,
electric boats; and beyond were ships of large
burden, a multitude of filthy colliers, trim
merchantmen, cattle ships, passenger boats,
petroleum tanks, ocean tramps, an old white
transport even, neat white and grey liners from
Southampton and Hamburg; and along the blue coast
across the Blackwater my brother could make out
dimly a dense swarm of boats chaffering with the
people on the beach, a swarm which also extended up
the Blackwater almost to Maldon. 11
About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very
low in the water, almost, to my brother’s
perception, like a water-logged ship. This was the
ram Thunder Child. It was the only warship in sight,
but far away to the right over the smooth surface of
the sea—for that day there was a dead calm—lay a
serpent of black smoke to mark the next ironclads of
the Channel Fleet, which hovered in an extended
line, steam up and ready for action, across the
Thames estuary during the course of the Martian
conquest, vigilant and yet powerless to prevent it.
12
At the sight of the sea, Mrs. Elphinstone, in spite
of the assurances of her sister-in-law, gave way to
panic. She had never been out of England before, she
would rather die than trust herself friendless in a
foreign country, and so forth. She seemed, poor
woman, to imagine that the French and the Martians
might prove very similar. She had been growing
increasingly hysterical, fearful, and depressed
during the two days’ journeyings. Her great idea was
to return to Stanmore. Things had been always well
and safe at Stanmore. They would find George at
Stanmore. 13
It was with the greatest difficulty they could get
her down to the beach, where presently my brother
succeeded in attracting the attention of some men on
a paddle steamer from the Thames. They sent a boat
and drove a bargain for thirty-six pounds for the
three. The steamer was going, these men said, to
Ostend. 14
It was about two o’clock when my brother, having
paid their fares at the gangway, found himself
safely aboard the steamboat with his charges. There
was food aboard, albeit at exorbitant prices, and
the three of them contrived to eat a meal on one of
the seats forward. 15
There were already a couple of score of passengers
aboard, some of whom had expended their last money
in securing a passage, but the captain lay off the
Blackwater until five in the afternoon, picking up
passengers until the seated decks were even
dangerously crowded. He would probably have remained
longer had it not been for the sound of guns that
began about that hour in the south. As if in answer,
the ironclad seaward fired a small gun and hoisted a
string of flags. A jet of smoke sprang out of her
funnels. 16
Some of the passengers were of opinion that this
firing came from Shoeburyness, until it was noticed
that it was growing louder. At the same time, far
away in the southeast the masts and upperworks of
three ironclads rose one after the other out of the
sea, beneath clouds of black smoke. But my brother’s
attention speedily reverted to the distant firing in
the south. He fancied he saw a column of smoke
rising out of the distant grey haze. 17
The little steamer was already flapping her way
eastward of the big crescent of shipping, and the
low Essex coast was growing blue and hazy, when a
Martian appeared, small and faint in the remote
distance, advancing along the muddy coast from the
direction of Foulness. At that the captain on the
bridge swore at the top of his voice with fear and
anger at his own delay, and the paddles seemed
infected with his terror. Every soul aboard stood at
the bulwarks or on the seats of the steamer and
stared at that distant shape, higher than the trees
or church towers inland, and advancing with a
leisurely parody of a human stride. 18
It was the first Martian my brother had seen, and he
stood, more amazed than terrified, watching this
Titan advancing deliberately towards the shipping,
wading farther and farther into the water as the
coast fell away. Then, far away beyond the Crouch,
came another, striding over some stunted trees, and
then yet another, still farther off, wading deeply
through a shiny mudflat that seemed to hang halfway
up between sea and sky. They were all stalking
seaward, as if to intercept the escape of the
multitudinous vessels that were crowded between
Foulness and the Naze. In spite of the throbbing
exertions of the engines of the little paddleboat,
and the pouring foam that her wheels flung behind
her, she receded with terrifying slowness from this
ominous advance. 19
Glancing northwestward, my brother saw the large
crescent of shipping already writhing with the
approaching terror; one ship passing behind another,
another coming round from broadside to end on,
steamships whistling and giving off volumes of
steam, sails being let out, launches rushing hither
and thither. He was so fascinated by this and by the
creeping danger away to the left that he had no eyes
for anything seaward. And then a swift movement of
the steamboat (she had suddenly come round to avoid
being run down) flung him headlong from the seat
upon which he was standing. There was a shouting all
about him, a trampling of feet, and a cheer that
seemed to be answered faintly. The steamboat lurched
and rolled him over upon his hands. 20
He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not
a hundred yards from their heeling, pitching boat, a
vast iron bulk like the blade of a plough tearing
through the water, tossing it on either side in huge
waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer,
flinging her paddles helplessly in the air, and then
sucking her deck down almost to the waterline. 21
A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment.
When his eyes were clear again he saw the monster
had passed and was rushing landward. Big iron
upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and
from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking
blast shot with fire. It was the torpedo ram,
Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the
rescue of the threatened shipping. 22
Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching
the bulwarks, my brother looked past this charging
leviathan at the Martians again, and he saw the
three of them now close together, and standing so
far out to sea that their tripod supports were
almost entirely submerged. Thus sunken, and seen in
remote perspective, they appeared far less
formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the
steamer was pitching so helplessly. It would seem
they were regarding this new antagonist with
astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the
giant was even such another as themselves. The
Thunder Child fired no gun, but simply drove full
speed towards them. It was probably her not firing
that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she
did. They did not know what to make of her. One
shell, and they would have sent her to the bottom
forthwith with the Heat-Ray. 23
She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she
seemed halfway between the steamboat and the
Martians—a diminishing black bulk against the
receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast. 24
Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and
discharged a canister of the black gas at the
ironclad. It hit her larboard side and glanced off
in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an
unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which the
ironclad drove clear. To the watchers from the
steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their
eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the
Martians. 25
They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out
of the water as they retreated shoreward, and one of
them raised the camera-like generator of the
Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward,
and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its
touch. It must have driven through the iron of the
ship’s side like a white-hot iron rod through paper.
26
A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam,
and then the Martian reeled and staggered. In
another moment he was cut down, and a great body of
water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of
the Thunder Child sounded through the reek, going
off one after the other, and one shot splashed the
water high close by the steamer, ricocheted towards
the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a
smack to matchwood. 27
But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of
the Martian’s collapse the captain on the bridge
yelled inarticulately, and all the crowding
passengers on the steamer’s stern shouted together.
And then they yelled again. For, surging out beyond
the white tumult, drove something long and black,
the flames streaming from its middle parts, its
ventilators and funnels spouting fire. 28
She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems,
was intact and her engines working. She headed
straight for a second Martian, and was within a
hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear.
Then with a violent thud, a blinding flash, her
decks, her funnels, leaped upward. The Martian
staggered with the violence of her explosion, and in
another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving
forward with the impetus of its pace, had struck him
and crumpled him up like a thing of cardboard. My
brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of
steam hid everything again. 29
“Two!,” yelled the captain. 30
Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to
end rang with frantic cheering that was taken up
first by one and then by all in the crowding
multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to
sea. 31
The steam hung upon the water for many minutes,
hiding the third Martian and the coast altogether.
And all this time the boat was paddling steadily out
to sea and away from the fight; and when at last the
confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour
intervened, and nothing of the Thunder Child could
be made out, nor could the third Martian be seen.
But the ironclads to seaward were now quite close
and standing in towards shore past the steamboat. 32
The little vessel continued to beat its way seaward,
and the ironclads receded slowly towards the coast,
which was hidden still by a marbled bank of vapour,
part steam, part black gas, eddying and combining in
the strangest way. The fleet of refugees was
scattering to the northeast; several smacks were
sailing between the ironclads and the steamboat.
After a time, and before they reached the sinking
cloud bank, the warships turned northward, and then
abruptly went about and passed into the thickening
haze of evening southward. The coast grew faint, and
at last indistinguishable amid the low banks of
clouds that were gathering about the sinking sun. 33
Then suddenly out of the golden haze of the sunset
came the vibration of guns, and a form of black
shadows moving. Everyone struggled to the rail of
the steamer and peered into the blinding furnace of
the west, but nothing was to be distinguished
clearly. A mass of smoke rose slanting and barred
the face of the sun. The steamboat throbbed on its
way through an interminable suspense. 34
The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and
darkened, the evening star trembled into sight. It
was deep twilight when the captain cried out and
pointed. My brother strained his eyes. Something
rushed up into the sky out of the greyness—rushed
slantingly upward and very swiftly into the luminous
clearness above the clouds in the western sky;
something flat and broad, and very large, that swept
round in a vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly,
and vanished again into the grey mystery of the
night. And as it flew it rained down darkness upon
the land. 35
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