BOOK ONE: THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS
CHAPTER 17: 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 South-end 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.
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.
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 ham-stringing 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.
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