Chapter 8
Friday Night
THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY THING to my mind, of all
the strange and wonderful things that happened upon that Friday,
was the dovetailing of the commonplace habits of our social order
with the first beginnings of the series of events that was to
topple that social order headlong. If on Friday night you had taken
a pair of compasses and drawn a circle with a radius of five miles
round the Woking sand pits, I doubt if you would have had one human
being outside it, unless it were some relation of Stent or of the
three or four cyclists or London people lying dead on the common,
whose emotions or habits were at all affected by the newcomers.
Many people had heard of the cylinder, of course, and talked about
it in their leisure, but it certainly did not make the sensation
that an ultimatum to Germany would have done.
In London that night poor Henderson’s telegram
describing the gradual unscrewing of the shot was judged to be a
canard;ap and
his evening paper, after wiring for authentication from him and
receiving no reply—the man was killed—decided not to print a
special edition.
Even within the five-mile circle the great majority
of people were inert. I have already described the behaviour of the
men and women to whom I spoke. All over the district people were
dining and supping; working men were gardening after the labours of
the day, children were being put to bed, young people were
wandering through the lanes love-making, students sat over their
books.
Maybe there was a murmur in the village streets, a
novel and dominant topic in the public-houses, and here and there a
messenger, or even an eye-witness of the later occurrences, caused
a whirl of excitement, a shouting, and a running to and fro; but
for the most part the daily routine of working, eating, drinking,
sleeping, went on as it had done for countless years—as though no
planet Mars existed in the sky. Even at Woking station and Horsell
and Chobham that was the case.
In Woking junction, until a late hour, trains were
stopping and going on, others were shunting on the sidings,
passengers were alighting and waiting, and everything was
proceeding in the most ordinary way. A boy from the town,
trenchingaq on
Smith’s monopoly, was selling papers with the afternoon’s news. The
ringing impact of trucks, the sharp whistle of the engines from the
junction, mingled with their shouts of “Men from Mars!” Excited men
came into the station about nine o’clock with incredible tidings,
and caused no more disturbance than drunkards might have done.
People rattling Londonwards peered into the darkness outside the
carriage windows, and saw only a rare, flickering, vanishing spark
dance up from the direction of Horsell, a red glow and a thin veil
of smoke driving across the stars, and thought that nothing more
serious than a heath fire was happening. It was only round the edge
of the common that any disturbance was perceptible. There were half
a dozen villas burning on the Woking border. There were lights in
all the houses on the common side of the three villages, and the
people there kept awake till dawn.
A curious crowd lingered restlessly, people coming
and going but the crowd remaining, both on the Chobham and Horsell
bridges. One or two adventurous souls, it was afterwards found,
went into the darkness and crawled quite near the Martians; but
they never returned, for now and again a light-ray, like the beam
of a warship’s searchlight, swept the common, and the Heat-Ray was
ready to follow. Save for such, that big area of common was silent
and desolate, and the charred bodies lay about on it all night
under the stars, and all the next day. A noise of hammering from
the pit was heard by many people.
So you have the state of things on Friday night. In
the centre, sticking into the skin of our old planet Earth like a
poisoned dart, 11 was
this cylinder. But the poison was scarcely working yet. Around it
was a patch of silent common, smouldering in places, and with a few
dark, dimly seen objects lying in contorted attitudes here and
there. Here and there was a burning bush or tree. Beyond was a
fringe of excitement, and farther than that fringe the inflammation
had not crept as yet. In the rest of the world the stream of life
still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years. The fever of
war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve and
destroy brain, had still to develop.
All night long the Martians were hammering and
stirring, sleepless, indefatigable,12 at work
upon the machines they were making ready, and ever and again a puff
of greenish-white smoke whirled up to the starlit sky.
About eleven a company of soldiers came through
Horsell, and deployed along the edge of the common to form a
cordon. Later a second company marched through Chobham to deploy on
the north side of the common. Several officers from the Inkerman
barracks had been on the common earlier in the day, and one, Major
Eden, was reported to be missing. The colonel of the regiment came
to the Chobham bridge and was busy questioning the crowd at
midnight. The military authorities were certainly alive to the
seriousness of the business. About eleven, the next morning’s
papers were able to say, a squadron of hussars,ar
two Maxims,as and
about four hundred men of the Cardigan regiment started from
Aldershot.at
A few seconds after midnight the crowd in the
Chertsey road, Woking, saw a star fall from heaven into the pine
woods to the northwest. It had a greenish colour, and caused a
silent brightness like summer lightning. This was the second
cylinder.