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The War of the Worlds
Chapter 27. WRECKAGE
And now comes the strangest thing in my story, yet, perhaps, it's not completely strange.
I remember clearly and vividly all I did that day until I stood weeping and praising God on Primrose Hill.
And then I forget everything that happened after that point, completely and suddenly.
Of the next three days I know nothing.
I've learned since that I wasn't the first to discover the Martian defeat.
Several other wanderers like me had already found this the night before.
One man, the first, had gone to St.
Martin's-le-Grand, and while I sheltered in the cabmen's hut, he'd managed to send a telegram to Paris.
Martin's-le-Grand, and while I sheltered in the cabmen's hut, he'd managed to send a telegram to Paris.
From there the joyful news had flashed all over the world.
A thousand cities, chilled by terrible fears, suddenly burst into wild lights.
They knew about it in Dublin, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham at the time when I stood at the edge of the pit.
Already men, weeping with joy as I've heard, were shouting and stopping their work to shake hands and shout.
They were making up trains even as near as Crewe to come down to London.
The church bells that had stopped two weeks ago suddenly caught the news, until all England was ringing with bells.
Men on bicycles, thin-faced, unwashed, raced along every country lane shouting of unexpected rescue, shouting to thin, staring figures of despair.
And for the food! Across the Channel, across the Irish Sea, across the Atlantic, corn, bread, and meat were rushing to our relief.
All the ships in the world seemed to be going to London in those days.
But of all this I have no memory, I drifted, a crazy man.
I was in a house of kind people who found me on day three wandering, weeping, and talking wildly in St. John's Wood.
They've told me since that I was singing some crazy song about "The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left Alive!"
Troubled by their own affairs, these people, whose name I can't give though I'd like to thank them, still cared for me.
They sheltered me and protected me from myself.
They'd apparently learned something of my story from me during the days I was out of my mind.
Very gently, when my mind was clear again, they told me what they'd learned about the fate of Leatherhead.
Two days after I was trapped, it had been destroyed, with every person in it, by a Martian.
He'd wiped it out of existence, it seemed, without any reason, as a boy might crush an ant hill, just from the pure love of power.
I was a lonely man, and they were very kind to me.
I was a lonely man and a sad one, and they put up with me.
I stayed with them four days after I recovered.
All that time I felt a vague, growing desire to see whatever remained of the little life that had seemed happy and bright.
It was just a hopeless wish to feast on my misery.
They tried to stop me, they did all they could to turn me away from this dark mood.
I couldn't resist the urge any longer.
I promised faithfully to return to them.
I parted from these four-day friends with tears.
Then I went out again into the streets.
They had lately been so dark, strange, and empty.
Already they were busy with returning people.
In places there were even shops open, and I saw a drinking fountain running water.
I remember how mockingly bright the day seemed as I went back on my sad journey to the little house at Woking.
I remember how busy the streets were and how vivid the moving life around me seemed.
So many people were out everywhere, busy in a thousand activities, that it seemed impossible that any large part of the population could have been killed.
I noticed how yellow the skins of the people I met were.
The men had shaggy hair and large, bright eyes.
Every other man still wore his dirty rags.
Their faces all seemed to have one of two expressions, a jumping joy and energy or a grim determination.
Except for the expression of the faces, London seemed a city of homeless people.
The local councils were giving out bread sent to us by the French government.
The ribs of the few horses showed sadly.
Tired special police officers with white badges stood at the corners of every street.
I saw little of the damage done by the Martians until I reached Wellington Street.
And there I saw the red weed climbing over the supports of Waterloo Bridge.
At the corner of the bridge, I saw one of the common contrasts of that strange time.
A sheet of paper hung against a thicket of red weed, held in place by a stick.
It was the sign of the first newspaper to start publishing again, the Daily Mail.
I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket.
Most of it was blank, but one typesetter who set it had amused himself making an odd pattern of ads on the back.
The material he printed was emotional, the news organization hadn't found its way back yet.
I learned nothing new except that already in one week the study of the Martian machines had given amazing results.
Among other things, the article told me, which I didn't believe at the time, that the "Secret of Flying" had been discovered.
At Waterloo I found the free trains that were taking people to their homes.
The first rush was already over, there were few people in the train, and I wasn't in the mood for casual conversation.
I got a compartment to myself, and sat with folded arms, looking greyly at the sunlit destruction that flowed past the windows.
And just outside the station the train jerked over temporary rails, and on either side of the railway the houses were blackened ruins.
To Clapham Junction, the face of London was dirty with powder of the Black Smoke despite two days of thunderstorms and rain.
At Clapham Junction the line had been wrecked again.
There were hundreds of out-of-work office workers and shop workers working side by side with the usual laborers.
And we were jerked over a quick repair.
All down the line from there the look of the country was thin and unfamiliar.
Wimbledon especially had suffered, Walton, because of its unburned pine woods, seemed the least hurt of any place along the line.
The Wandle, the Mole, every little stream, was a heaped mass of red weed, looking like a mix of butcher's meat and pickled cabbage.
The Surrey pine woods were too dry, however, for the hanging strings of the red climber.
Beyond Wimbledon, within sight of the line, in certain plant nurseries, were the heaped masses of earth around the sixth cylinder.
A number of people were standing around it, and some soldiers were busy in the middle of it.
Over it flew a Union Jack, flapping cheerfully in the morning breeze.
The nurseries were everywhere red with the weed, a wide area of ugly color cut with purple shadows, and very painful to the eye.
One's gaze went with endless relief from the burned greys and dull reds of the foreground to the blue-green softness of the eastward hills.
I got off at Byfleet station, I took the road to Maybury.
I passed the place where I and the artilleryman had talked to the hussars.
I also passed the spot where the Martian had appeared to me in the thunderstorm.
Here, moved by curiosity, I turned aside.
Among a tangle of red fronds I found the twisted, broken dog cart and the whitened bones of the horse scattered and chewed.
For a time I stood looking at these remains.
Then I returned through the pine wood, neck-high with red weed here.
There, to find the landlord of the Spotted Dog had already been buried, and so came home past the College Arms.
A man standing at an open cottage door greeted me by name as I passed.
I looked at my house with a quick flash of hope that faded immediately.
The door had been forced open, it was unlocked and was opening slowly as I approached.
The heavy door slammed again, echoing through the empty hall with a sudden force.
The curtains of my study blew out of the open window from which I and the artilleryman had watched the dawn.
No one had closed it since, the smashed bushes were just as I had left them nearly four weeks ago.
I stumbled into the hall, and the house felt empty.
The stair carpet was wrinkled and discolored where I had crouched, soaked to the skin from the thunderstorm the night of the disaster.
Our muddy footsteps, I saw, still went up the stairs.
I followed them up the stairs and into my dusty, empty study.
There, on my writing-table, lay the sheet of work I had left on the afternoon of the cylinder's opening.
The selenite paper weight still rested on it.
For a moment I stood reading over my abandoned arguments.
It was a paper on the likely development of Moral Ideas with the development of the civilizing process.
And the last sentence was the start of a prophecy.
"In about two hundred years," I had written, "we may expect." The sentence ended suddenly.
I remembered inability to focus that morning, a month ago, and how I had stopped to get the Daily Chronicle from the newsboy.
I remembered how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I had listened to his strange story of "Men from Mars."
I came down and went into the dining room.
There were the mutton and bread, long decayed, and a beer bottle knocked over, as the artilleryman and I had left them.
My home was empty, I saw the foolishness of the faint hope I had held for so long.
And then a strange and unexpected thing happened that made me start and look up.
"It's no use," said a voice.
"The house is deserted. No one has been here these ten days. Don't stay here to torment yourself. No one escaped but you."
I was startled, Had I spoken my thought out loud?
I turned, and the French window was open behind me.
I took a step to it, and stood looking out.
And there, amazed and afraid, even as I stood amazed and afraid, were my cousin and my wife, my wife white and tearless.
She gave a faint cry, a thin, startled sound breaking the sudden stillness.
"I came," she said.
"I knew, knew."
She put her hand to her throat, swayed.
I took a step forward, and caught her in my arms.