Then came a moment of short-lived triumph for the Army. One of the artillery shells found its target, and with a shocking violence the platform exploded into fragments. With scarcely a pause, and as if possessed of a life of its own, the battle-machine staggered on, careening and swaying. After a few seconds it collided with the tower of a church near Shepperton, and fell back into the river. As the heat-cannon made contact with the water its furnace exploded, sending up an enormous cloud of spray and steam.
All this had taken place in less than a minute, the very speed at which the Martians were capable of making war being a decisive factor in their supremacy.
Before we had time to recover our senses, the four battle-machines which had silenced the Chertsey battery went to aid their fallen comrade. The first we knew of this was when we heard a great hissing and splashing, and glancing upstream we saw the four mighty machines racing through the water towards us. We had no time to think of hiding or escaping; indeed, so stricken with terror were we that the Martians were on us before we could react. To our own good luck, the monsters had no thought or time for us, for they were engaged in a greater war. Almost before they were beyond us, the heat-cannons were spraying their deadly beams, and once more the deep, staccato voice of the artillery by Shepperton spoke its ineffectual reply.
Then came a sight I have no wish ever to witness again. The deliberation and malice of the Martian invaders was never realized in a more conclusive fashion.
One machine went towards the artillery at Shepperton, and, ignoring the shells which burst about its head, calmly silenced the guns with a long sweep of its beam. Another, standing beside it, set about the systematic destruction of Shepperton itself. The other two battle-machines, standing in the confusion of islands where the Wey meets the Thames, dealt death upon Weybridge. Without compunction, both man and his effects were blasted and razed, and across the green Surrey meadows we heard one detonation after another, and the clamour of voices raised in the terror that precedes a violent death.
When the Martians had finished their evil work the land became silent again … but there was no stillness about. Wey bridge burned, and Shepperton burned. Steam from the river mingled with smoke from the towns, joining in a great column that poured into the cloudless sky.
The Martians, unchallenged once more, folded away their cannons, and congregated at the bend of the river where the first battle-machine had fallen. As the platforms rotated to and fro, the bright sunlight reflected from the burnished cowls.
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During all this Amelia and I had been so taken with the events about us that we failed to notice that our boat continued to drift with the stream. Amelia still crouched at the bottom of the boat, but I had shipped my oars and sat on the wooden seat.
I looked at Amelia, and with my voice reflecting in its hoarseness the terror I felt, I said: “If this is a measure of their power, the Martians will conquer the world!”
“We cannot sit by and allow that to happen.”
“What do you propose we do?”
“We must get to Richmond,” she said. “Sir William will be better placed to know.”
“Then we must row on,” I said.
In my terrible confusion I had overlooked the fact that four battle-machines stood between us and Richmond at that very moment, and so I took the oars and placed them in the water again. I took just one stroke, when behind me I heard a tremendous splashing of water, and Amelia screamed.
“They’re coming this way!”
I released the oars at once, and they slipped into the water.
“Lie still!” I cried to Amelia. Putting my own words into effect, I threw myself backwards, lying at an awkward and painful angle across the wooden seat. Behind me I heard the tumultuous splashing of the battle-machines as they hurtled up-river. We were now drifting almost in the centre of the stream, and so lay directly in their path!
The four were advancing abreast of one another, and lying as I was I could see them upside-down. The wreckage of the battle-machine struck by the shell had been retrieved by the others, and now, carried between them, was being taken back the way they had come. I saw for an instant the torn and blasted metal that had been the platform, and saw too that there was gore and blood about much of it. I derived no satisfaction from the death of one monster-creature, for what was this to the spiteful destruction of two towns and the murder of countless people?
If the monsters had chosen to slay us then we would have had no chance of survival, yet once again we were spared by their preoccupations. Their victory over the two hapless towns was emphatic, and such stray survivors as ourselves were of no consequence. They closed on us with breathtaking speed, almost obscured by the clouds of spray thrown up by their churning legs. One of these sliced into the water not three yards from our little boat, and we were instantly deluged. The boat rocked and yawed, taking in water in such copious quantities that I felt we must surely sink.
Then, in a few seconds, the tripods were gone, leaving us waterlogged and unsteady on the troubled river.
viii
It took us several minutes of paddling to retrieve our oars, and to bale out the water to make the boat manoeuvrable again. By then the Martian battle-machines had vanished towards the south, presumably heading for their pit on the common by Woking.
Considerably shaken by the prolonged incident I set myself to rowing, and in a few minutes we were passing the blasted remains of Weybridge.
If survivors there were, we saw none about. A ferry had been plying as the Martians struck, and we saw its upturned and blackened hull awash in the river. On the towpath lay scores, perhaps hundreds, of charred bodies of those who had suffered directly under the heat-beam. The town itself was well ablaze, with few if any buildings left untouched by the murderous attack. It was like a scene from a nightmare, for when a town burns in silence, unattended, it is no less than a funeral pyre.
There were many bodies in the water, presumably of those people who had thought that there lay refuge. Here the Martians, with their magnificent and wicked cunning, had turned their heat-beams on the river itself, so raising its temperature to that of boiling. As we rowed through, the water was still steaming and bubbling, and when Amelia tested it with her hand she snatched it away. Many of the bodies which floated here revealed by the brilliant redness of their skins that the people had been, quite literally, boiled to death. Fortunately for our sensibilities, the steam had the effect of obscuring our surroundings, and so, as we passed through the carnage, we were spared the sight of much of it.
It was with considerable relief that we turned the bend in the river, but our agonies were not at an end, for now we could see what damage had been inflicted on Shepperton. At Amelia’s urging I rowed more quickly, and in a few minutes I had. taken us beyond the worst.
Once we had turned another bend I slackened off a little, for I was rapidly tiring. We were both in a terrible state as a result of what we had seen, and so I pulled into the bank. We climbed to the shore and sat down in a heady state of shock. What passed between us then I will not relate, but our agonizing was much coloured by our acceptance of complicity in this devastation.