It was the first time I realised that the Martians might have any other
purpose than destruction with defeated humanity. We stood for a moment
petrified, then turned and fled through a gate behind us into a walled
garden, fell into, rather than found, a fortunate ditch, and lay there,
scarce daring to whisper to each other until the stars were out.
I suppose it was nearly eleven o clock before we gathered courage to
start again, no longer venturing into the road, but sneaking along
hedgerows and through plantations, and watching keenly through the
darkness, he on the right and I on the left, for the Martians, who
seemed to be all about us. In one place we blundered upon a scorched
and blackened area, now cooling and ashen, and a number of scattered
dead bodies of men, burned horribly about the heads and trunks but with
their legs and boots mostly intact; and of dead horses, fifty feet,
perhaps, behind a line of four ripped guns and smashed gun carriages.
Sheen, it seemed, had escaped destruction, but the place was silent and
deserted. Here we happened on no dead, though the night was too dark
for us to see into the side roads of the place. In Sheen my companion
suddenly complained of faintness and thirst, and we decided to try one
of the houses.
The first house we entered, after a little difficulty with the window,
was a small semi-detached villa, and I found nothing eatable left in
the place but some mouldy cheese. There was, however, water to drink;
and I took a hatchet, which promised to be useful in our next
house-breaking.
We then crossed to a place where the road turns towards Mortlake. Here
there stood a white house within a walled garden, and in the pantry of
this domicile we found a store of food two loaves of bread in a pan, an
uncooked steak, and the half of a ham. I give this catalogue so
precisely because, as it happened, we were destined to subsist upon
this store for the next fortnight. Bottled beer stood under a shelf,
and there were two bags of haricot beans and some limp lettuces. This
pantry opened into a kind of wash-up kitchen, and in this was firewood;
there was also a cupboard, in which we found nearly a dozen of
burgundy, tinned soups and salmon, and two tins of biscuits.
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