railway station to get an evening paper, for the morning papers had
contained only a very inaccurate description of the killing of Stent,
Henderson, Ogilvy, and the others. But there was little I didn t know.
The Martians did not show an inch of themselves. They seemed busy in
their pit, and there was a sound of hammering and an almost continuous
streamer of smoke. Apparently they were busy getting ready for a
struggle. Fresh attempts have been made to signal, but without
success, was the stereotyped formula of the papers. A sapper told me
it was done by a man in a ditch with a flag on a long pole. The
Martians took as much notice of such advances as we should of the
lowing of a cow.
I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this preparation,
greatly excited me. My imagination became belligerent, and defeated the
invaders in a dozen striking ways; something of my schoolboy dreams of
battle and heroism came back. It hardly seemed a fair fight to me at
that time. They seemed very helpless in that pit of theirs.
About three o clock there began the thud of a gun at measured intervals
from Chertsey or Addlestone. I learned that the smouldering pine wood
into which the second cylinder had fallen was being shelled, in the
hope of destroying that object before it opened. It was only about
five, however, that a field gun reached Chobham for use against the
first body of Martians.
About six in the evening, as I sat at tea with my wife in the
summerhouse talking vigorously about the battle that was lowering upon
us, I heard a muffled detonation from the common, and immediately after
a gust of firing. Close on the heels of that came a violent rattling
crash, quite close to us, that shook the ground; and, starting out upon
the lawn, I saw the tops of the trees about the Oriental College burst
into smoky red flame, and the tower of the little church beside it
slide down into ruin. The pinnacle of the mosque had vanished, and the
roof line of the college itself looked as if a hundred-ton gun had been
at work upon it. One of our chimneys cracked as if a shot had hit it,
flew, and a piece of it came clattering down the tiles and made a heap
of broken red fragments upon the flower bed by my study window.
I and my wife stood amazed. Then I realised that the crest of Maybury
Hill must be within range of the Martians Heat-Ray now that the
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