John s Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and Highbury and
Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the vastness of London
from Ealing to East Ham people were rubbing their eyes, and opening
windows to stare out and ask aimless questions, dressing hastily as the
first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It
was the dawn of the great panic. London, which had gone to bed on
Sunday night oblivious and inert, was awakened, in the small hours of
Monday morning, to a vivid sense of danger.
Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother went
down and out into the street, just as the sky between the parapets of
the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying people on foot and
in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. Black Smoke! he heard
people crying, and again Black Smoke! The contagion of such a
unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on the
door-step, he saw another newsvendor approaching, and got a paper
forthwith. The man was running away with the rest, and selling his
papers for a shilling each as he ran a grotesque mingling of profit and
panic.
And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic dispatch of the
Commander-in-Chief:
The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a black and
poisonous vapour by means of rockets. They have smothered our
batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are
advancing slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way. It
is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Black Smoke but
in instant flight.
That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the great
six-million city was stirring, slipping, running; presently it would be
pouring _en masse_ northward.
Black Smoke! the voices cried. Fire!
The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, a cart
carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks and curses, against the water
trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights went to and fro in the
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