carriages even at two o clock. By three, people were being trampled and
crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards or more
from Liverpool Street station; revolvers were fired, people stabbed,
and the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted
and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the people they were called
out to protect.
And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers refused to
return to London, the pressure of the flight drove the people in an
ever-thickening multitude away from the stations and along the
northward-running roads. By midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes,
and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thames and
across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the bridges in
its sluggish advance. Another bank drove over Ealing, and surrounded a
little island of survivors on Castle Hill, alive, but unable to escape.
After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North-Western train at Chalk
Farm the engines of the trains that had loaded in the goods yard there
_ploughed_ through shrieking people, and a dozen stalwart men fought to
keep the crowd from crushing the driver against his furnace my brother
emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across through a hurrying
swarm of vehicles, and had the luck to be foremost in the sack of a
cycle shop. The front tire of the machine he got was punctured in
dragging it through the window, but he got up and off, notwithstanding,
with no further injury than a cut wrist. The steep foot of Haverstock
Hill was impassable owing to several overturned horses, and my brother
struck into Belsize Road.
So he got out of the fury of the panic, and, skirting the Edgware Road,
reached Edgware about seven, fasting and wearied, but well ahead of the
crowd. Along the road people were standing in the roadway, curious,
wondering. He was passed by a number of cyclists, some horsemen, and
two motor cars. A mile from Edgware the rim of the wheel broke, and the
machine became unridable. He left it by the roadside and trudged
through the village. There were shops half opened in the main street of
the place, and people crowded on the pavement and in the doorways and
windows, staring astonished at this extraordinary procession of
fugitives that was beginning. He succeeded in getting some food at an
inn.
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