helpful, sometimes lowering and savage. Fighting side by side with them
pushed some weary street outcast in faded black rags, wide-eyed,
loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. There were sturdy workmen thrusting
their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothed like clerks or shopmen,
struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier my brother noticed, men
dressed in the clothes of railway porters, one wretched creature in a
nightshirt with a coat thrown over it.
But varied as its composition was, certain things all that host had in
common. There were fear and pain on their faces, and fear behind them.
A tumult up the road, a quarrel for a place in a waggon, sent the whole
host of them quickening their pace; even a man so scared and broken
that his knees bent under him was galvanised for a moment into renewed
activity. The heat and dust had already been at work upon this
multitude. Their skins were dry, their lips black and cracked. They
were all thirsty, weary, and footsore. And amid the various cries one
heard disputes, reproaches, groans of weariness and fatigue; the voices
of most of them were hoarse and weak. Through it all ran a refrain:
Way! Way! The Martians are coming!
Few stopped and came aside from that flood. The lane opened slantingly
into the main road with a narrow opening, and had a delusive appearance
of coming from the direction of London. Yet a kind of eddy of people
drove into its mouth; weaklings elbowed out of the stream, who for the
most part rested but a moment before plunging into it again. A little
way down the lane, with two friends bending over him, lay a man with a
bare leg, wrapped about with bloody rags. He was a lucky man to have
friends.
A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a filthy black
frock coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed his
boot his sock was blood-stained shook out a pebble, and hobbled on
again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw
herself under the hedge close by my brother, weeping.
I can t go on! I can t go on!
My brother woke from his torpor of astonishment and lifted her up,
speaking gently to her, and carried her to Miss Elphinstone. So soon as
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