no disciplined march; it was a stampede a stampede gigantic and
terrible without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed
and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout
of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.
Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network of
streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents,
gardens already derelict spread out like a huge map, and in the
southward _blotted_. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would have
seemed as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart. Steadily,
incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting out
ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising
ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found valley,
exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting paper.
And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the river, the
glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and methodically spreading
their poison cloud over this patch of country and then over that,
laying it again with their steam jets when it had served its purpose,
and taking possession of the conquered country. They do not seem to
have aimed at extermination so much as at complete demoralisation and
the destruction of any opposition. They exploded any stores of powder
they came upon, cut every telegraph, and wrecked the railways here and
there. They were hamstringing mankind. They seemed in no hurry to
extend the field of their operations, and did not come beyond the
central part of London all that day. It is possible that a very
considerable number of people in London stuck to their houses through
Monday morning. Certain it is that many died at home suffocated by the
Black Smoke.
Until about midday the Pool of London was an astonishing scene.
Steamboats and shipping of all sorts lay there, tempted by the enormous
sums of money offered by fugitives, and it is said that many who swam
out to these vessels were thrust off with boathooks and drowned. About
one o clock in the afternoon the thinning remnant of a cloud of the
black vapour appeared between the arches of Blackfriars Bridge. At that
the Pool became a scene of mad confusion, fighting, and collision, and
for some time a multitude of boats and barges jammed in the northern
arch of the Tower Bridge, and the sailors and lightermen had to fight
savagely against the people who swarmed upon them from the riverfront.
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