alternately with my brother. She saw it.
On Wednesday the three fugitives they had passed the night in a field
of unripe wheat reached Chelmsford, and there a body of the
inhabitants, calling itself the Committee of Public Supply, seized the
pony as provisions, and would give nothing in exchange for it but the
promise of a share in it the next day. Here there were rumours of
Martians at Epping, and news of the destruction of Waltham Abbey Powder
Mills in a vain attempt to blow up one of the invaders.
People were watching for Martians here from the church towers. My
brother, very luckily for him as it chanced, preferred to push on at
once to the coast rather than wait for food, although all three of them
were very hungry. By midday they passed through Tillingham, which,
strangely enough, seemed to be quite silent and deserted, save for a
few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham they suddenly
came in sight of the sea, and the most amazing crowd of shipping of all
sorts that it is possible to imagine.
For after the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they came on
to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and afterwards
to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They lay in a huge
sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last towards the Naze.
Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks English, Scotch,
French, Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts,
electric boats; and beyond were ships of larger burden, a multitude of
filthy colliers, trim merchantmen, cattle ships, passenger boats,
petroleum tanks, ocean tramps, an old white transport even, neat white
and grey liners from Southampton and Hamburg; and along the blue coast
across the Blackwater my brother could make out dimly a dense swarm of
boats chaffering with the people on the beach, a swarm which also
extended up the Blackwater almost to Maldon.
About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water,
almost, to my brother s perception, like a water-logged ship. This was
the ram _Thunder Child_. It was the only warship in sight, but far away
to the right over the smooth surface of the sea for that day there was
a dead calm lay a serpent of black smoke to mark the next ironclads of
the Channel Fleet, which hovered in an extended line, steam up and
ready for action, across the Thames estuary during the course of the
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