The First Martian Attack, 1890's London

In the immensity of the vacancy of space where the dust of the material universe swims, our earth seems safe, distant, tranquil.

Man goes about his petty affairs secure in his empire over matter.

Yet eyes were upon our world. Much like a man would be, peering into a microscope with a vast, cool, detached, and unsympathetic intellect compared to the minute objects he's focused on.

These eyes were of hearts that were hardened by the pressures and necessities of a harsh Martian desertscape. Their small, cold, dying homeworld presented a challenging environment that offered the distressing needs that stimulate the development of brightened intellects and enlarged powers, theirs now far beyond ours.

They coldly observed, and consider our warm earth with envious eyes, with emotions long frozen by their icy, distant planet.

A flaming burst of gas from Mars and a cylinder hurtles toward the Earth. Earth, crowded with inferior animals going about their daily activities peaceful and safe.

Green streaks of a cylinder race across the night sky, then a crash, and an alien vessel violently embeds itself into the soft earth.

The lid slowly unscrews and falls. Something moving inside. Something not of our world!

Well, time for me to go! Time to leave the Martians to the government and police to handle!

Then the huge, grotesque metallic monsters. Heat-rays. Black smoke.

Death is coming!

All strength and courage is lost. I witness horrible atrocities. I lose all reason, behaving like an animal now, where neither kindness or force succeeds in persuading me from my hysterics.

Running, running, mouth and throat parched, strength slowly beginning to fade.

My mind filled with horrible dreams, the sky now lit up with Martians busily going about their task, surrounded by the blackened desolate human ruins left behind by their heat-rays.

The night became terrible. Mankind was down. Beat. Cities, nations, civilizations, progress, all at an end.

Another green star falls.

The threat of the poisonous black smoke. Sanity and memory gone. Our planet not a secure home for man any longer.

The horror of another greenish flame high in the atmosphere falling to earth from outer space. A thin blue smoke rising against the dawn from the pits of the Martian cylinders.

Should there be life, or creatures in the cylinders? or merely manuscripts, coins, models… these were my first thoughts.

As the end of the Martian cylinder unscrewed, a yellow-white metal gleamed with an unearthly hue. ‘Extraterrestrial’ had no meaning for most of the onlookers.

Ah, such late 19th-century onlookers gathering around these visitors! What did such a crowd wonder amid the carriages, dog carts, barrows of apples, bicycles, and gaily dressed ladies? What of the cabmen, the tobacconist, the sweet-stuff dealer, the jobbing gardener, the milkman, the butcher, the golf caddy, the loafer?

An old omnibus and two motor cars pulled up and stopped. Policemen keeping the ‘lunatics at large’ in order. The potman from the Public House, the waggoners, the shop assistants, children in the pony chaises, the large timbered wagons, the brewer’s dray, horses feeding out of nosebags, traps, hay wagons, an old-fashioned tricycle with the small front wheel, all gathering around the alien smoking pit.

What would be printed up in Nature, the Punch, the Daily Chronicle, the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sun, the St. James Gazette, the Referee, the Astronomical Exchange?

The first Martian peered over the edge of the open encrusted cylinder. The extraordinary intensity of its immense eyes became crippling and monstrous.

The onlooker’s astonishment gave way to horror, then disgust, dread, then ungovernable terror.

Like a fascination paralyzing one’s action, I stood in limbo between fear and curiosity.

Then the heat-rays. Melting lead, softening iron. Anything combustible bursting into flames. Buildings. Trees. People. Horses. Carts. Death and destruction. Panic and terror.

I found myself running, weeping silently as a child might do.

Bodies. Charred and distorted beyond recognition.

A messenger on a bicycle sent to the post office with a special wire to the evening paper. The Martians cut the lines, ruined the rails. Disrupting and demoralizing, it seemed. Keeping most of us alive for some purpose.

Others do not know of the danger yet. Crowds begin to gather. A tumult begins, caused by the more thoughtless and excitable souls to whom a crowd is an occasion for noise and horseplay.

I am now exhausted with the violence of emotion and flight. My running seemingly futile in the immensities of the night, space, and nature with death so close behind.

Annoyed in my feebleness and anguish, my mind numbing into a blank wonder, muscles and nerves drained of strength.

The gasworks go up in a ball of flame. The nestled row of houses with gables crumbling in ashes at the blast of the heat-ray.

I stagger drunkenly, becoming detached from myself, out of space, out of time, running among the rows of electric lamps.

I tried to warn others in the next village about the Men from Mars. I am laughed at, ridiculed. Feeling foolish and silly, completely haggard, I made my way home and tempered it all with wine, nuts, and a cigarette.

The inertness of the yet unsuspecting people in the outlying regions- people dining, gardening, children being put to bed, young people wandering the lanes in love making, students sitting over their books.

The stream of life flowing as it had done for immeasurable years.

The fever of war that clogs the arteries and veins, deadens the nerves, and destroys brains had not yet developed in the countryside.

I gained some reassurance in the squadron of Hussars, several Maxims, a regiment of infantry, and a detachment of sappers moving toward the battleground.

12-pounders lined the roads, the cannon pointing in the general direction of the landing sites. A formidable defense between the invaders and London.

At the sight of the men at arms my imagination becomes belligerent, defeating the Martians in a dozen different ways.

A light-hearted quip entered my head, ‘This lot of Martians will cost the insurance companies a pretty penny…’

The sun shines through the blood-red of the burning trees.

I distanced myself. The scent of hay in the meadows, hedges sweet with dog roses return to my senses.

I took my wife to the next town. She was oppressed with foreboding by my stories, answering only in monosyllables, while peering at the blood-red glow on the western horizon.

The walking engines of the Martians, glittering monsters of metal on three legs. Puffs of green smoke from out of their joints and its deafening howl- ‘Aloo, aloo…’ like a siren in the crackling lightening and hail of the night.

I passed a one-room squatter’s hut with a potato garden. I stumbled over a dead body. Overcoming the repugnance of one who has never been touched by a dead body, I bend and feel for a pulse. Quite dead.

My imagination is full of the striding metallic monsters. Every now and then a haze of smoke passed and hides the Martian shapes from my view.

The reflections of the fiery chaos danced along the walls and roofs of a once secure world ruined by the alien mechanical Colossi, our iron-clad steam engines seeming mere gestures of despair.

More puffs of vivid green vapors streamed skyward from the glittering Martian Titans.

I could imagine a disastrous struggle before these creatures could be destroyed. I perceived the 12-pounder cannon as mere bows and arrows against the advanced workings of the merciless invaders.

I pass a worthy vicar jingling a bell and holding a celebration, and a man with a portmanteau on his shoulder.

I think of all the tiny towns and hamlets, when they were in their formative years in centuries past being merrily named after certain persons or monuments or natural features, then passing into our world of modern commerce, and then coming to such a blackened and charred end.

St. Georges Hill, Weybridge, Shepperton, Surry, Byfleet, Leatherhead, Maybury Hill, Chobham, Woking, Ripley, Send, Chertsey, all rendered into rubble like the earthquake that destroyed Lisbon a century before.

Kingston, Richmond, Pyrford, Audlestone, Banstead, Epsom Downs, Halliford, Walton, Putney, Middlesex, Sunbury, Molesey, Waterloo, Virginia Water, Windsor, Cockchafer, Ditton, Escher, Woolwich, Chatham, Southhampton, Porthsouth, Barnes, Wimbledon, Aldershot, Richmond Park, churchbells ringing with evensong, Salvation Army lassies passing, all as yet beyond the charred pine spinneys and broken arcades of the ruined villages nearer the Martians.

On the verge of my reason and hope, hope remained. There were just a few dozen Martian machines against mankind’s millions.

I reach London. Wandering alone in a city of the dead. intolerably lonely.

The wreak of a Martian fighting machine smashed and twisted among the ruins of the city.

Then there it stood. One sentinel under the evening mackerel sky, guarding its pit.

Hadley, Barnet, Waltham Abbey, Southend, Shoeburyness, Deal, Broadstairs, Ealing, Tillingham, Harwich, Clacton, If one could from a balloon look down one could have seen the streams of refugees- each black dot a human agony of terror and physical distress seeking a haven from the murderous intruders.

The beginning of the rout of human civilization.

London, a proud city of six million, crowded as Epsom High St. on Derby Day. Sunday night promenaders once strolling under the gas lamps, some still oblivious to their peril, from the Park Terraces to Marylebone, Westbourne Park, St. Pancras, Kilburn, St. John’s Wood, Hampstead, Shoreditch, Highbury, Haggerston, Hoxton, East Ham, each beginning to receive the yellow illuminations that will begin to flicker in their windows just ahead of the Martian fighting machines that promised certain death and destruction, now using rockets to spread a poisonous black smoke in the night and bringing extinction.

In the panic revolvers were fired, people were stabbed.

Hounslow, Ockhan, St. Albans, Chelmsford, Essex, High Barnet, Norwich, Stanmore, New Barnet, Edgeware, Pinnaer, Stains, the reflections in the windows playing out an other-worldly scene before being disintegrating.

To the Thames I made my way, searching for a way out by sea.

Fishing smacks, steam launchers, yachts, electric boats, colliers, cattle ship, passenger liners, petroleum tanks, ocean tramps, paddle-steamers, steamboats- all asking exorbitant prices for a passage out. People swimming out looking for a free ride pitched back into the water.

An iron-clad, the Thunder Child, raced toward three Martian machines that were moving to cut off the human exodus. A heat-ray held high. A huge cloud of vapor rose. An burning iron-clad hulk ramming a Martian Goliath and crumpling it like cardboard. Then another. A unanimous cheer rising up from the vessels in the river. A Martian retreat. For now.

I turned, silent and wretched, a phantasm in a dead city. Perceiving dead contorted bodies rising up, tattered and dog bitten, distortions of humanity, vague and unreal, tearing at me. Fiercer, paler, uglier from the inanimate vastness of sidereal space like ghosts of the past, haunting the vacant streets and singing the doom of mankind, dim and putrefied.

The Martians had disrupted mankind’s serene confidence that gives rise to decadence and were sweeping man out of existence without any provocation, as a boy might crush an anthill in the mere wantonness of power.

Then I observed them. The Martians were mainly just a head, with tentacles for arms. Earth, being three times the gravity of Mars, made their movements ponderous. They communicated with a sort of telepathy. They did not make use of the wheel in all their machinations. They brought with them from Mars a sort of spongy biped, not unlike man, as food. When that ran out they went around in their fighting machines gathering up people and placing them in a metal basket hanging from the dome. They sucked blood from the living through a tube. Efficient. No need for ineffectual digestion. They were of no sex, the young budding from an ear behind their heads like a flowering plant and falling to the ground.

I, being of a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific pursuits had imagined that in the future the perfection of mechanical devices would supercede our limbs, and the perfection of chemical devices would supercede our digestive system, and the brain and the hands would grow larger, and finally intelligence would completely suppress the animal side of the organism. The Martians had seemed to have attained this.

While men are happy or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy stomachs or sound gastric glands, the Martians were lifted above all this, and exhibited a cool, impassioned intelligence.

Then I heard it. the ‘Ulla, ulla, ulla’, as if the mighty desert of houses had obtained a wailing voice of their own.

I wondered if, given a few more centuries, man would have learned to travel in space, and when the slow cooling of the sun made the earth uninhabitable, man may continue his life elsewhere in the vast universe.

I met a strange, undisciplined dreamer of great things, intent on taking over a Martian fighting machine, a self-proclaimed energetic regenerator of our species.

He spoke of a new race of men, not made up of writers of novels and poetry, but of ideas and science. The new mankind will survive, able-bodies, clean-minded, no lackadaisical, weak, or silly. He could not imagine the timid clerks, singers, bar loafers, those after amusement, and those who would submit to persecution being among the new men, or those who blame man himself for being the oppressors of the poor and needy and now being punished.

Stay alive and learn, he says. I feel like a traitor for surviving.

After witnessing his drink and gluttony I perceived the enormous gulf between his dreams and his actual powers. I leave him and make my way through the smoldering city.

The ‘Ulla, ulla, ulla’ continued, then came to a haunting abrupt end.

For man had an ally. Some of the smallest things that God in His wisdom had put on the earth, things that since the beginning of time man had grown resistant to, had begun their deed and had slain the Martians.

Slain, after all of man’s devices had failed, by a planet that, by the toll of a billion deaths, man had bought his birthright on.

But for the moment, in my feverish mind, it had only seemed that the Angel of Death had risen and slain them in the night.

The city lay in a somber robe of smoke. A multitudinous array of hopes and efforts had gone into building this human reef only to see its swift and ruthless destruction. The world, saved for humanity for a brief time longer, would never be the same.