desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and wretched, in the darkness of the night.
I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day....
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.
Endnotes
Epigraph: But who shall dwell in these wôrlds if they be inhabited? ... Are we or they Lords of the World? ... And how are all things made for man?: In his book The Anatomy of Melancholy ( 1621-1651 ), Robert Burton elaborates on the thoughts of astronomer Johannes Kepler ( 1571-1630). In “The Second Partition: The Cure of Melancholy,” section 2, Digression of Air, Burton writes: “But who shall dwell in these vast bodies, Earths, Worlds, if they be inhabited? Rational creatures? as Kepler demands, or have they souls to be saved? or do they inhabit a better part of the World than we do? Are we or they Lords of the World? And how are all things made for man? It is a difficult knot to untie: ’tis hard to determine; this only he proves, that we are in the best place, best world, nearest the heart of the Sun.”
Book One
1 (p. 9) intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own: Wells signals the reader here that Earth will not be conquered by the invading Martians, who, despite their intellectual, scientific, and technological superiority, are not immortal.
2 (p. 9) No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space: Wells’s narrator concludes that the outer planets cooled sooner than Earth, that life started there earlier, and that, therefore, the Martians are older than humans and inhabit an older planet.
3 (p. 9) The planet Mars: The fourth planet from the sun and red in appearance, Mars is named for the Greco-Roman god of war. Its mean distance, or mid-point between furthest and closest distance from the sun, is approximately 141 million miles. The Martian year, the time it takes Mars to rotate around the sun, is approximately 687 days. When Mars, Earth, and the sun are in alignment (in opposition), Mars is at its closest to the sun (the perihelion). At that time, which recurs every 15 to 17 years, Mars is about 35 million miles from Earth. When Mars is farthest from the sun, it is about 63 million miles from Earth. Mars’s diameter (4,200 miles) is about half that of Earth; its mass is 11 percent that of Earth’s. In 1877 Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli ( 1835-1910) discovered the lines on Mars’s surface, which he called canals. American astronomer Percival Lowell ( 1855-1916) propagated the notion that the canals were water-carrying aqueducts and that Mars was inhabited.
4 (p. 9) if the nebular hypothesis has any truth: The nebular hypothesis is a theory regarding the origin of the planets in the solar system. First enunciated by Immanuel Kant ( 1724-1804), it was restated in scientific terms by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), who proposed that the solar system initially was a nebula composed of a hot, rotating