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08 - Friday Night - The War of the Worlds - H G Wells · Daily Classic Sci Fi Books

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  Chapter eight. Friday Night. The most extraordinary thing to my mind, of
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  all the strange and wonderful things that happened upon that Friday, was the dovetailing
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  of the commonplace habits of our social order, with the first beginnings of the
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  series of events that was to topple that social order headlong. If on Friday
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  night you had taken a pair of compasses and drawn a circle with a radius
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  of five miles round the Woking sand pits, I doubt if you would have
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  had one human being outside it, unless it were some relation of Stent,
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  or of the three or four cyclists, or London people lying dead on the
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  common whose emotions or habits were at all affected by the newcomers. Many people
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  had heard of the cylinder, of course, and talked about it in their
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  leisure, but it certainly did not make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany
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  would have done. In London that night, Poor Henderson's telegram describing the graduate
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  unscrewing of the shot was judged to be a Canard, and his Evening Paper,
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  after wiring for authentication from him and receiving no reply the man was killed,
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  decided not to print a special edition even within the five mile circle,
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  the great majority of people were inert. I have already described the behavior of
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  the men and women to whom I spoke All over the district. People were
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  dining and supping. Working men were gardening after the labors of the day.
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  Children were being put to bed. Young people were wandering through the lanes love
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  making. Students sat over their books. Maybe there was a murmur in the
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  village streets, a novel and dominant topic in the public houses. And here
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  and there a messenger or even an eye witness of the later occurrences caused a
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  while of excitement, a shouting, and a running to and fro. But
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  for the most part, the daily routine of working, eating, drinking,
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  sleeping went on as it had done for countless years, as though no planet
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  Mars existed in the sky. Even at Woking Station and Horseal and Chobham.
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  That was the case in Woking Junction until a late hour. Trains were stopping
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  and going on. Others were shunting on the sidings, Passengers were alighting and
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  waiting, and everything was proceeding in the most ordinary way. A boy from
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  the town, trenching on Smith's monopoly, was selling papers with the afternoon's news,
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  the ringing impact of trucks, the sharp whistle of the engines from the
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  junction, mingled with their shouts of men from Mars. Excited men came into
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  the station about nine o'clock with incredible tidings, and caused no more disturbance than
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  drunkards might have done. People rattling londonwards peered into the darkness outside the carriage
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  way windows and saw only a rare, flickering, vanishing spark dance up from
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  the direction of Hawseal, a red glow and a thin veil of smoke driving
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  across the stars, and thought that nothing more serious than a heath fire was
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  happening. It was only round the edge of the Common that any disturbance was
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  perceptible. There were half a dozen villas burning on the Woking border. There
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  were lights in all the houses on the common side of the three villages,
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  and the people there kept awake till dawn. A curious crowd lingered restlessly,
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  people coming and going, but the crowd remaining both on the Chobham and Harsel
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  Bridges. One or two adventurous souls, it was afterwards found went into the
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  darkness and crawled quite near the Martians, but they never returned. For now
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  and again a light ray like the beam of a warship's searchlight, swept the
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  common, and the heat ray was ready to follow. Save for such that
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  big area of common was silent and desolate, and the charred bodies lay about
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  on it all night under the stars, and all the next day a noise
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  of hammering from the pit was heard by many people. So you have the
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  state of things on Friday night. In the center. Sticking into the skin
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  of our old planet Earth like a poisoned dart, was this cylinder, but
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  the poison was scarcely working. Yet around it was a patch of silent common,
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  smoldering in places, and with a few dark, dimly seen objects lying
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  in contorted attitudes. Here and there, here and there was a burning bush
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  or tree. Beyond was a fringe of excitement. And farther than that fringe,
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  the inflammation had not crept as yet in the rest of the world.
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  The stream of life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years. The
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  fever of war that that would presently clog vein and artery, dead and nerve
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  and destroy brain, had still to develop. All night long, the martians
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  were hammering and stirring, sleepless, indefatigable at work upon the machines they were
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  making ready, and ever and again a puff of greenish white smoke whirled up
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  to the Starlit sky. About eleven a company of soldiers came through from Hausel
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  and deployed along the edge of the Common to former cordon. Later, a
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  second company marched through Chobham to deploy on the north side of the Common.
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  Several officers from the Inkerman Barracks had been on the Common earlier in the day,
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  and one major Eden was reported to be missing. The colonel of the
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  regiment came to the Chobham Bridge and was busy questioning the crowd. At midnight.
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  The military authorities were certainly alive to the seriousness of the business. About
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  eleven, the next morning's papers were able to say a squadron of whose ars,
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  two maxims and about four hundred men of the Cardigan Regiment started from Aldershot.
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  A few seconds after midnight, the crowd in the Chertsey Road, Woking
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  saw a star fall from Heaven into the pine woods to the northeast. It
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  had a greenish color and caused a silent brightness like summer lightning. This was
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  the second cylinder end of section eight.