Short Answer
Here is the short answer. The Martians die of earthly disease. Their bodies had no defence against our bacteria, so by the time the narrator climbs Primrose Hill, the invaders are dead and no human weapon has stopped them. This video has full spoilers for H. G. Wells’s novel, from the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number thirty-six. If you haven’t finished, stop here.
The Last Walk
Let me set the scene, because the ending is only a few chapters long. At the end of Book Two, chapter seven, the narrator leaves the artilleryman on Putney Hill and goes into London. In chapter eight, Dead London, he finds black dust, closed shops and dead bodies, and then he hears a wail: ulla, ulla, ulla, repeating without end, from a Martian standing in Regent’s Park.
He follows the sound. Near the park he finds a wrecked handling-machine, with blood on the seat and gnawed gristle left by the dogs. Then he crosses a bridge, and the wailing stops. The silence frightens him more than the cry did, and he runs off and hides in a cabmen’s shelter until long after midnight. He has already thought about the poisons in the chemists’ shops.
At first light, he walks toward a Martian on Primrose Hill, because he has decided to die. He sees black birds circling its hood.
What He Finds
He climbs the earth wall around the Martians’ last and largest camp. Inside are huge machines and heaps of material. And scattered among them are the Martians, some in their overturned fighting-machines, some in handling-machines, and a dozen laid out in a row. Nearly fifty, he says, all dead. Dogs are fighting over the bodies at the bottom of the pit.
Across the far edge lies the flying machine they were testing in our thick air, and the narrator says death came not a day too soon. Two more Martians stand dead farther down the slope. One was still crying out when it died, and the narrator guesses it was the last, until its machinery ran down.
His first thought is the story of Sennacherib, a divine hand striking an army in the night.
What Killed Them
Then comes the explanation, and it is the narrator’s own. The Martians were killed by the putrefactive and disease bacteria that humans have lived with since the beginning of time. People have built up resistance through what he calls the toll of a billion deaths, and some of those germs, like the ones that rot a corpse, can’t hurt us at all. But there are no bacteria on Mars.
So once the invaders arrived and began to drink and feed, our microscopic allies went to work. The narrator says they were already doomed while he was watching them in the pit, dying and rotting as they moved. Notice what the text does not do. It never names a specific disease.
The Clues
This is where the book is fairer than its reputation. Before the reveal, the narrator gives us two clues. In Book Two, chapter two, when he describes the Martian body, he says microorganisms either never appeared on Mars or were cleared away ages ago. He lists the diseases they don’t have, and in the moment it reads as one more way they are above us.
And in chapter six, the red weed that spreads over the country, a plant they brought from Mars, is attacked by bacteria and rots away almost as fast as it spread, like something already dead. The narrator explains that earthly plants have a resisting power against bacterial disease. That is the ending, shown on a small scale.
By my count the word bacteria, or bacterial, appears five times in the whole story. The first is in Book Two, chapter six, and Book One never uses it.
How Sure Is The Book?
Here is a detail people miss. The narrator does not claim certainty. In the epilogue, he says that a man named Carver has given the reason for the rapid death of the Martians, and calls it so probable that it is almost proven. Then he adds that it is by no means a proven conclusion.
What he does report: the Martian bodies examined after the war held no bacteria except known earth species. They also buried none of their dead, and killed recklessly, which he reads as ignorance of how decay works. Meanwhile, the Black Smoke remains a mystery, with an unknown element in its black powder. The Heat-Ray generator is a puzzle, and disasters at two laboratories have discouraged further study.
Where Did The Humans Win?
They don’t, at least not by fighting. Remember the high points. At Shepperton, hidden guns hit a Martian, and the Thunder Child destroys two before she is lost. But the narrator says that after Sunday night no body of men stood against them. The artilleryman was right that people were beaten, and wrong about what came next. His dream of capturing a fighting-machine never matters.
What saves humanity is the thing nobody planned. The narrator says that people paid for this immunity over generations. It is a quiet, almost unfair rescue, and Wells knows it. He lets the narrator thank God on a hilltop while the last of the Martians lie dead in the pit.
Three Wrong Forecasts
It helps to see how many people in this book predict the ending and get it wrong. The narrator says, on the first night, that the Martians are too heavy to leave the pit and that one shell would kill them all. The curate says it is the day of judgment and the end of the world. The artilleryman says humanity is beaten for good, and that the survivors must hide underground and learn for a million years.
The narrator admits that he and many others might have foreseen the real answer, if terror and disaster had not blinded their minds. In my reading, the book keeps showing that every confident explanation, whether military, religious or philosophical, is smaller than the thing it is trying to explain.
After The Pit
Chapter nine, Wreckage, is the narrator’s collapse. He remembers climbing the hill, and then nothing for three days. Meanwhile, a man has telegraphed Paris, and church bells ring across England. Ships head for London with food. The first newspaper to come back is mostly blank, and red weed is climbing the buttresses of Waterloo Bridge, but the streets fill with people who look yellow and shaggy, with bright eyes and either a leaping energy or a grim resolve on their faces. Kind people find the narrator raving in St. John’s Wood, singing about being the last man left alive, and they tell him that Leatherhead was destroyed.
He goes back to his house, finds the dining room as he left it, and on his desk finds the paper he was writing on the first morning, stopped in the middle of a sentence about what to expect in two hundred years. Then a voice behind him says no one has been here for ten days, and no one escaped but him. His wife is standing in the garden with his cousin.
In the pages I read, the book does not say how they got out. It just ends the scene, and later he says he has counted her among the dead.
What Humans Take From It
The epilogue then asks what the war did to us. The narrator says it robbed people of the calm confidence in the future that breeds decay. He says it brought enormous gifts to science, helped the idea of a common cause for all mankind, and widened our view of the universe. He even imagines that if Martians can reach Venus, then someday humans might spread to other planets too.
And yet the same chapter says the Martians may return at any opposition of Mars, and that the destruction of the Martians may only be a reprieve. Hope and dread sit side by side, right up to the last page.
What The Book Leaves Open
So what does Wells not answer? The ten nights of flashes stopped, and no one has explained why. The narrator says ten cylinders were fired, but by my count he describes only seven falling stars, and I found no account of the other three. The artilleryman is never heard of again. And Mars may return.
The narrator thinks it should be possible to find the gun on Mars and watch for the next shot, and he says the Martians have lost a vast advantage. He also reports a man named Lessing’s theory that they have landed on Venus. At the end, a Martian machine still stands on Primrose Hill, and sightseers wander around it.
My Reading
This part is my opinion, so treat it as a draft. I think the ending is meant to feel both joyful and slightly cheap. For most of the book, human cleverness fails, and then it simply doesn’t matter. The narrator’s relief is real, but so is his lasting fear, because he can no longer believe the world is fenced in and safe.
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