The Telescope
The narrator watches Mars through a telescope and sees a puff of gas. The astronomer beside him puts the chances of anything manlike up there at a million to one. Then it happens again the next night, and the next, for ten nights.
This is a full summary of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, chapter by chapter, with the ending, so it spoils everything. I followed the calendar: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and then fifteen days underground.
Which Text
I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number thirty-six. Its record says it was released on October first, two thousand four, and last updated on March thirtieth, twenty twenty-six. I give no first publication date, because I could not source one twice.
By my count the story is about sixty thousand words in twenty-seven chapters. Book One, The Coming of the Martians, has seventeen. Book Two, The Earth Under the Martians, has ten. The narrator never gets a name, so I’ll call him the narrator. He writes about philosophy and lives at Maybury, near Woking, with his wife.
Ten Flashes
Chapter one. An astronomer in Java reports a huge outbreak of burning gas on Mars. That night the narrator joins Ogilvy at the Ottershaw observatory and sees a second flash himself. The flashes come every night for ten nights, and then stop. No one on earth, he says, has explained why.
Meanwhile he is busy learning to ride a bicycle. Then, in chapter two, a falling star burns over Winchester, and at dawn Ogilvy finds it on Horsell Common. It is a cylinder about thirty yards across, half buried in the pit it dug. The top is turning. Something inside is unscrewing it.
Chapters three and four are the crowd. Boys throw stones, a dealer wheels up apples and ginger beer, and the evening papers shout about a message from Mars. At sunset the lid drops off, and a grey bulk the size of a bear climbs up, with two dark eyes and tentacles. A shop assistant, pushed into the pit by the crowd, slides out of sight.
Friday Night
Chapters five to eight. A deputation walks toward the pit with a white flag: Ogilvy, Stent the Astronomer Royal, and the journalist Henderson. Green smoke puffs up, a humped shape rises, and a beam of invisible heat sweeps over them. Men and bushes burst into flame. The narrator calls it the Heat-Ray. Nearly forty people lie dead around the pit, and in the panic on the road at least three more are crushed.
The narrator runs until he drops. Soon after, he is at home with a cold dinner, telling his wife the Martians cannot leave the pit, because earth’s gravity is three times that of Mars. A shell in the pit, he says, would kill them all. He calls it the last civilised dinner he would eat for many days.
Chapter eight is the strangest, because life goes on. Trains keep running into Woking junction, and hardly anyone farther away cares. A few seconds after midnight, a second star falls.
Saturday
Chapters nine to eleven. Saturday is suspense. The milkman says the troops are not to kill the Martians if it can be avoided. Then, at six, the Heat-Ray wrecks the Oriental College, and the narrator knows his hill is in range. He gets a dog cart from the landlord of the Spotted Dog for two pounds, drives his wife twelve miles to her cousins at Leatherhead, and promises to bring the cart back by midnight.
On the drive home a storm breaks, and a third star falls. By lightning he sees a tripod taller than a house, a walking engine of metal with a hood, crying out Aloo. His horse dies. At the top of the hill he finds the landlord of the Spotted Dog dead. At home, a gunner climbs into his garden, an artillery driver, and says they were wiped out. At dawn, three of the machines stand around the pit.
Sunday
Chapters twelve and thirteen. The narrator and the artilleryman head for Weybridge, and the narrator wants to take his wife out of the country. At Shepperton Lock, refugees crowd the ferry. Five tripods appear over the meadows, and the narrator dives into the river. Hidden guns fire, and a shell bursts in the face of the nearest. The headless machine smashes the church tower and crashes into the Thames, and a boiling wave rolls over him.
The other four carry off the wreck. The narrator drifts downriver in an abandoned boat, and at dusk he meets the curate, who is raving about judgment. The narrator tells him to keep his head, and that God has not exempted Weybridge.
The Brother’s War
Chapters fourteen to seventeen follow the narrator’s younger brother, a medical student in London. On Sunday night the Martians fire canisters that release the Black Smoke, a heavy poison vapour. By Monday dawn the Commander-in-Chief’s dispatch says there is no safety but flight, and six million people run.
On a lane near Barnet, the brother saves Mrs Elphinstone and her sister-in-law from robbers, and joins them. At the crossroads a man scooping up spilled gold is run over. On Wednesday they reach the Essex coast, buy places on a paddle steamer, and watch the ironclad Thunder Child charge three Martians. She destroys two, then is destroyed herself.
Under the Ruin
Book Two. The narrator and the curate leave Halliford, and at Kew a Martian picks up fleeing people and drops them into a carrier on its back. They hide in a house at Sheen. Around midnight the fifth cylinder lands beside them, and they are buried in the kitchen with a gap in the wall.
Through it they watch the pit. A crab-like handling-machine makes aluminium bars from clay. The Martians themselves are round heads about four feet across, with a beak, big eyes and sixteen tentacles. They have no stomach. They inject fresh blood from other creatures, and the narrator sees a man lifted into the air.
The curate loses his mind. After days of fighting over the food, the curate starts shouting that he must bear witness, and the narrator strikes him down with the butt of a meat chopper. A Martian drags the body away, and its tentacle searches the cellar where the narrator hides under coal.
The Fifteenth Day
Chapters five to seven. On the fifteenth day a dog sniffs at the hole. The pit is empty except for crows, and red weed has grown over everything. The narrator climbs out into a landscape that feels like another planet. He then sees that the red weed is dying of disease.
At Putney Hill he meets the artilleryman again. The artilleryman says humans are beaten, just eatable ants, and plans to live in the drains and learn the Martians’ machines. But he digs very little, and by evening he is drinking champagne and teaching the narrator cards. The narrator leaves him there.
Dead London
Chapter eight. London is silent, with black dust in the streets, and a wailing cry from a Martian standing in Regent’s Park: ulla, ulla. Then the cry stops. On Primrose Hill, at dawn, birds are pecking at a Martian’s hood. In the pit below lie nearly fifty Martians, dead, killed by the bacteria that cause disease and decay. The narrator thanks God, and then his memory goes blank.
Chapter nine. For three days he knows nothing. The news went by telegraph to Paris and across the world. Kind strangers find him raving in St. John’s Wood, and tell him Leatherhead was destroyed. He goes to his house near Woking, finds his unfinished paper on the table, and hears a voice behind him. It is his wife, alive, with his cousin.
What Stays Open
The epilogue is the narrator’s loose ends. A man named Carver gives the likely reason the Martians died, and no bacteria but known earth species were found in their bodies. The Black Smoke and the Heat-Ray stay unexplained. Mars could come back, he warns, and a man named Lessing thinks the Martians have landed on Venus.
That is the whole story, and it ends with the narrator holding his wife’s hand and thinking that each had counted the other among the dead. If this helped, subscribe, and tell me in the comments which moment hits you harder, the Thunder Child or the dead Martians on Primrose Hill.
