The War of the Worlds

With the introduction of the Martian fighting-machines, the middle portion of Book 1 sees widespread human misery at the hands of the Martians progress from a likelihood to a certainty. The Martian attack on Maybury Hill in Chapter 9 immediately results in instinctive and desperate flight for the narrator and his wife, the horrors he witnesses upon returning to Maybury that night leave him “shivering violently” (55), and his miraculous survival of the Martian onslaught in Weybridge and Shepperton seem effectively to have killed him for a time as he floats helplessly down the Thames and wanders mindlessly begging for water. With the Martians’ power on such impressive display, the reader has little reason to maintain any hope for the narrator or for humanity, and yet the narrator’s survival is guaranteed by virtue of his narration. Moreover, this section provides some reason to believe that all is not lost. This hope comes chiefly via the destruction of a fighting-machine at Shepperton—a sight the narrator greets with “a scream and a cheer” (70), his joy shared by all present.

The narrator believes that the Martians spare him only because they are caught off-guard: “After getting this sudden lesson in the power of terrestrial weapons, the Martians retreated […] and in their haste […] they no doubt overlooked many such a stray and negligible victim as myself” (74). Although the reader has little cause to expect it, the role the narrator’s insignificance plays in his survival foreshadows the ultimate defeat of the Martians by bacteria, the most negligible of “terrestrial weapons.” While the narrator certainly cannot have predicted this connection either, he holds onto this event as to justify his optimism when countering the despair of the curate: “One of them was killed yonder not three hours ago. […] We have chanced to come in for the thick of it, […] and that is all” (78-79). The narrator’s assessment here proves to be accurate in the end, although he could not have been prepared for just how intense and extensive “the thick of it” would prove to be.

The curate is one of the most important characters in the novel, as is the artilleryman. Each man provides a unique angle into how survivors process calamity and trauma, and each also occupies a functional position within Wells’s societal commentary. Understandably, the artilleryman is overcome by what he has witnessed. Almost immediately upon entering the narrator’s home, he “put his head on his arms, and began to sob and weep like a little boy, in a perfect passion of emotion” (59). However, he soon regains his composure and delivers useful information to the narrator—and later to his fellow soldiers—about what he witnessed at Horsell Common. Furthermore, despite his experiences, the artilleryman has the fortitude to return to his post, although this decision may also be attributable to fear of staying near Horsell Common or of committing the crime of desertion.

Regardless, just like the military he represents, the artilleryman remains capable of fighting to protect his country, at least for the time being. However, Wells provides some preview in these early chapters of the narcissistic descent that will afflict him by the time the narrator reencounters him in Book 2. Firstly, it is highly symbolic that he survives his company’s destruction at Horsell Common by “lying under a heap of charred dead men and dead horses” (59), for these circumstances presage the manner in which he will benefit from the abandoned wreckage of London later on. Secondly, though the artilleryman’s idea to “ransack the house” and fill “every available pocket with packets of biscuits and slices of meat” before the two men leave the narrator’s house is undeniably prudent (62), the fact remains that the artilleryman almost certainly maintains some of this store when he is separated from the narrator in Weybridge, and so the habit he develops for stockpiling other people’s wealth, which will form the basis of Wells’s criticism of the military, has its origins here.

The curate, whose occupation should make him a valuable resource for the narrator and others reeling from the invasion, instead is completely useless, incapacitated by his inability to make sense of what is happening within the framework of his religion. Incapable of offering anything of value to the narrator, the curate instead alternates between questioning why all of this is happening and spouting scripture: “What have we done—what has Weybridge done? […] The church! We rebuilt it only three years ago. Gone! Swept out of existence! Why? […] The smoke of her burning goeth up for ever and ever!” (77). Soon, the narrator recognizes that “[t]he tremendous tragedy in which [the curate] had been involved […] had driven him to the very verge of his reason” (78). In this sense the curate acts as a stand-in for the organized religious institutions of the day, conveying Wells’s scathing criticism of the paralysis with which churches of the Western World met atrocities committed for imperialism and so-called progress.

Religion itself has a complex role in The War of the Worlds, and this is first explored meaningfully in this section as well. Over the course of the novel, the reader learns that, despite his vast personal differences from the curate, the narrator believes in God. However, this belief seems to be highly personal and only comes up on occasion. The first clear reference to religion appears in the form of an allusion made by one of the soldiers the narrator meets on Saturday when investigating Horsell Common. Discussing the appearance of the Martians, the soldier says, “Octopuses, […] that’s what I calls ‘em. Talk about fishers of men—fighters of fish it is this time!” (44). Jesus is quoted in the Gospel of Mark as calling upon his disciples to be “fishers of men” (Mark 1:17), and so the soldier is paralleling the duty to fight the Martians with this invocation, framing the fight as a holy war. The narrator passes no judgment on this observation, though he certainly shares an enthusiasm for the battle against the Martians, as he expresses repeatedly.

Following that conversation with the soldiers, the narrator’s imagination “became belligerent, and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways; something of my schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism came back” (45), and even later that night, as he prepares to return to the mayhem of Maybury, he confesses, “I had been feverishly excited all day. Something very like the war-fever that occasionally runs through a civilized community had got into my blood” (49). Whether the narrator’s excitement has a religious dimension is unclear, but his immersion in the Thames to escape the Martians at Weybridge and Shepperton certainly possesses a baptismal quality, and it is reasonable to view this act of submission as the antecedent of the destruction of the Martian fighting-machine, his own survival which he describes as “a miracle” (73), and his subsequent experiences with the curate, which are arguably even more miraculous, which position him to claim that “no surviving human being saw so much of the Martians in action as I did” (142).

Wells further complicates his colonialism allegory by depicting both the humans and the Martians with unexpected charity. On Saturday morning, the narrator learns from his milkman that, even after the first massacre, the military hopes to avoid violence: “They aren’t to be killed, […] if that can possibly be avoided” (42). Ogilvy’s company’s initial request for military support “to protect these strange creatures from violence” and the subsequent approach of his group under a white flag already laid the groundwork for these peaceful aspirations (31, 26), but it is a testament to the mercy of the British military that they continue to share this goal after the Martians have shed blood. Given the predilection of the actual British military for violence, especially at that time in history, this characterization is somewhat far-fetched and may be designed in part to underscore the general good-natured cluelessness of the human response. In this sense, it certainly adds some realism to the colonialism allegory, as Europeans were often surprised at the friendliness of the indigenous peoples they encountered, not that that kept them from exploiting it when it suited them.

The humanizing of the Martians in this section is speculative, and therefore may say as much about those doing the speculating as it does about the Martians. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that, after the curate refers to the Martians as “invulnerable” and “pitiless,” the narrator replies, “Neither the one nor, perhaps, the other” (79). That the narrator is willing to reserve judgment about the Martians even after twice having been nearly killed by them suggests that his recent makeshift baptism may have also fortified his sense of charity and that perhaps he found something touching and relatable in the image of “the four carrying the debris of their comrade between them” after the British artillery took a Martian fighting-machine down (73). It is around this time that the narrator’s observations of the Martians begin to convince him that “they were in no hurry” (74), that, as he articulates more fully a few chapters later, “[t]hey do not seem to have aimed at extermination so much as at complete demoralization and the destruction of any opposition” (115). Like European colonists, then, the Martians may have viewed the sins they committed as necessary evils in the pursuit of their greater plan. By putting mercy for the Martians into his narrator’s heart, Wells leaves open the possibility of redemption for the real-world invaders, his fellow Brits and Europeans, despite the seemingly unforgivable crimes they had committed and continued to commit around the globe.