The War of the Worlds

The final half of Book 2 sees the narrator emerge from his two weeks of imprisonment to a “landscape, weird and lurid, of another planet” (159). Gazing out on the wreckage of Greater London, now dominated by the red weed, the narrator “touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, […] a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel” (159). While in fact Martians have already begun to die en masse from terrestrial bacteria, the narrator knows nothing of this and so presumes that they have moved on to continue their conquest elsewhere. Considering how insubstantial any threats to Martian dominance have seemed up until this point, the reader has every reason to share this prediction.

Still, the fact that the narrator is alive to tell the story continues to mean something, and Wells gives further reason for hope by revealing that “the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain bacteria, presently seized upon it” (160). Even on its own this foreshadowing of the Martians’ demise is quite overt, but it becomes especially conspicuous when coupled with the narrator’s revelation on the subject from a few chapters earlier: “Micro-organisms […] have either never appeared upon Mars or Martian sanitary science eliminated them ages ago” (141).

Of course, with the red weed still thriving and Martians yet to be studied under the microscope, the narrator is unable to make these connections in the moment. Nevertheless, even if the red weed makes his homeland look alien and cannot be divorced from the ruthless Martians who brought it to Earth, the narrator does not villainize it. On its first appearance, when he sees it floating underneath a bridge before becoming trapped with the curate, he has no idea what he is looking at but confesses, “I put a more horrible interpretation on them than they deserved” (129). Presumably, he guesses these “red masses” are remnants of human slaughter. While it is hard to imagine a more horrible interpretation than that, it is noteworthy that he initially greets this invasive, otherworldly weed from a place of relief.

Two weeks later, the invasion of the weed through the peephole contributes to his awakening from a terrified stupor and encourages him to leave his place of safety and strike back out into the world (157). As he does so, he finds that “the density of the weed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding” (159-60). Even when “a sudden impulse”—perhaps a desire to conquer something, anything Martian—moves him to eat the stuff, though he is turned off by its “sickly, metallic taste” (161), it does not harm him. He describes it as “watery” (161), perhaps suggesting that, had he reached a state of greater desperation, it might have kept him alive. In making the red weed such a neutral element in the Martian invasion, and in some ways even a source of protection and security, Wells again complicates the morality of Mars and its organisms, leaving open the possibility that, had terrestrial bacteria not eradicated all Martian lifeforms, some meaning might have been found amidst the new balance that would have been struck between the lifeforms of the two planets.

The artilleryman presents himself as someone ready to make a very aggressive meaning out of such a new order, even if he is not willing to put in the legwork necessary to attain his vision and the vision itself proves to be deeply inhumane. The changes this character has undergone since he first met the narrator in Book 1 reveal Wells’s misgivings about the militaries of Britain and other imperial powers. Like these powers, the artilleryman has a shrewd understanding of the state of affairs and is driven by laudable virtues, resulting in the narrator’s surprised agreement with him: “I could find nothing to bring against this man’s reasoning. In the days before the invasion no one would have questioned my intellectual superiority to his […]; and yet he had already formulated a situation that I had scarcely realized” (172).

Even after the reality of the artilleryman’s sloth and greed fractures his plan in the narrator’s eyes, the man’s enthusiasm and idealism are such that the narrator “more than half believed in him again” (177). However, the narrator has already revealed himself on multiple occasions to be susceptible to getting carried away in this sort of excitement, and the fact remains that the artilleryman is too caught up in eating, drinking, and celebrating his dominion to accomplish his vision (175). More troublingly, his self-importance, his frenzy to pilot one of the Martian fighting-machines, and his eagerness to cast out “the useless and cumbersome and mischievous” whom he asserts “ought to be willing to die,” for “[i]t’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race” (173), together raise the concern of whether life in the artilleryman’s militaristic, discriminatory society would be any better than life under the Martians. As a symbol for the militaries of his time, then, the artilleryman embodies Wells’s criticism of these institutions as hollow, greedy instruments of death and social division, a startlingly progressive criticism given Wells’s own predilection for eugenics.

Despite “the gulf between [the artilleryman’s] dreams and his powers” (175), his predictions about life under the Martians reveal stunning insight into human behavior. Given the benefit humans pose to Martians as food, the artilleryman’s prediction that humans will be placated and farmed rather than eradicated is highly credible.

Furthermore, his recognition that many people would be satisfied with a life of “[n]ice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding,” a life which is not so different from—and perhaps in some ways better than—the rat race that industrialization had made of their lives prior to the invasion, belies a deep understanding of the willingness of many people to sacrifice self-actualization and liberty for comfort and security: “After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they’ll come and be caught cheerful. They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them” (171). It is ironic, given these scathing observations about human nature, that immediately thereafter, as he helps the artilleryman to dig his ridiculous tunnel, the narrator “found a curious relief from the aching strangeness of the world in this steady labor” despite already realizing the flaws of the plan: “As we worked, I turned his project over in my mind, and presently objections and doubts began to arise; but I worked there all the morning, so glad was I to find myself with a purpose again” (175). If the narrator cannot help but feel contentment when working to bring about the artilleryman’s futile, off-kilter vision, especially on the heels of a conversation criticizing empty living, perhaps humanity is doomed to such a fate with or without the Martians. The irony builds when both men lose themselves that very night in food, drink, and games as the world suffers all around them. While the narrator extricates himself from the self-gratifying life the artilleryman has built for him, the concerns that even this flawed narrator voices in the epilogue that humanity is growing complacent in the wake of its miraculous survival, that Martians are now little more than museum attractions and a centerpiece on Maybury Hill surrounded by “sight-seers” and “the tumult of playing children” (197), suggest that the lessons of their invasion have not been duly heeded.

The remarkable ending, in which the Martians suddenly suffer total defeat “by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth” (185), has special significance when considering the colonialism allegory. The role infectious disease played in eradicating indigenous peoples and thus facilitating European imperialism is well-known, and yet it is fundamentally a matter of luck. Under different circumstances, the Europeans would have been the ones ravaged by disease, their colonial ambitions dashed in the process. The ending to The War of the Worlds reminds readers of the precariousness of this outcome and should humble anyone who believes that Europeans deserve their place in the seat of global power. That said, there is a certain insensitive poetic injustice to the fact that the British benefit from disease in this way both in real life and in Wells’s novel, and so some readers may view this authorial choice as a testament to a sort of cosmic favoritism for Wells’s people.

Either way, humans deserve no credit for surviving in The War of the Worlds. Their salvation is attributable to the microscopic creatures that inhabit “The Earth Under the Martians,” which is perhaps a more meaningful way to read the title of Book 2. While there is a note of optimism in this ending, a sense that our existence on Earth is ordained and protected by the sacrifices we have made over the eons to earn a spot within life’s delicate balance, this optimism is tempered by the fact that we also admire and imitate the Martians, even when the end of that evolutionary road disgusts us. Wells’s story suggests that, if we allow ourselves to become too much like them, the hubris of thinking we can lift ourselves above the intricate balance of life in this universe will lead us into calamitous mistakes of our own.

As for the narrator and the others who were there on the frontlines, the trauma of their experience remains at the fore, as the last paragraphs make clear. Any joy of survival will always be substantially undercut by the uncertainty and fear that have become permanent fixtures, which will for the rest of the narrator’s life render “strangest of all” the intimate act of “hold[ing] my wife’s hand again, and […] think[ing] that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead” (197).