Summary
Book 1, Chapter 11
The narrator drinks some whiskey, changes his clothes, and looks out at the countryside around him from his second-story window. He realizes that the red glow he has seen is the countryside around him on fire. Dark shapes move about, which are probably the Martians in their tripod devices. The narrator is horrified at the carnage, but he is also puzzled over the tripod devices. He’s certain that a Martian must be controlling each of them.
Later that night, the narrator notices a soldier trying to sneak into his garden. The man is clearly distressed, saying that the Martians wiped his unit out. The narrator offers him a glass of whiskey. The man weeps like a child.
The man reveals himself to be an artilleryman. During his unit’s confrontation with the Martians, his horse tripped and fell into a hole, and when he got up, there was fire all around him. His unit had been completely destroyed by the heat ray. One of the tripods then appeared to kill all the survivors. A second tripod appeared as well.
The artilleryman survived only because he hid under a dead horse until the Marians had left. Since then, he has been making his way toward London.
The two men eat together and then survey the destruction from the window.
Book 1, Chapter 12
The two men agree that they cannot stay where they are, and the artilleryman suggests they make their way to London, where he can rejoin his battery. The narrator plans to return to Leatherhead to find his wife and leave the country. However, the third cylinder has landed between the narrator and Leatherhead, and the artilleryman points out that it would do his wife no favors for him to leave her a widow. The narrator and the artilleryman decide to travel together in the same direction for a little while.
They see bodies burned by the heat ray, as well as numerous abandoned valuables. They see no other living people.
At last, they run into a group of Hussars (English soldiers). The soldiers ask what the Martians are like, and the artilleryman replies that they’re a hundred feet high with bodies like aluminum. The lieutenant is incredulous, but the narrator confirms this description. The lieutenant says that the artilleryman should report to the Brigadier-General at Weybridge.
As the two men travel, they notice many families packing their possessions and the military setting up guns to provide them with protection for their escape, as well as transport trucks. One man is trying to bring his orchids on board. The narrator tries to explain that death is coming, but the man does seem to understand.
Weybridge is in total confusion. Most people seem to regard the evacuation as a distraction or interest, failing to understand the real danger of the invasion. They take their time loading into trains and transports.
Suddenly, they hear guns in the far distance. Then, the guns nearby start firing. Four of the tripods appear in the distance, moving quickly. A fifth appears even closer, and the crowd begins to panic.
The narrator runs to the river, thinking it will help him survive the heat ray. He notices the tripod destroy the guns across the river with its heat ray, but one of the guns destroys a tripod. The crowd cheers. However, the other tripods continue their advance. Several of the tripods carry off their damaged companion, and the rest incinerate the small crowd and the town around it. The narrator escapes by hiding in the near-boiling water and then scrambling to shore.
Book 1, Chapter 13
The tripods retreat with the damaged form of their companion to the commons where they originally landed. This is fortunate for the humans because, otherwise, the tripods would have reached London before the news of their attack arrived.
More and more cylinders arrive. The Martians seem to be hard at work on something in their pit, and the humans desperately try to reinforce their guns. In other words, both the Martians and humanity are preparing for battle.
The narrator finds a boat and jumps in it, reasoning that staying close to the water offers him the best chance at survival should the Martians return. He drifts through the burning countryside and finally arrives at the Middlesex bank. He walks through the countryside for about half a mile before falling asleep in the shadow of a hedge.
When he wakes up, he sees a man next to him, whom he asks for water. The man has none. Suddenly, the man asks what this all means. He compares it to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he asks for what sort of sin they are being punished. He rambles about how they only just finished the church and now it’s totally destroyed. The narrator begins to realize that he is a survivor from Weybridge and has lost his reason.
The narrator tries to give the man hope, but the curate persists in his belief that the end of the world has come upon them. At last the narrator shouts at him, asking what good religion is if it just collapses until calamity; the man goes silent.
The narrator also tells him that one of the tripods was destroyed not long ago. The man replies that one of God’s ministers could not be killed.
The men see the signal in the sky that represents troops preparing for the Martian approach and decide to move on.
Book 1, Chapter 14
The narrative suddenly switches to the perspective of the narrator’s younger brother, a medical student. The brother had read in the papers that Martians had landed near Woking and killed a few people, but the paper assures its readers that the Martians will be unable to function in the dense atmosphere of Earth. Still, the narrator's brother makes up his mind to visit the narrator the next day.
Most Londoners go about their business as usual, and the only unusual things are slightly delayed train schedules (from where the Martians destroyed train lines). Then refugees begin to flood into the city, bearing strange tales of large machines. Though newspapers pick up these reports, they remain optimistic.
The narrator and the rest of the city of London are woken up Monday morning by the clamoring of bells and a door-to-door alarm. The Martians are coming, apparently having pushed past military installments. They are using a terrible weapon called the Black Smoke, a type of poison gas. The narrator's brother grabs some money and flees his home.
Book 1, Chapter 15
The narrative returns to the narrator and the curate. After gathering their forces at the Horsell Commons, the Martians go on the offensive, attacking two artillery units. One unit flees in panic, and another manages to damage one of the tripods before being blown up by a blast from the heat ray.
The narrator begins to puzzle about what the Martians could want. As he thinks about this, he notices the Martians launch rockets that disperse some kind of noxious fumes. This is the Black Smoke, another Martian weapon of war, which kills anyone who breathes it in. The narrator and the curate take refuge in an abandoned house to wait out this new threat.
The Martians advance, using the Black Smoke to take out all military installments that might threaten the tripods. The army and government totally crumble under this new threat, leading to chaos. The narrator thinks about what it might have been like to have been one of those soldiers, ready to stop the Martian advance but instead snuffed out by the Black Smoke before even seeing the enemy.
Book 1, Chapter 16
The narrative shifts back to the perspective of the narrator's brother. London swiftly descends into chaos, and soon the trains are no longer running to take people out of the city. The narrator's brother steals a bike and is able to get away in this manner. Eventually, his bike gives out and he is forced to walk. He witnesses a robbery in progress: three men attacking two women. The brother knocks out one of the men and the two women are able to get away. However, he is now facing two armed, angry men by himself. Suddenly, one of the women returns with a gun. She is not a very good shot, but the robbers flee.
The women introduce themselves as Mrs. Elphinstone and her sister. The sister was the one to find the gun, whereas Mrs. Elphinstone is primarily worried about her husband, a doctor who is helping people elsewhere.
They see a number of people attempting to flee London, including a man who drops a bag of coins and is trampled to death by a cart when he attempts to retrieve them.
The group pauses to rest, but then another group of people fleeing from the opposite direction encounters them. There is no safe place from the Martian invaders.
Book 1, Chapter 17
The narrator's brother asks the reader to imagine the view of the fleeing crowds from the perspective of someone in a hot-air balloon. People would look like ants, scurrying back and forth. Large portions of the landscape are destroyed by the Martians, who are focusing on destroying railways and communication networks.
The narrator's brother and the ladies Elphinstone make their way to the sea, where captains are charging exorbitant amounts of money for passage on their ships. They also notice an ironclad navy ship called The Thunder Child. They also see more cylinders fall, making a total of seven.
The three manage to buy passage on a ship to Belgium, though Mrs. Elphinstone is anxious about leaving the country. However, just as their ship and others loaded with refugees are about to disembark, a group of Martian tripods appears. The tripods wade into the water towards the heavily-laden passenger ships, and the people panic.
Suddenly, The Thunder Child speeds up and rams the Martians, destroying two of them although it destroys itself in the process. The refugee ships are able to escape unharmed.
As the ship heads out to sea, the narrator's brother notices a mysterious flying object raining darkness upon the land.
Analysis
The initial defeat of the Martian tripod at Weybridge gives a jolt of hope to humanity: perhaps these monsters can be defeated after all! However, this small victory is quickly revealed to be a hollow one as the Martians exterminate the crowd at Weybridge. The Martians also soon reveal their second terrible weapon, the Black Smoke, which kills anything that breathes it is. Poison gas was unknown at the time that Wells was writing the novel, but it would later be used widely in the First World War. This is an uncanny example of fiction predicting reality.
The man trying to make his way onto the transport carrying his bushel of orchids indicates that the populace is still not taking this threat seriously. This man seems to seriously consider his flowers' monetary value more highly than his own life. Unfortunately, this man's hubris ultimately means his death.
Wells details the breakdown of society under the Martian onslaught in close detail: "By three, people were being trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards or more from Liverpool Street station; revolvers were fired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the people they were called out to protect." In their panic to get out of London before the Martians arrive, humans start turning on each other.
This section also introduces the reader to the insufferable Mrs. Elphinstone, who seems incapable of functioning without her husband. The narrator's brother notes, "She seemed, poor woman, to imagine that the French and the Martians might prove very similar." This quote touches on a major theme in the book and in science fiction more generally: that aliens and cyborgs are, in fact, stand-ins for human beings who are considered "other," and the complex problems of science fiction are simply new ways to discuss the issues that ordinary human beings face every day.
This section also introduces the reader to the curate, a miserable man who seems to have gone mad and decided that the Martians are God's punishment for sinful humanity. The curate represents Wells' suspicion of organized religion—specifically, he may be critiquing the inability of religion to respond to crisis and social change.
