The War of the Worlds

“Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from life’s beginning but nearer its end.”

In the extensive background the narrator provides before getting into the events of the actual invasion, he supplies a solid rationale for the Martians’ aggression, even providing reason to pity them. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that the narrator believes they are simply farther along the same path on which we find ourselves. Logically, then, we should hesitate to judge them as we likely would act similarly in their position.

“It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so silvery warm—a pin’s-head of light! It was as if it quivered a little, but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.”

This description of the planet Mars is highly suggestive and symbolic. On one hand, the planet’s tiny, almost fragile appearance emphasizes humanity’s total unpreparedness for the Martian invasion, as well as the lack of thought most humans committed to Mars. Also, the narrator’s observation that the telescope’s movements make the planet appear to quiver foreshadows the misguided confidence that the narrator and his compatriots will have in the power of human technology to control and vanquish the creatures of that planet.

“You may imagine the young people brushed up after the labors of the day, and making this novelty, as they would make any novelty, the excuse for walking together and enjoying a trivial flirtation. You may figure to yourself the hum of voices along the road in the gloaming.…”

Given the scope of the tragedy that unfolds, it is astounding how frivolously people regarded it, even after many had seen clear evidence of the Martians’ devastating power. Nowhere is this clearer than in this observation, where the narrator remarks that people were actually glad for the arrival of the cylinder, as it gave them an excuse to stroll about and gossip.

“[T]here had only been three real things before me—the immensity of the night and space and nature, my own feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death.”

With this simple list, the narrator conveys the raw terror he feels after narrowly surviving the first Martian attack. Of particular note is the fear he now associates with the night. He connects this darkness with outer space, which obviously includes Mars. This line underscores the humbling impact of the Martian invasion, as it revealed how dangerously little human beings truly understood of the mysteries of the universe.

“So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. ‘We will peck them to death to-morrow, my dear.’”

For the second time in the novel, the narrator compares the victims of the Martian invasion to the dodo, a bird that went extinct thanks to changes wrought by the Europeans who colonized its home of Mauritius. The dodo has become a symbol for awkwardness and idiocy, and the narrator conveys this impression by showing how foolhardy he was to dine comfortably that night with his wife, confident that the British military would vanquish the Martians.

“Many people had heard of the cylinder, of course, and talked about it in their leisure, but it certainly did not make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have done.”

Again, the narrator conveys the way most people downplay the seriousness of the Martian invasion. Unlike the Germans, long known to be a real threat, the Martians are an unknown entity, and so the danger they pose is discounted. Coincidentally, less than two decades after this novel’s publication, an ultimatum not to Germany but issued by its ally Austria-Hungary would make an unprecedented sensation across the globe, leading as it did to World War I.

“It’s a pity they make themselves so unapproachable […]. It would be curious to learn how they live on another planet; we might learn a thing or two.”

This comment from the narrator’s neighbor expresses the widespread peaceful sentiments many humans bear toward the Martians at first. The narrator himself earlier expresses excitement at what might be learned from the contents of the first cylinder. In terms of the novel’s colonialism allegory, it parallels the good-willed manner in which many indigenous peoples greeted imperialists, usually to their own detriment.

“I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this preparation, greatly excited me. My imagination became belligerent, and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways; something of my school-boy dreams of battle and heroism came back. It hardly seemed a fair fight to me at that time. They seemed very helpless in that pit of theirs.”

The narrator reveals in these lines his struggle with toxic masculinity. Despite his impressive ability to empathize with the Martians and his lack of personal bravery, he gets charged up at the thought of gunshots and explosions and the human superiority their effective use might imply. This tendency leads him into many of his greatest moral failures in the novel, such as the support he briefly gives the artilleryman in pursuing his hopeless, hateful vision.

“It’s bows and arrows against the lightning.”

The artilleryman speaks these words to characterize the fighting between humans and Martians. He employs metaphor and hyperbole to show just how unbalanced the technologies of the two species are, and his use of lightning to describe Martian weaponry links them with the mighty gods of antiquity, a neat expression of the awesomeness of their arms.

“No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle—how much they understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions were organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees?”

In these reflective lines, the narrator expresses an existential concern. He wonders if all the advances of human technology, all our species’ progress, are even noticed by creatures as superior as the Martians are. In the end, given that humans play no role in the defeat of the Martians, humanity’s dignity on the extraterrestrial scale remains in question.

“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.”

This description of the chaos the narrator’s brother witnesses as London begins its panicked evacuation demonstrates how humans can worsen their own misery in times of crisis. While there are other moments where the hardships of the invasion bring people together, the prevalence of situations such as this presents a grim reality of humanity that cannot be ignored.

“Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede—a stampede gigantic and terrible—without order and without a goal, six million people, unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilization, of the massacre of mankind.”

The enormity of the invasion is emphasized in this line describing the exodus from London. By invoking previous historical situations, the narrator asserts that the devastation wrought by the Martians constitutes a new depth of suffering for humanity. The particularly extreme language that ends the passage suggests that the horrifying impacts of the Martian invasion are felt despite humanity’s survival.

“As they grew hungry the rights of property ceased to be regarded. Farmers were out to defend their cattlesheds, granaries, and ripening root crops with arms in their hands.”

Here is another example of the vindictive side of the human response to calamity. Especially when contrasted with the complacent, frivolous reactions of just a day or two prior, this rapid descent into anarchy reveals the ghastly capacity of catastrophe to lay bare the hollowness of the moral fortitude we project in peacetime.

“What was needed now was not bravery, but circumspection.”

This assertion, which the narrator makes when considering the ability of his wife’s cousin to protect her, represents another admission of humility in the face of the Martians’ immensely superior technology. However, it is also a convenient perspective for the narrator, who often struggles with bravery himself, and an ironic one, considering it is his own lack of circumspection that has resulted in his separation from his wife.

“The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.”

The narrator is discussing the Martian practice of injecting the blood of their prey directly into their veins for sustenance. In doing so, he continues a trend of reframing the relationship between humans and animals in light of the Martian invasion. He often wonders whether human intelligence is noteworthy to the Martians, and so this comparison also implies the possibility that we have misjudged the intelligence of the other creatures of our own planet.

“The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the hand […]. Without the body the brain would, of course, become a more selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being.”

These observations of Martian anatomy and its consequences reveal uncommon foresight into the evolution of intelligent life, as well as uncommon insight into the links between our physical and mental forms. Just as Wells predicted in saying humans are moving toward these Martian forms, many of us nowadays operate almost exclusively through our brains and devices we manipulate with our hands. Meanwhile, his concern that our capacity for empathy may hinge on the less desirable elements of our physical forms constitutes one of his many misgivings about these evolutionary trends.

“Those who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to elemental things, will have a wider charity.”

Here, the narrator pleads for compassion from the reader, who may not have experienced anywhere near the level of duress that he does in his solitude with the curate. He asserts that people in such situations ought to be held to less rigorous moral standards. Given his judgments of the curate, which were often rather harsh, perhaps had he heeded this wisdom better himself, the desperate end of their relationship might have been avoidable.

“For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.”

Better than any other in the novel, this passage encapsulates the existential dread inherent in the idea of alien lifeforms of superior intelligence. If such beings exist and can reach us, as they do in this novel, that may well be game over for humanity. Even if we survive such an encounter, our conception of ourselves and our pursuit for meaning will be forever and irrevocably diminished.

“I found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of my return from Leatherhead I had not prayed. I had uttered prayers, fetich prayers, had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in extremity; but now I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with the darkness of God. Strange night! strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding-place—a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity—pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.”

This passage includes a barrage of warring emotions and thoughts, a manifestation of the ongoing frenzy of the narrator’s mindset despite the tranquility and hope restored by his escape from the ruined house. Having grappled with the moral failure that resulted in the curate’s death, felt the existential anguish of humanity’s defeat, and witnessed the unrecognizable planet they have left behind, he prays for his wife’s death. He is then surprised that this awful wish constitutes his first real prayer in days, which tacitly parallels with the perverse faith of the curate. Finally, he again finds himself identifying with lowly animals, and his newfound humility forces him to wonder whether they may be far less inferior than we have long presumed.

“These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety.”

Speaking of the cages in which he predicts Martians will imprison humans as they prepare to harvest their blood, the artilleryman notes the power of religion to placate the victims of tragic circumstances. This perspective is associated with Marxism, which holds that religion distracts people from seeking to remediate the true causes of their hardships. It casts the curate’s uselessness in a harsh new light, suggesting that religion may have been the primary cause of his downfall.

“But while that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation, had been endurable; by virtue of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life about me had upheld me.”

The voice to which the narrator refers is the death cry of the Martians. The comfort the narrator takes from this sound is shocking and may constitute the most visceral example of the empathy he feels for these monstrous creatures. Having long made clear his belief that we would act similarly—indeed already have acted similarly—to the Martians in their shoes, and having a few chapters earlier laid out his convictions that they are our evolutionary destiny, he cannot help but feel pity for them as their doom comes to pass. Implicit in their death cry is the terrifying likelihood that we will one day experience a similar fate.

“And, scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.”

In this passage the narrator reveals the demise of the Martians, exposing the deus ex machina devastation wrought on them by terrestrial microbes. Even though humanity’s salvation is brought about independently of human actions, the invocation of God’s wisdom suggests a sense that our survival is ordained by a higher power, at once an encouraging thought and a dangerous means for humanity’s hubris to endure.

“It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind.”

The narrator presents this optimistic take on the Martian invasion in the epilogue. While this sort of positive thinking is necessary to move on from such a devastating tragedy, there is very little certainty that such a perspective is merited. He has just expressed concern that humanity is already failing to take the threat of another invasion seriously; those gifts he mentions may in fact be the cause of great misery in the wrong hands, and these previous two possibilities together could certainly undo any commonweal. Ultimately, while a bright future may be ahead, the trauma that occupies the narrator at the very end of the novel casts a mighty shadow over it.

“The broadening of men’s views that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated. Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further. If the Martians can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils.”

The introduction of Venus as a possible destination for both Martians and humans is a surprising element of the epilogue, and such a possibility casts the definitiveness of the novel’s title into question. Furthermore, it places the narrator’s earlier predictions that Mars and the invading Martians represent our future into a more concrete scenario. Given the novel’s ending, this prospect gives at least as much reason to fear as to hope.