(continued)

I went down, unfastened the door, and let him in, and locked the door again.  I could not see his face.  He was hatless, and his coat was unbuttoned.

"My God!" he said, as I drew him in.

"What has happened?" I asked.

"What hasn't?"  In the obscurity I could see he made a gesture of despair.  "They wiped us out—simply wiped us out," he repeated again and again.

He followed me, almost mechanically, into the dining room.

"Take some whiskey," I said, pouring out a stiff dose.

He drank it.  Then abruptly he sat down before the table, put his head on his arms, and began to sob and weep like a little boy, in a perfect passion of emotion, while I, with a curious forgetfulness of my own recent despair, stood beside him, wondering.

It was a long time before he could steady his nerves to answer my questions, and then he answered perplexingly and brokenly.  He was a driver in the artillery, and had only come into action about seven.  At that time firing was going on across the common, and it was said the first party of Martians were crawling slowly towards their second cylinder under cover of a metal shield.

Later this shield staggered up on tripod legs and became the first of the fighting-machines I had seen.  The gun he drove had been unlimbered near Horsell, in order to command the sand pits, and its arrival it was that had precipitated the action.  As the limber gunners went to the rear, his horse trod in a rabbit hole and came down, throwing him into a depression of the ground.  At the same moment the gun exploded behind him, the ammunition blew up, there was fire all about him, and he found himself lying under a heap of charred dead men and dead horses.

"I lay still," he said, "scared out of my wits, with the fore quarter of a horse atop of me.  We'd been wiped out.  And the smell—good God!  Like burnt meat!  I was hurt across the back by the fall of the horse, and there I had to lie until I felt better.  Just like parade it had been a minute before—then stumble, bang, swish!"

"Wiped out!" he said.

He had hid under the dead horse for a long time, peeping out furtively across the common.  The Cardigan men had tried a rush, in skirmishing order, at the pit, simply to be swept out of existence.  Then the monster had risen to its feet and had begun to walk leisurely to and fro across the common among the few fugitives, with its headlike hood turning about exactly like the head of a cowled human being.  A kind of arm carried a complicated metallic case, about which green flashes scintillated, and out of the funnel of this there smoked the Heat-ray.

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