War of the worlds

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THE EVE OF THE WAR  

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth  

century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by  

intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as  

men busied themselves about their various concerns they were  

scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a  

microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and  

multiply in a drop of water.  With infinite complacency men went to  

and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their  

assurance of their empire over matter.  It is possible that the  

infusoria under the microscope do the same.  No one gave a thought to  

the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of  

them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or  

improbable.  It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of  

those departed days.  At most terrestrial men fancied there might be  

other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to  

welcome a missionary enterprise.  Yet across the gulf of space, minds  

that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish,  

intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with  

envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.  And  

early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.  

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the  

sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it  

receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world.  

It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our  

world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its  

surface must have begun its course.  The fact that it is scarcely one  

seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling  

to the temperature at which life could begin.  It has air and water  

and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.  

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer,  

up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that  

intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all,  

beyond its earthly level.  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 time's beginning but nearer its end.  

The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has  

already gone far indeed with our neighbour.  Its physical condition is  

still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial  

region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest  

winter.  Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have  

shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow  

seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and  

periodically inundate its temperate zones.  That last stage of  

exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a  

present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars.  The immediate  

pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their  

powers, and hardened their hearts.  And looking across space with  

instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of,  

they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of  

them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with  

vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of  

fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad  

stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.  

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them  

at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us.  The  

intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant  

struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief  

of the minds upon Mars.  Their world is far gone in its cooling and  

this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they  

regard as inferior animals.  To carry warfare sunward is, indeed,  

their only escape from the destruction that, generation after  

generation, creeps upon them.  

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what  

ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only  

upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its  

inferior races.  The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness,  

were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged  

by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.  Are we such  

apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same  

spirit?  

The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing  

subtlety--their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of  

ours--and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh  

perfect unanimity.  Had our instruments permitted it, we might have  

seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century.  Men  

like Schiaparelli watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that  

for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war--but failed to  

interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so  

well.  All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.  

During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the  

illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by  

Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers.  English readers heard  

of it first in the issue of _Nature_ dated August 2.  I am inclined to  

think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in  

the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired  

at us.  Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site  

of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.  

The storm burst upon us six years ago now.  As Mars approached  

opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange  

palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of  

incandescent gas upon the planet.  It had occurred towards midnight of  

the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted,  

indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an  

enormous velocity towards this earth.  This jet of fire had become  

invisible about a quarter past twelve.  He compared it to a colossal  

puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, "as  

flaming gases rushed out of a gun."  

A singularly appropriate phrase it proved.  Yet the next day there  

was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the _Daily  

Telegraph_, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest  

dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard of  

the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer,  

at Ottershaw.  He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess  

of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a  

scrutiny of the red planet.  

Summing up

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own . . . . . No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

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