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Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the right across the road . But once in the stream he seemed to lose volition , to become a part of that dusty rout . They swept through Chipping Barnet with the torrent ; they were nearly a mile beyond the centre of the town before they had fought across to the opposite side of the way . It was din and confusion indescribable ; but in and beyond the town the road forks repeatedly , and this to some extent relieved the stress . They struck eastward through Hadley , and there on either side of the road , and at another place farther on they came upon a great multitude of people drinking at the stream , some fighting to come at the water . And farther on , from a lull near East Barnet , they saw two trains running slowly one after the other without signal or order — trains swarming with people , with men even among the coals behind the engines — going northward along the Great Northern Railway . My brother supposes they must have filled outside London , for at that time the furious terror of the people had rendered the central termini impossible . Near this place they halted for the rest of the afternoon , for the violence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three of them . They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger ; the night was cold , and none of them dared to sleep . And in the evening many people came hurrying along the road nearby their stopping place , fleeing from unknown dangers before them , and going in the direction from which my brother had come . XVII . THE “ THUNDER CHILD ” . Had the Martians aimed only at destruction , they might on Monday have annihilated the entire population of London , as it spread itself slowly through the home counties . Not only along the road through Barnet , but also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey , and along the roads eastward to Southend and Shoeburyness , and south of the Thames to Deal and Broadstairs , poured the same frantic rout . If one could have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London every northward and eastward road running out of the tangled maze of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives , each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress . I have set forth at length in the last chapter my brother’s account of the road through Chipping Barnet , in order that my readers may realise how that swarming of black dots appeared to one of those concerned . 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 civilisation , of the massacre of mankind .
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