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For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence , and that I stood there alone , the last man left alive . Hard by the top of Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton , with the arms dislocated and removed several yards from the rest of the body . As I proceeded I became more and more convinced that the extermination of mankind was , save for such stragglers as myself , already accomplished in this part of the world . The Martians , I thought , had gone on and left the country desolated , seeking food elsewhere . Perhaps even now they were destroying Berlin or Paris , or it might be they had gone northward . VII . THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL . I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney Hill , sleeping in a made bed for the first time since my flight to Leatherhead . I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking into that house — afterwards I found the front door was on the latch — nor how I ransacked every room for food , until just on the verge of despair , in what seemed to me to be a servant’s bedroom , I found a rat - gnawed crust and two tins of pineapple . The place had been already searched and emptied . In the bar I afterwards found some biscuits and sandwiches that had been overlooked . The latter I could not eat , they were too rotten , but the former not only stayed my hunger , but filled my pockets . I lit no lamps , fearing some Martian might come beating that part of London for food in the night . Before I went to bed I had an interval of restlessness , and prowled from window to window , peering out for some sign of these monsters . I slept little . As I lay in bed I found myself thinking consecutively — a thing I do not remember to have done since my last argument with the curate . During all the intervening time my mental condition had been a hurrying succession of vague emotional states or a sort of stupid receptivity . But in the night my brain , reinforced , I suppose , by the food I had eaten , grew clear again , and I thought . Three things struggled for possession of my mind : the killing of the curate , the whereabouts of the Martians , and the possible fate of my wife . The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall ; I saw it simply as a thing done , a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse . I saw myself then as I see myself now , driven step by step towards that hasty blow , the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that .
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