The War of the Worlds | Book 2, Chapter 7:

The Man on Putney Hill

Summary

The narrator spends the night in a deserted inn and reflects on the death of the curate
"without the quality of remorse." Thinking of his wife leads him to pray.

The narrator leaves the inn and, on his way, encounters the artilleryman he had previously
known in Woking, who had also miraculously survived. The artilleryman tells the narrator
the Martians have made their way across London and built a flying machine. The narrator
recognizes this invention of the future in the wrong hands spells doom for humanity.
The artilleryman explains his predictions about Martian plans for humanity, speculating
they would make pets of what he sees as weak humans who willingly submit. He explains
his own plans for survival and the survival of humankind, which involve living in the
London sewer system. He imagines the ordeal would only strengthen the race by weeding
out the weak. He claims humans could learn to use Martian machines and form a resistance.

After working with the artilleryman and listening a bit spellbound to the man's "grandiose
plans," the narrator eventually sees the plan as greedy and impractical. He resolves to go to
London to look for other signs of life.

Analysis

The artilleryman represents the insufficiency and folly of a merely intellectual

response to threats. The artilleryman is an "undisciplined dreamer," and the narrator sees
"the gulf between his dreams and his powers." Even as the artilleryman criticizes religion
as a coping mechanism for the weak, his alternative plan of a subterranean utopia without
the will to accomplish it may be just as irrational.

Still, the artilleryman's plan is strangely seductive to the narrator. The imagined scenes of
human safety and triumph and the gluttony of his stash of stolen food and drink
temporarily comfort the narrator, but he quickly recognizes them for the follies that they
are.
The author further explores the idea of evolution through the artilleryman's plans for
human survival. He identifies the weak as those unlike himself, those with "no proud
dreams and no proud lusts," who do what society expects of them. He argues that "the
useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die" lest they "taint the race." He plans
to save human knowledge as well, without which he claims mankind will be no different
from rats.

Through the speech of the artilleryman about those who follow convention and
religion, Wells also criticizes Victorian values and conventions of his time. Specifically,
the artilleryman castigates men who sleep with wives they marry for money rather than
women they desire. Wells himself practiced the notion of free love, and although he
married twice, he had many affairs and fathered four children with three different women

The War of the Worlds | Book 2, Chapter 8:

Dead London

Summary

The narrator continues walking through the city of London, passing many dead bodies, a
drunken man, looted shops, and black dust. The city is silent, "condemned and derelict." He
hears then the first of the howling, which increases in volume as he nears the city center.
He comes upon a Martian making the noise who "appeared to be standing and yelling, for
no reason," and who did not move. As he makes his way to get a closer look, he comes
across a broken handling-machine that wrecked itself by driving straight into a house. He
happens on another Martian, as still as the first. Suddenly, the howling stops.

As night falls the narrator becomes terrified and hides. In the morning, he finds a third
motionless Martian. In that moment he says, "An insane resolve possessed me" to walk up
to the Martian and "save myself even the trouble of killing myself." He runs toward it to
discover a great pit. The Martian hanging out of the hood of its machine is dead as are all
the others and their machines, brought down by bacteria to which they had no resistance,
just like the red weed. The narrator reflects that the Martians had been doomed since their
arrival. His hope for humanity returns, and he thanks God.

Analysis

This chapter contains the climax of the story. All of the action and suspense has built
rising tension to this moment of confrontation with the Martians. All the foreshadowing
pointing toward the cause of their downfall becomes clear. In their death the problem of
the novel is resolved. The invaders are no longer a threat to humanity.
The author reminds readers of one last important aspect of evolution in this chapter.
Context is everything. Humans have adapted to survive on Earth. While superior in
many ways, Martians evolved to survive on Mars and lacked defenses against the
"humblest things that God, in his wisdom ... put on this earth."

The author again uses an intimate knowledge of the setting to lend realism to the novel. He
describes moving through the city of London with great accuracy, mentioning which
landmarks can be seen from which locations. This makes it easy for readers to imagine the
events clearly. The destruction of London, the capital of the British Empire, has more
impact because of this realism.

The narrator also compares the sudden destruction of the Martians to the work of the
angel of death in Sennacherib's destruction. This is a reference to the biblical
account of the overnight deaths of 185,000 Assyrians under the command of King
Sennacherib as they sought to conquer Jerusalem during the rule of King Hezekiah around
700 BCE. When the narrator says he thought "God had repented, that the Angel of Death
had slain them in the night," he imagines London as Jerusalem and the Martians as the
invading Assyrians. He imagines God repenting for allowing the Martians in the capital and
sending his Angel of Death in the night to kill them, thus saving the city.