in my mind. To get under water!
That was it!

"Get under water!" I shouted, unheeded.

I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching Martian,
rushed right down the gravelly beach and headlong into the water.
Others did the same. A boatload of people putting back came leaping
out as I rushed past. The stones under my feet were muddy and
slippery, and the river was so low that I ran perhaps twenty feet
scarcely waist-deep. Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely
a couple of hundred yards away, I flung myself forward under the
surface. The splashes of the people in the boats leaping into the
river sounded like thunderclaps in my ears. People were landing
hastily on both sides of the river. But the Martian machine took no
more notice for the moment of the people running this way and that
than a man would of the confusion of ants in a nest against which his
foot has kicked. When, half suffocated, I raised my head above water,
the Martian's hood pointed at the batteries that were still firing
across the river, and as it advanced it swung loose what must have
been the generator of the Heat-Ray.

In another moment it was on the bank, and in a stride wading
halfway across. The knees of its foremost legs bent at the farther
bank, and in another moment it had raised itself to its full height
again, close to the village of Shepperton. Forthwith the six guns
which, unknown to anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the
outskirts of that village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near
concussion, the last close upon the first, made my heart jump. The
monster was already raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the
first shell burst six yards above the hood.

I gave a cry of astonishment. I saw and thought nothing of the
other four Martian monsters; my attention was riveted upon the nearer
incident. Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the
body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to
dodge, the fourth shell.

The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged,
flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh
and glittering metal.

"Hit!" shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.

I heard answering shouts from the people in the water about me. I
could have leaped out of the water with that momentary exultation.

The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did
not fall over. It