ny men might have
foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These
germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of
things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here.
But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed
resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to
many--those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our
living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in
Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and
fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already
when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting
even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a
billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is
his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten
times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in
that great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that must have
seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be. To me also
at that time this death was incomprehensible. All I knew was that
these things that had been alive and so terrible to men were dead.
For a moment I believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been
repeated, that God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain
them in the night.

I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously,
even as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his
rays. The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and
wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their
tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows
towards the light. A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the
bodies that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across
the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great
flying-machine with which they had been experimenting upon our denser
atmosphere when decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a
day too soon. At the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the
huge fighting-machine that would fight no more for ever, at the
tattered red shreds of flesh that dripped down upon the overturned
seats on the summit of Primrose Hill.

I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed
now in b