Back to Barnet 4U
Not many people know that H.G.Wells wrote about Barnet in his classic
"The War of the Worlds", published in 1898.
Here is the extract that mentions our town
The War of the Worlds. H.G. Wells (1866–1946).

                           Chapter Sixteen
The Exodus from London
So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world
just as Monday was dawning. The stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a
foaming tumult round the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the
shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel northward and eastward.
By ten o’clock the police organisation, and by midday even the railway organisations, were
losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that
swift liquefaction of the social body.

All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern people at Cannon Street
had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and trains were being filled. People were fighting
savagely for standing room in the carriages even at two o’clock. By three, people were being
trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards or more from
Liverpool Street station; revolvers were fired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had
been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the
people they were called out to protect.

And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers refused to return to London,
the pressure of the flight drove the people in an ever-thickening multitude away from the
stations and along the northward-running roads.
By midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes, and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove
along the Thames and across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the bridges in its
sluggish advance. Another bank drove over Ealing, and surrounded a little island of survivors
on Castle Hill, alive, but unable to escape.
After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North-Western train at Chalk Farm—the engines of
the trains that had loaded in the goods yard there ploughed through shrieking people, and a
dozen stalwart men fought to keep the crowd from crushing the driver against his furnace
my brother emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across through a hurrying swarm of
vehicles, and had the luck to be foremost in the sack of a cycle shop. The front tire of the
machine he got was punctured in dragging it through the window, but he got up and off, not
withstanding, with no further injury than a cut wrist. The steep foot of Haverstock Hill was
impassable owing to several overturned horses, and my brother struck into Belsize Road.

So he got out of the fury of the panic, and, skirting the Edgware Road, reached Edgware
about seven, fasting and wearied, but well ahead of the crowd. Along the road people were
standing in the roadway, curious, wondering.
He was passed by a number of cyclists, some horsemen, and two motor cars. A mile from
Edgware the rim of the wheel broke, and the machine became unridable. He left it by the
roadside and trudged through the village.
There were shops half opened in the main street of the place, and people crowded on the
pavement and in the doorways and windows, staring astonished at this extraordinary
procession of fugitives that was beginning.
He succeeded in getting some food at an inn.

For a time he remained in Edgware not knowing what next to do. The flying people
increased in number. Many of them, like my brother, seemed inclined to loiter in the
place. There was no fresh news of the invaders from Mars.
At that time the road was crowded, but as yet far from congested. Most of the fugitives
at that hour were mounted on cycles, but there were soon motor cars, hansom cabs,
and carriages hurrying along, and the dust hung in heavy clouds along the road to
StAlbans.

It was perhaps a vague idea of making his way to Chelmsford, where some friends
of his lived, that at last induced my brother to strike into a quiet lane running eastward.
Presently he came upon a stile, and, crossing it, followed a footpath north-eastward.
He passed near several farmhouses and some little places whose names he did not learn.
He saw few fugitives until, in a grass lane towards High Barnet, he happened upon two
ladies who became his fellow travellers. He came upon them just in time to save them.

He heard their screams, and, hurrying round the corner, saw a couple of men struggling
to drag them out of the little pony-chaise in which they had been driving, while a third
with difficulty held the frightened pony’s head.
One of the ladies, a short woman dressed in white, was simply screaming; the other,
a dark, slender figure, slashed at the man who gripped her arm with a whip she held in
her disengaged hand.

My brother immediately grasped the situation, shouted, and hurried towards the struggle.
One of the men desisted and turned towards him, and my brother, realising from his
antagonist’s face that a fight was unavoidable, and being an expert boxer, went into him
forthwith and sent him down against the wheel of the chaise.
It was no time for pugilistic chivalry and my brother laid him quiet with a kick, and
gripped the collar of the man who pulled at the slender lady’s arm.
He heard the clatter of hoofs, the whip stung across his face, a third antagonist struck
him between the eyes, and the man he held wrenched himself free and made off down
the lane in the direction from which he had come.

Partly stunned, he found himself facing the man who had held the horse’s head, and
became aware of the chaise receding from him down the lane, swaying from side to side,
and with the women in it looking back.
The man before him, a burly rough, tried to close, and he stopped him with a blow in the
face. Then, realising that he was deserted, he dodged round and made off down the lane
after the chaise, with the sturdy man close behind him, and the fugitive, who had turned
now, following remotely.

Suddenly he stumbled and fell; his immediate pursuer went headlong, and he rose to his
feet to find himself with a couple of antagonists again. He would have had little chance
against them had not the slender lady very pluckily pulled up and returned to his help.
It seems she had had a revolver all this time, but it had been under the seat when she
and her companion were attacked.
She fired at six yards’ distance, narrowly missing my brother.
The less courageous of the robbers made off, and his companion followed him, cursing
his cowardice. They both stopped in sight down the lane, where the third man lay
insensible.

“Take this!” said the slender lady, and she gave my brother her revolver.

“Go back to the chaise,” said my brother, wiping the blood from his split lip.
She turned without a word—they were both panting—and they went back to where
the lady in white struggled to hold back the frightened pony.
The robbers had evidently had enough of it. When my brother looked again they
were retreating.

“I’ll sit here,” said my brother, “if I may”; and he got upon the empty front seat.
The lady looked over her shoulder.

“Give me the reins,” she said, and laid the whip along the pony’s side.
In another moment a bend in the road hid the three men from my brother’s eyes.
So, quite unexpectedly, my brother found himself, panting, with a cut mouth, a
bruised jaw, and bloodstained knuckles, driving along an unknown lane with these
two women.

He learned they were the wife and the younger sister of a surgeon living at Stanmore,
who had come in the small hours from a dangerous case at Pinner, and heard at some
railway station on his way of the Martian advance.
He had hurried home, roused the women—their servant had left them two days before
packed some provisions, put his revolver under the seat—luckily for my brother
and told them to drive on to Edgware, with the idea of getting a train there.

He stopped behind to tell the neighbours. He would overtake them, he said, at about
half past four in the morning, and now it was nearly nine and they had seen nothing of him.
They could not stop in Edgware because of the growing traffic through the place, and
so they had come into this side lane.
That was the story they told my brother in fragments when presently they stopped again,
nearer to New Barnet.
He promised to stay with them, at least until they could determine what to do, or until the
missing man arrived, and professed to be an expert shot with the revolver—a weapon
strange to him—in order to give them confidence.
They made a sort of encampment by the wayside, and the pony became happy in the hedge.
He told them of his own escape out of London, and all that he knew of these Martians and their
ways.
The sun crept higher in the sky, and after a time their talk died out and gave place to an
uneasy state of anticipation. Several wayfarers came along the lane, and of these my
brother gathered such news as he could.
Every broken answer he had deepened his impression of the great disaster that had
come on humanity, deepened his persuasion of the immediate necessity for
prosecuting this flight. He urged the matter upon them.

“We have money,” said the slender woman, and hesitated
.
Her eyes met my brother’s, and her hesitation ended.

“So have I,” said my brother.

She explained that they had as much as thirty pounds in gold, besides a five-pound
note, and suggested that with that they might get upon a train at St. Albans or New Barnet.
My brother thought that was hopeless, seeing the fury of the Londoners to crowd upon the
trains, and broached his own idea of striking across Essex towards Harwich and thence
escaping from the country altogether.

Mrs. Elphinstone—that was the name of the woman in white—would listen to no reasoning,
and kept calling upon “George”; but her sister-in-law was astonishingly quiet and
deliberate, and at last agreed to my brother’s suggestion. So, designing to cross the
Great North Road, they went on towards Barnet, my brother leading the pony to save
it as much as possible.

As the sun crept up the sky the day became excessively hot, and under foot a thick,
whitish sand grew burning and blinding, so that they travelled only very slowly.
The hedges were grey with dust.
And as they advanced towards Barnet a tumultuous murmuring grew stronger.



They began to meet more people. For the most part these were staring before them,
murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard, unclean.
One man in evening dress passed them on foot, his eyes on the ground.
They heard his voice, and, looking back at him, saw one hand clutched in his hair and
the other beating invisible things.
His paroxysm of rage over, he went on his way without once looking back.
As my brother’s party went on towards the crossroads to the south of Barnet they
saw a woman approaching the road across some fields on their left, carrying a child
and with two other children; and then passed a man in dirty black, with a thick stick
in one hand and a small portmanteau in the other.
Then round the corner of the lane, from between the villas that guarded it at its
confluence with the high road, came a little cart drawn by a sweating black pony and
driven by a sallow youth in a bowler hat, grey with dust.
There were three girls, East End factory girls, and a couple of little children crowded
in the cart.

“This’ll tike us rahnd Edgware?” asked the driver, wild-eyed, white-faced; and when
my brother told him it would if he turned to the left, he whipped up at once without
the formality of thanks.

My brother noticed a pale grey smoke or haze rising among the houses in front of
them, and veiling the white facade of a terrace beyond the road that appeared
between the backs of the villas.
Mrs. Elphinstone suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky red flame
leaping up above the houses in front of them against the hot, blue sky.
The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of many voices,
the gird of many wheels, the creaking of wagons, and the staccato of hoofs.
The lane came round sharply not fifty yards from the crossroads.

“Good heavens!” cried Mrs. Elphinstone. “What is this you are driving us into?”

My brother stopped.
For the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of human beings
rushing northward, one pressing on another. A great bank of dust, white and
luminous in the blaze of the sun, made everything within twenty feet of the ground
grey and indistinct and was perpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense
crowd of horses and of men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of
every description.

“Way!” my brother heard voices crying. “Make way!”

It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to approach the meeting point of the lane
and road; the crowd roared like a fire, and the dust was hot and pungent.
And, indeed, a little way up the road a villa was burning and sending rolling masses
of black smoke across the road to add to the confusion.
Two men came past them. Then a dirty woman, carrying a heavy bundle and weeping.
A lost retriever dog, with hanging tongue, circled dubiously round them, scared and
wretched, and fled at my brother’s threat.
So much as they could see of the road London ward between the houses to the right
was a tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying people, pent in between the villas on either
side; the black heads, the crowded forms, grew into distinctness as they rushed towards
the corner, hurried past, and merged their individuality again in a receding multitude
that was swallowed up at last in a cloud of dust.

“Go on! Go on!” cried the voices. “Way! Way!”

One man’s hands pressed on the back of another. My brother stood at the pony’s head.
Irresistibly attracted, he advanced slowly, pace by pace, down the lane.
Edgware had been a scene of confusion, Chalk Farm a riotous tumult, but this was a whole
population in movement. It is hard to imagine that host. It had no character of its own.
The figures poured out past the corner, and receded with their backs to the group in the lane.
Along the margin came those who were on foot threatened by the wheels, stumbling in the
ditches, blundering into one another.

The carts and carriages crowded close upon one another, making little way for those swifter
and more impatient vehicles that darted forward every now and then when an opportunity
showed itself of doing so, sending the people scattering against the fences and gates of the
villas.

“Push on!” was the cry. “Push on! They are coming!”

Few stopped and came aside from that flood. The lane opened slantingly into the main
road with a narrow opening, and had a delusive appearance of coming from the direction
of London.
Yet a kind of eddy of people drove into its mouth; weaklings elbowed out of the stream,
who for the most part rested but a moment before plunging into it again. A little way
down the lane, with two friends bending over him, lay a man with a bare leg, wrapped
about with bloody rags. He was a lucky man to have friends.
A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a filthy black frock coat, limped out
and sat down beside the trap, removed his boot—his sock was blood-stained—shook out
a pebble, and hobbled on again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw
herself under the hedge close by my brother, weeping.

“I can’t go on! I can’t go on!”

My brother woke from his torpor of astonishment and lifted her up, speaking gently to
her, and carried her to Miss Elphinstone. So soon as my brother touched her she
became quite still, as if frightened.

“Ellen!” shrieked a woman in the crowd, with tears in her voice—“Ellen!” And the
child suddenly darted away from my brother, crying “Mother!”

“They are coming,” said a man on horseback, riding past along the lane.

“Out of the way, there!” bawled a coachman, towering high; and my brother saw
a closed carriage turning into the lane.
The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. My brother pushed the
pony and chaise back into the hedge, and the man drove by and stopped at the turn
of the way.
It was a carriage, with a pole for a pair of horses, but only one was in the traces.
My brother saw dimly through the dust that two men lifted out something on a white
stretcher and put it gently on the grass beneath the privet hedge.
One of the men came running to my brother.

“Where is there any water?” he said. “He is dying fast, and very thirsty. It is Lord Garrick.”

“Lord Garrick!” said my brother; “the Chief Justice?”

“The water?” he said.

“There may be a tap,” said my brother, “in some of the houses. We have no water.
I dare not leave my people.”
The man pushed against the crowd towards the gate of the corner house.

“Go on!” said the people, thrusting at him. “They are coming! Go on!”

Then my brother’s attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced man lugging
a small handbag, which split even as my brother’s eyes rested on it and disgorged
a mass of sovereigns that seemed to break up into separate coins as it struck the
ground. They rolled hither and thither among the struggling feet of men and horses.
The man stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his
shoulder and sent him reeling. He gave a shriek and dodged back, and a cartwheel
shaved him narrowly.

“Way!” cried the men all about him. “Make way!”

So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both hands open, upon the heap
of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in his pocket. A horse rose close upon him,
and in another moment, half rising, he had been borne down under the horse’s hoofs.

“Stop!” screamed my brother, and pushing a woman out of his way, tried to clutch
the bit of the horse.
Before he could get to it, he heard a scream under the wheels, and saw through the
dust the rim passing over the poor wretch’s back. The driver of the cart slashed his
whip at my brother, who ran round behind the cart. The multitudinous shouting
confused his ears.
The man was writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to rise,
for the wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp and dead.
My brother stood up and yelled at the next driver, and a man on a black horse
came to his assistance.

“Get him out of the road,” said he; and, clutching the man’s collar with his free hand,
my brother lugged him sideways. But he still clutched after his money, and regarded
my brother fiercely, hammering at his arm with a handful of gold.
“Go on! Go on!” shouted angry voices behind.

“Way! Way!”

There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the cart that the man on
horseback stopped. My brother looked up, and the man with the gold twisted his head
round and bit the wrist that held his collar. There was a concussion, and the black
horse came staggering sideways , and the carthorse pushed beside it.
A hoof missed my brother’s foot by a hair’s breadth.
He released his grip on the fallen man and jumped back. He saw anger change to
terror on the face of the poor wretch on the ground, and in a moment he was hidden
and my brother was borne backward and carried past the entrance of the lane,
and had to fight hard in the torrent to recover it.

He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little child, with all a child’s want of
sympathetic imagination, staring with dilated eyes at a dusty something that lay
black and still, ground and crushed under the rolling wheels.

“Let us go back!” he shouted, and began turning the pony round.

“We cannot cross this—hell,” he said and they went back a hundred yards the way
they had come, until the fighting crowd was hidden. As they passed the bend in the
lane my brother saw the face of the dying man in the ditch under the privet, deadly
white and drawn, and shining with perspiration.
The two women sat silent, crouching in their seat and shivering.

Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again. Miss Elphinstone was white and
pale, and her sister-in-law sat weeping, too wretched even to call upon “George.”
My brother was horrified and perplexed. So soon as they had retreated he realised
how urgent and unavoidable it was to attempt this crossing. He turned to Miss
Elphinstone, suddenly resolute.

“We must go that way,” he said, and led the pony round again.

For the second time that day this girl proved her quality. To force their way into the
torrent of people, my brother plunged into the traffic and held back a cab horse,
while she drove the pony across its head. A wagon locked wheels for a moment and
ripped a long splinter from the chaise.
In another moment they were caught and swept forward by the stream. My brother,
with the cabman’s whip marks red across his face and hands, scrambled into the
chaise and took the reins from her.

“Point the revolver at the man behind,” he said, giving it to her, “if he presses us
too hard. No! point it at his horse.”
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.
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.