Book 2 Chapter 7 The Man on Putney Hill
The narrator then finds an inn on Putney Hill, where he spends the night, still searching for food. However, he cannot and so continues towards Leatherhead. While travelling, he thinks about the minister’s death, his ambivalence towards it, and whether his wife is still safe. Surprisingly, he comes across a man wielding a sword, who he identifies as the soldier he met some time ago.
The two talk and discuss the establishment of a new society, based underground. The soldier wants to eventually overthrow the Martians by creating a society where only the strongest are allowed the luxury of their warrens. The narrator, though critical of such a world, helps him dig into the tunnels. It takes a day, however, for the narrator to leave the soldier as he desires to make sure his wife is safe and healthy.
War of The Worlds
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own… Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
H.G Wells (1898)