The War of the Worlds: Book 2, Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

The narrator spends a restless night at an abandoned inn atop Putney Hill, unable to stop thinking about the curate’s death. He turns to God, praying that, if she is dead, his wife died a swift and painless death. Upon rising in the morning, he goes outside and finds a man dressed in rags hiding behind a thicket of bushes. “Stop!” yells this man, approaching. He brusquely explains to the narrator that there’s no food in the area, saying, “This is my country,” and all the food I the area is for him and him alone. When the narrator says he’s trying to go to Leatherhead to find his wife, the renegade is astonished, and the narrator realizes that the man standing before him is the artilleryman he traveled with before meeting the curate.

The artilleryman fills the narrator in on what’s happened in the past two weeks, explaining that the Martians have gone to London, where they’ve set up a larger encampment. He even dares to say that they’ve invented a flying machine. The narrator is astounded by this, saying, “It is all over with humanity. If they can do that they will simply go round the world.” Although this depresses the narrator, the artilleryman appears unperturbed, taking pleasure in saying, “We’re beat” and, “it’s all over.” He insists that humanity’s struggle against the Martians was never even a war, since humans are mere ants when compared to these unstoppable creatures.

“What will they do with us?” the narrator asks the artilleryman, who tells the narrator that he has thought a great deal about this question. He explains that he has observed people’s reactions to the Martian invasion, and remarks that “most of the people were hard at it squealing and exciting themselves.” He asserts that “it’s the man that keeps on thinking [who] comes through.” Assuring the narrator that he has thought it out, he goes on to explain his theory: that humanity has grown soft, has become accustomed to superfluous luxuries that obscure the importance and hard work of survival. The artilleryman believes the Martians will take over the earth, eventually enslaving humans in cages. Many of the most spineless and bourgeois humans will simply accept this fate. Others, like the artilleryman himself, will go on living “for the sake of the breed.”

The artilleryman’s plan is to live underground in a network of tunnels that connect to London’s sewer and subway systems. “The risk,” he tells the narrator, “is that we who keep wild will go savage—degenerate into a sort of big, savage rat…” He plans to form a group of “able-bodied, clean-minded men,” resolving to banish “weaklings” from the posse with the aim of avoiding such a fate. Saving the human race, though, is not the only objective. Rather, the artilleryman points out that they must preserve and advance human knowledge. The narrator, he says, will come in handy because he’s an intellectual. The underground human race will educate and improve until it understands how to match the Martians’ technology. At this point, they will be able to sneak into the fighting machines and finally resist the aliens.

The artilleryman is so convincing in his vision of humanity’s way forward that the narrator follows him back to an abandoned house, where the artilleryman has been digging in the basement. The idea is to dig until they intersect the sewers. Together they work all day, and the narrator ponders the plan, finding many logistical problems in it now that he has time to fully reflect. One misgiving he has, for instance, is that instead of blindly digging a tunnel from this house, they could simply go into the underground system from a manhole and then dig back to the house. The artilleryman suggests that they take a break after a while, saying that one can’t always work. Taking a break on the roof, the artilleryman reviews his “grandiose plans,” making it clear that he wants to be the one to steal a Martian fighting machine.

Going downstairs, neither the narrator nor the artilleryman want to resume work, so they eat a meal instead, and the artilleryman urges the narrator to play cards. They play many games and then have another meal accompanied by cigars and champagne, which the artilleryman finishes. The narrator leaves the drunk artilleryman downstairs and goes to the roof. Staring across the fiery landscape and the glowing sky, he sees the red weed glowing purple in the night, and this awakens his “sense of wonder” and understanding of “the proportion of things.” Suddenly he’s ashamed of having indulged the artilleryman’s rhetoric, feeling like a “traitor” to his wife and to all humankind. With this realization, he decides to “leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony,” resolving to go to London, where he thinks he’ll be able to better discern what his “fellow-men” are doing.