In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen ram-
part and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt
was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines
here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange
shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their over-
turned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-
machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in
a row, were the Martians—DEAD!—slain by the putrefactive
and disease bacteria against which their systems were unpre-
pared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all
man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God,
in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many 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.
I heard it’s unwise to play that on the radio without a warning that it’s fiction.
“Until now I always felt a stranger in this town, and that I’d no concern with you people. But now that I’ve seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody’s business.”
“... once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended.”