Book 2: Survival & Resolution
Book 2: The Earth Under the Martians
Book 2 shifts from large-scale warfare to intimate survival horror. The narrator is trapped in a ruined house with the curate, directly adjacent to a Martian pit. For days they hide, ration food, and listen to the Martians operating their machinery. Wells uses this confined setting to explore how extreme stress strips away civilised behaviour. The curate, a man of God, becomes hysterical and selfish, hoarding food and screaming. The narrator is forced to knock him unconscious to prevent the Martians from hearing them.
The curate’s collapse is morally complex. He is not a villain but a man whose entire worldview — his faith that God controls events and protects the righteous — has been destroyed. He wails “Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done?” and “What are these Martians?” Wells uses the curate to explore what happens when faith is tested by genuine catastrophe. The curate’s religion provides no practical survival skills and, worse, his self-pity and noise endanger both their lives. When the narrator finally strikes him, it is an act of pragmatic necessity that Wells uses to show how survival demands a harder morality than peacetime allows.
The curate represents the failure of organised religion under crisis. He is selfish, irrational, and hysterical when faith is tested by real danger. Wells — an atheist — uses the curate to argue that religious institutions provide no genuine moral strength when civilisation collapses.
The Artilleryman
After escaping the ruined house, the narrator encounters the artilleryman, who outlines a vision for rebuilding humanity underground. He talks of creating a new civilisation, breeding strong people, and fighting back. His speech is compelling but ultimately hollow — when the narrator visits his “tunnel,” it is barely started. The artilleryman represents rhetoric without action — all talk and no work.
The artilleryman’s vision has a darker edge. He talks about forming a band of “able-bodied, clean-minded men”, selecting who deserves to survive. This echoes the eugenic thinking that was gaining popularity in Victorian Britain. Wells presents the artilleryman sympathetically at first — his ideas sound bold and practical — but then reveals them as fantasies. The barely-started tunnel exposes the gap between words and deeds. This is Wells’s satire of the kind of person who responds to crisis with grandiose plans but lacks the discipline to implement them.
In one of the novel’s most disturbing revelations, the narrator discovers that the Martians feed by injecting human blood directly into their own veins. This makes humans literal livestock — a horrifying inversion of the human-animal relationship. Wells forces the reader to experience what it feels like to be treated as a resource rather than a sentient being, directly paralleling the colonial treatment of indigenous peoples.
The Martians’ Defeat
The novel’s resolution is one of the most famous in literature. The Martians are not defeated by human weapons, intelligence, or courage — they are killed by bacteria. Earth’s common germs, to which humans have long been immune through millennia of evolution, prove fatal to the Martians. Wells writes that they were “slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.”
This ending is deeply significant. It rejects the idea that humanity is saved by heroism or technology. Instead, it is biology — the same Darwinian process that produced the Martians — that saves us. Wells is also referencing the real history of colonisation: European diseases killed vast numbers of indigenous peoples in the Americas. The bacteria ending mirrors this history, completing the colonial reversal.
The phrase “the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth” carries multiple layers of meaning. The word “humblest” undercuts human pride — it is not human intelligence, bravery, or technology that saves the species, but microscopic organisms. The reference to “God” is ironic given the curate’s failure of faith; Wells suggests that if there is a divine plan, it operates through biological processes rather than supernatural intervention. The phrase also implies humility — that humanity should be humble about its place in the natural order.
Wells chose bacteria to reject the idea that heroism or technology saves humanity. The Darwinian ending shows that survival depends on evolution, not military power. It also mirrors colonial history: European diseases devastated indigenous peoples, and now Earth’s germs devastate the colonising Martians.
The novel ends with the narrator reflecting on the invasion’s legacy. He suggests that the experience has permanently changed humanity’s view of itself: “We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man.” The invasion has destroyed human exceptionalism. Wells leaves the reader with a sense of ongoing vulnerability — the Martians could return at any time.