Book 2: Survival & Resolution
Trapped with the Curate
The narrator is trapped in a ruined house with a curate (clergyman) as Martians excavate nearby. The curate rapidly deteriorates: he hoards food, weeps, raves and ultimately threatens to reveal their hiding place. The narrator is forced to knock him unconscious. Wells uses the curate to represent the failure of organised religion under extreme pressure — his faith offers no comfort or guidance when civilisation collapses.
The scenes in the ruined house are the novel’s most claustrophobic. The narrator observes the Martians at close range, watching them feed on human blood through their handling machines. Wells forces both the narrator and the reader to confront the reality of being prey.
The Martians are killed by bacteria — not by human weapons, courage or intelligence. Wells’s message is that humanity survives not because of superiority but because of biological luck. This undercuts any triumphalism and reminds readers that we are part of nature, not above it.
The Artilleryman’s Fantasy
After escaping, the narrator encounters an artilleryman who describes grandiose plans to rebuild civilisation underground. He talks of selecting only the “strong” and “useful” people, letting the weak perish. But the artilleryman is all talk — he spends his time drinking champagne and playing cards. Wells satirises the response that talks about rebuilding while doing nothing.
The artilleryman’s language echoes Social Darwinism — the idea that only the “fittest” deserve to survive. Wells, despite being influenced by Darwin, critiques this ideology as self-serving fantasy that justifies abandoning others.
In one of the novel’s most disturbing scenes, the narrator watches Martians feed by injecting human blood directly into their bodies. This literalises the metaphor of exploitation — the coloniser feeds on the colonised. Wells forces the reader to see humanity as a resource to be consumed, not a civilisation to be respected.
The Martians’ Defeat
The Martians are not defeated by human weapons but by microorganisms — bacteria to which they have no immunity. The narrator finds London silent, the Martians dead in their machines. Wells’s ending is deliberately anti-climactic: humanity is saved not by heroism or technology but by the smallest, most primitive forms of life.
Wells deliberately avoids a heroic resolution. The Martians die not in battle but from infection. The narrator stumbles through a silent London, finding corpses in machines. This anticlimactic ending reinforces Wells’s message: human survival was accidental, not earned. The novel’s final paragraphs warn that the Martians might return — we remain vulnerable.
The curate represents the failure of religion under pressure — his faith collapses into hysteria. The artilleryman represents the fantasy of Social Darwinism — big talk about selecting the “strong” while doing nothing. Wells critiques both responses as inadequate to genuine crisis.