reached Wellington Street,
and there I saw the red weed clambering over the buttresses of
Waterloo Bridge.

At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts
of that grotesque time--a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket
of the red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place. It was
the placard of the first newspaper to resume publication--the _Daily
Mail_. I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket.
Most of it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing
had amused himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement
stereo on the back page. The matter he printed was emotional; the
news organisation had not as yet found its way back. I learned
nothing fresh except that already in one week the examination of the
Martian mechanisms had yielded astonishing results. Among other
things, the article assured me what I did not believe at the time,
that the "Secret of Flying," was discovered. At Waterloo I found the
free trains that were taking people to their homes. The first rush
was already over. There were few people in the train, and I was in no
mood for casual conversation. I got a compartment to myself, and sat
with folded arms, looking greyly at the sunlit devastation that flowed
past the windows. And just outside the terminus the train jolted over
temporary rails, and on either side of the railway the houses were
blackened ruins. To Clapham Junction the face of London was grimy
with powder of the Black Smoke, in spite of two days of thunderstorms
and rain, and at Clapham Junction the line had been wrecked again;
there were hundreds of out-of-work clerks and shopmen working side by
side with the customary navvies, and we were jolted over a hasty
relaying.

All down the line from there the aspect of the country was gaunt
and unfamiliar; Wimbledon particularly had suffered. Walton, by virtue
of its unburned pine woods, seemed the least hurt of any place along
the line. The Wandle, the Mole, every little stream, was a heaped
mass of red weed, in appearance between butcher's meat and pickled
cabbage. The Surrey pine woods were too dry, however, for the festoons
of the red climber. Beyond Wimbledon, within sight of the line, in
certain nursery grounds, were the heaped masses of earth about the
sixth cylinder. A number of people were standing about it, and some
sappers were busy in the midst of it. Over it flaunted a Union Jack,
flapping chee