Orwell was correct in his perception of the importance of the First World War in having a profound effect on Wells, as it did on so many of his contemporaries. Summing up the armistice, Prime Minister Lloyd George stated "At eleven o'clock this morning came to an end the cruellest and most terrible war that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came an end to all wars." Wells had coined a similar phrase to Lloyd George's as the title of a book - 'The War that Will End War' - written towards the beginning of the conflict. Although the sentiment was to prove hopelessly optimistic, it was an understandable reaction to the colossal loss of life and apocalyptic destruction wrought upon Europe by the most widespread and most mechanised war ever fought. However, if there ever was a war to end all wars it is the one described in The War of the Worlds. Where as the First World War did nothing but magnify enmities, the Narrator of The War of The Worlds describes how the Martian invasion "has done much to promote the conception of the commonwealth of mankind."
What is more remarkable though, is Wells' description of a mechanised war before not only the First World War but even the Boer War. But it is not a war of machine guns and tanks: the chief vehicles are the "monstrous tripod[s]" that the Narrator witnesses: "higher than many houses, striding over the young pine-trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder... Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles... swinging and rattling about its strange body... the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman's basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me." And with these machines they effect a Blitzkrieg unknown in Earthly warfare (until the destruction wrought by twentieth-century weaponry made the Martian weapons look like pea- shooters): "they've made their footing good and crippled the greatest power in the world," says the artillery-man "This isn't a war... it was never a war, any more than there's a war between men and ants."
The Martian's war is a Total War - aimed as much at disrupting the civilian infrastructure (and acquiring humans as food) as at the pitifully inadequate human guns. One of the most striking pictures painted by Wells is that of the mass exodus of London: "the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing into a foaming tumult round the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel northward and eastward... the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of human beings rushing northward, one pressing on another... a dense crowd of horses and of men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every description... this was a whole population in movement... Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human being moved and suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would have been a drop in the current. And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede - a stampede gigantic and terrible - without order and without a goal, six million people, unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong." Never before in history perhaps, but a scene that was to be repeated across the world repeatedly throughout the next century, and now is beamed through our television sets into our front rooms.
At the end of the nineteenth century, though the media had far less reach than today, Wells incisively satirises its familiar practises and sentiment. As the shooting stars that herald the destruction head earthwards, "The serio-comic periodical Punch... made a happy use of it in the political cartoon... People in these latter times scarcely realise the abundance and enterprise of our nineteenth-century papers." And early on in the conflict, when the humans are confident that they can repel the alien invasion, the papers duly encourage belligerent patriotism. As the Narrator observes: "Something very like the war-fever that occasionally runs through a civilised community had got into my blood... I was even afraid that the last fusillade I had heard might mean the extermination of our invaders from Mars. I can best express my state of mind by saying that I wanted to be in at the kill." And later, as the Martians descend on London, the newspapers' habit of exploiting dramatic incidences to promote sales is personified by a paper man, "running away... selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran - a grotesque mingling of profit and panic."
However, before this, the papers seem a little slow on the uptake: one of the first headlines after the Martians land reads, "REMARKABLE STORY FROM WOKING", The papers generally maintain a matter- of-fact calmness and understatement - an article in one paper comparing "the affair to a menagerie suddenly let loose in a village" rather than the giant mechanical death-machines that are destroying the home counties. Not only that, but when the papers finally come round to the reality of the situation, there seems to be little panic in reaction to them: "Plenty of Londoners did not hear of the Martians until the panic of Monday morning... The majority of people in London do not read Sunday papers... The habit of personal security, moreover, is so deeply fixed in the Londoner's mind, and startling intelligence so much a matter of course in the papers, that they could read without any personal tremors: 'About seven o'clock last night the Martians came out of the cylinder, and, moving about under an armour of metallic shields, have completely wrecked Woking station with the adjacent houses and massacred an entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment... Maxims have been absolutely useless against their armour; the field-guns have been disabled by them.'"
There is a sense that whilst there are still papers operating to publish news stories, civilisation must somehow not be under threat. This is in stark contrast to the reaction of Orson Welles' 1938 radio dramatisation which memorably caused widespread panic in large areas of the eastern United States among listeners who took the fictional news reports of Martians invading New Jersey to be true: an illustration of the power of the first instant mass-media format. But, of course, we have to ask ourselves how much of the panic itself may have been 'hyped' by the media. As Wells himself said in a radio conversation with Orson Welles in 1940, "are you sure there was such a panic in America or wasn't it your Hallowe'en fun?" With regard to the 'mass' media in the novel itself, it is notable that the first paper to resume publication after the war is the Daily Mail - one of the first British papers to popularise its coverage to appeal to mass readership: The War of the Worlds is very much concerned with the fate and reaction of the proletariat to the invasion as much as it is of official reaction - the British government are given only two brief mentions.
To return to the 'war' itself, two of the weapons of the Martians elicit particular attention but for very different reasons. Their use of a "Black Smoke" - "the inhaling of its pungent wisp... was death to all that breathes" - of is striking when one considers the extent of the use of poison gas in the First World War, and the great fear of its use in every war since. Whilst under the terms of the Geneva Convention, men are free to shoot at each other, blow each up, burn each other with napalm, and so forth, the treaty outlaws the first use of chemical weapons in warfare: its use is considered somehow a dishonest, unrespectable way of killing people. And it should not be an irony lost on a world that has outlawed biological warfare that it is bacteria that spell the final end for the Martians (more of which later). The other chief weapon of the Martians is the "Heat-Ray": "An almost noiseless and blinding flash of light, and a man fell headlong and lay still; and as the unseen shaft of heat passed over them, pine-trees burst into fire, and every dry furze- bush became with one dull thud a mass of flames... It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat." Whilst science has yet to devise such a weapon to effectively and conveniently dispose of large numbers of humans, 'ray-guns', 'disintegrating rays', 'lasers cannons', and so on have become the staple of science- fiction weaponry - from the Flash Gordon serials of the nineteen-thirties to mega- budget Hollywood productions such as 1996's Independence Day (a thinly veiled rehash of The War of the Worlds - except in this case it is a computer-virus that spells the end for the invading extra-terrestrials.)