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Originally Posted by Raptor1
(Post 1510162)
It's a shame we only see the events from the narrator and his brother's viewpoint, I would very much have liked to know how the invasion turned out in other areas.
For example, the narrator only witnesses attacks on the fighting machines by field guns and hears from his brother about the Thunder Child, a torpedo ram, one of the weakest surface warships in existence at the time. How would they fared against howitzers, seeing as the martians don't really have an indirect fire weapon? Or the guns of a battleship, which might well outrange the Heat-Ray itself?
I think surprise was the main thing that allowed the martians their early victory, had they lacked that, they would have been either destroyed or at least driven to a bloody stalemate. In fact, IIRC it is practically stated by the narrator at the end of the book that because their first attack failed, they have lost the huge advantage that surprise gave them.
Thanks for that link, I've heard a lot about Little Wars, but I always wondered how it compared to modern wargaming systems.
The British army at the time it would have fought the martians was nowhere near being 'large'. I wonder how well the martians would have done against the German army...
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IIRC they do stumble across some heavy siege gun emplacements near Richmond or Kingston.
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From there we could see the searchlights on Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill going to and fro, and about eleven the windows rattled, and we heard the sound of the huge siege guns that had been put in position there. These continued intermittently for the space of a quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the invisible Martians at Hampton and Ditton, and then the pale beams of the electric light vanished, and were replaced by a bright red glow.
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Although by daylight and with adequate visibility, things may well have been a different matter.
Battleships on the other hand, I think the plan to deal with them was to drop black smoke on them. But it's a bit ambiguous, at the end of the chapter dealing with the Thunder Child:
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Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness--rushed slantingly upward and very swiftly into the luminous clearness above the clouds in the western sky; something flat and broad, and very large, that swept round in a vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly, and vanished again into the grey mystery of the night. And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the land.
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Many take the last sentence to mean that the flying machine was capable of dropping black smoke and it did so upon the ships of the fleet. Of course, this is written and taking place sixteen years before the 'Chemists war' brought gas masks into warfare...but I suspect that as the Martian war progressed some boffins would spot the "Inhaler or Lung Protector" of the American Lewis Haslet and push it into production.
As far as I can make out, the Black Smoke is a form of suffocation method, turning into a foam in contact with water, so when breathed in it would then block the lungs and suffocate the inhaler, which means that the 'Lung Protector' would effectively destroy the deadliness of the Black Smoke, thus bringing the war to a standstill as you described. Unless the Martians then came up with another device to move the war forward, and they were remarkably intelligent creatures (composed mostly of brain, and presumably able to utilise this brain more efficiently than we do since there is a hint at telepathy later in the book) then there would be a period of infinite war. The Martians would not give up, although they would probably learn a grudging respect for our intelligence (and rate us a little bit higher than livestock...although we would still be walking blood donaters), they would not run out of resources, as they would be able to utilise the resources they had captured, they would not run out of population, because as they were asexual they could 'bud' at will, and they would not negotiate a peace or ceasefire.
It is an interesting thing to consider though, and I apologise for waffling here, as you may have been able to tell (although I'm not sure...it's not very obvious) I am a rather large fan of the book, I have been since I was ten, and I do so wish that someone would do it justice in television or cinema.
TLAM Strike, but does that tripod walk across trees and crush them like matchsticks and is it 'taller than the tallest steeple'?
Raptor also has a point, I do wonder how the Martians would have fared against the German army of 1898, it was a bit less spread out than the British one was, plus there wouldn't be the security of having water all around your capture point. I guess that's why they went for Britain to begin with, a secure base of operations, easy enough to overcome in a surprise attack and difficult for an aggressor to retake without the right technology. :hmmm:
