The Martians Are Coming. Wells story is one of the earliest stories depicting a clash between humans and an extraterrestrial race.
Notable Excerpts
So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. “We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.”
She seemed, poor woman, to imagine that the French and the Martians might prove very similar.
Those who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to elemental things, will have a wider charity.
Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity–pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.
They haven’t any spirit in them–no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other–Lord! What is he but funk and precautions?
And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians–dead!–slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.