Much has been written about the Martian appetite for blood and the horrifying efficacy of their weaponry, both the invisible heat-rays that levelled churches and melted battleships, and the black smoke that sucked the very breath of life from all it encountered. Comparatively little has been reported of their more sinister goal to breed the subjugated humans for purposes we can only begin to guess at.
Perhaps it is the nature of their experimentation that has resulted in this deafening silence, for what man wishes to talk of his emasculation and what woman would confess to immodest behaviour of the sort induced by our alien captors.
For to humanity's profound shame, while England burned before the advance of Martian machines, not all the screams were of mortal terror or inconsolable grief. No, some were a wholly different anguish as moral conviction surrendered again and again to pleasure of the flesh, or as once human flesh was sculpted into monstrous forms that no unjaded eye could behold without revulsion.
This was no demonic magic but rather scientific knowledge far in excess of our own. To these alien intelligences we were nothing but animals to be domesticated and bent to purposes that neither God nor Darwin could have conceived of. What was done to us was done with steel and electricity, as if by the hand of Dr Frankenstein, and if our prayers were heard by any deity they went unanswered.
Others have written accounts of how the Martians came to Earth, and I have nothing to add there. I saw no cylinders streak across the sky and heard no impact of their landing. What little I knew was in those earliest reports, before there were no more newspapers. My attention was wholly on preparation for my wedding, for which every detail of dress and decoration was of utmost importance. That my fiancΓ© should find the news so extraordinarily distracting was a profound irritation.
We were in love, and that was all that mattered - or all that should have mattered. In the end, nothing mattered except that we were together when that ululating cry echoed through the valley and filled me with such a dread that all strength left my limbs. Robert, my fiancΓ©, pointed up in the air behind me, his expression one of astonishment - that gave way to abject terror as the air filled with a tumult of screams and shattering timbers and rock.
I twisted round to see the village that I loved, that had always been my home, wreathed in sudden and destructive flame, and people that I must surely have known by name now charred beyond recognition. This place that had only ever known peace and tranquility now burned as if war had burst out from Hell itself.
And there stood the Devil. A giant on three legs, surveying the destruction it had wrought. Like a great metal spider it advanced through the chaos, its three arms whipping out to snatch up a woman here, a man there, their screams of bewildered terror barely heard above the conflagration below.
"Isabelle!" my fiancΓ© yelled at me, tugging at my arms. How long he had been shouting my name I cannot say. I could not look away from the horror unfolding before my eyes. Only when Robert struck me sharply across my cheeks did my senses return to me. "We have to run, Isabelle!"
I nodded and managed to stand with his help, and then we were running like the Devil himself was in pursuit - which he was. A metal serpent slipped about my waist and wrenched me into the air so swiftly I was above the level of the blazing rooftops before I could even draw breath to scream. Far below me, Robert stared up at me in shock for vital seconds, and when gathering his wits to run it was too late. Another serpentine arm plucked him off his feet.
It was no Devil, of course. It was an infernal machine piloted by an alien intelligence, carrying a huge net into which it deposited its captured prey. I found myself squashed together helplessly with dozens of others - acquaintances who were scarcely recognisable, so changed were they by this incomprehensible terror.
Few who were netted lived to tell of it later. I wish to be honest in this account, even when it reflects poorly on me, so let me confess that such was my fear that I lost all control of myself, though I was not immediately aware of it. I was not alone either. Crushed together as we were, some staring out through the net, some reaching inwards to connect with others - I was close enough to Robert that our fingertips could touch, and that was a dear comfort for me - the stink in that confined space was one of urine and worse.
I didn't like to look out. The landscape was dotted with columns of black smoke, and the increasingly familiar glint and spidery outline of the Martian machines. For some of my fellow captives, shock gave way to tears or to indignation ("Someone will pay for this!" Fred the butcher muttered over and over), but it was not until our captor deposited its catch at its base that we understood at last the desperation of our fate.
We tumbled out of the net into an unearthly prison, its walls the crater formed by the blistering arrival of the cylinder at its heart. Like an iceberg, that steel tube that had been flung impossibly between their cold, distant home and our lush, vibrant planet was visible only at its tip, and the creatures that crawled out of its aperture were born of deepest nightmare.
The pictures of them that are so familiar to us now do not truly capture their macabre nature. Imagine if you can the black, bloated body and the ten spidery tentacles, but add eyes with the cold intelligence of a scientist studying a frog he intends to dissect.
I pray you forgive me my weakness, but my memory of what followed fails me. I know only that we were stripped of clothing and washed clean with brutal jets of water, and that we were prodded and pierced by all manner of cruel instruments. My next clear recollection is of being wrapped in Robert's protective arms, though he was trembling as uncontrollably as I.
We were both naked. We all were. Men and women alike. Young and old. A hundred of us corralled together, some faces familiar, all forlorn of hope, too distressed to feel humiliation from exposure. This was no Garden of Eden full of innocent delights, nor was it a pleasure garden inviting revelry and immodest games of pursuit and conquest. Though we did little more than sit, we were too exhausted to care about appearances.