two o’clock
So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning -- the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent , lashing in 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 . By ten o'clock the police organisation , and by midday even the railway organisations , were losing coherency , losing shape and efficiency , guttering , softening , running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body . All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern people at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday , and trains were being filled . People were fighting savagely for standing-room in the carriages even at two o'clock . By three , people were being trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street , a couple of hundred yards or more from Liverpool Street station ; revolvers were fired , people stabbed , and the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic , exhausted and infuriated , were breaking the heads of the people they were called out to protect . And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers refused to return to London , the pressure of the flight drove the people in an ever-thickening multitude away from the stations and along the northward-running roads . By midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes , and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thames and across the flats of Lambeth , cutting off all escape over the bridges in its sluggish advance .