midday
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 . Another bank drove over Ealing , and surrounded a little island of survivors on Castle Hill , alive , but unable to escape . After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North-Western train at Chalk Farm -- the engines of the trains that had loaded in the goods yard there _ ploughed _ through shrieking people , and a dozen stalwart men fought to keep the crowd from crushing the driver against his furnace -- my brother emerged upon the Chalk Farm road , dodged across through a hurrying swarm of vehicles , and had the luck to be foremost in the sack of a cycle shop . The front tire of the machine he got was punctured in dragging it through the window , but he got up and off , notwithstanding , with no further injury than a cut wrist .