Pattern #1: Obliviousness to the true danger of the Martians and an overall calm tone

  1. “The listened, rapped on the scaly burnt metal with a stick, and, meeting with no response, they both concluded the man or men inside must be insensible or dead” (page 16).
  1. “…and as it was then about a quart past five, I went home, had some tea, and walked up to the station to waylay him” (page 19).
  1. “About six in the evening, as I sat at tea with my wife in the summer-house talking vigorously about the battle that was lowering upon us, I heard a muffled detonation from the common, and immediately after a gust of firing” (page 41).

 

Pattern #2: Humans are superior to all other forms of life, terrestrials being included

  1. “No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own” (page 7).
  1. “And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us”(page 8).
  1. “It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently” (page 28).