How we cite our quotes: (Volume.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
They exploded any stores of powder they came upon, cut every telegraph, and wrecked the railways here and there. They were hamstringing mankind. (1.17.3)
The Martians try to stop people from fighting back, so they mostly destroy the military equipment. Here their destruction is described as "hamstringing," which generally just means to cripple, but which comes from a bodily metaphor. (It has to do with cutting the tendons in a leg. It's hard to walk without those tendons. So we hear.) It's curious to us that this technological issue is described in bodily terms.
Quote #8
Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness – rushed slantingly upward and very swiftly into the luminous clearness above the clouds in the western sky; something flat and broad, and very large, that swept round in a vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly, and vanished again into the grey mystery of the night. And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the land. (1.17.35)
Years after Wells wrote The War of the Words, people would start talking seriously about airplanes (or "aeroplanes"), but here Wells is imagining the narrator's brother seeing something that he might not have words for. Notice how the thing is always talked about as "Something," which is what we all do when we lack the word for unfamiliar technology. One other strange thing about this quote is the way that the language slips from describing this strange new technology to the Biblical sounding language of "rain[ing] down darkness." Once again, we're confronted with the two issues of religion and technology.
Quote #9
We men, with our bicycles and road-skates, our Lilienthal soaring-machines, our guns and sticks and so forth, are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out. (2.2.25)
Here the narrator really lays it on the line, drawing the connection between the Martians' technology and ours. Apparently, our technology might belong to the same evolutionary chain as the Martians' tech. Maybe our "soaring-machines" (gliders) will lead to flying machines, and our guns will lead to Heat-Rays.