Embankment machine (The War of the Worlds) Embankment machine (The War of the Worlds) The Embankment machine (also known as the Digging machine) is one of the fictional machines used by the Martians in the H. G. Wells' classic science fiction novel "The War of the Worlds". It is an excavator, and is one of the four types of machine the Martians bring with them when they invade Earth, the three others being the fighting machine, the flying machine, and the handling machine. The embankment machine is featured only once in the novel in very little detail. Rather than describe its appearance, Well's mentions it in passing
The War of the Worlds infrastructure such as armament stores, railways, and telegraph lines; it appears to be intended to cause maximum casualties, leaving humans without any will to resist. These tactics became more common as the twentieth century progressed, particularly during the 1930s with the development of mobile weapons and technology capable of surgical strikes on key military and civilian targets. Wells's vision of a war bringing total destruction without moral limitations in "The War of the Worlds" was not taken seriously by readers at the time of publication. He later expanded these ideas in the novels "When the Sleeper Wakes" (1899), "The War