The War of the Worlds: Situational Irony 1 key example

The story's central irony is that the Martians are so strong (in terms of weapons and technology) but ultimately so weak against basic bacteria on earth. In Book 2, Chapter 8, the narrator emphasizes the strangeness of this situational irony:

A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it[...]scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians – dead! – slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

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