The camp raid and the theft of the glasses is a decisive attack on Ralph’s dwindling group: Jack Merridew’s hunters invade their shelter at night, leave Piggy’s broken glasses behind, and depart with the means by which Ralph’s group has maintained its fire. The assault converts a confused fear of the beast into direct violence between the boys, and its material cost becomes unmistakable at dawn when the fire is out.

The attack in the darkness

The raid begins with sounds outside the shelter: a stick cracks, something brushes the back of the shelter, and an unseen voice calls for Piggy. In the darkness, Ralph and Piggy cannot identify who is there. Piggy believes the beast has come; Ralph tells him to stay quiet. When Piggy’s asthma seizes him and he crashes among the leaves, the waiting tension breaks into a physical assault.

The shelter fills with snarling, crashing, and flailing bodies. Ralph is knocked into the fight and strikes at figures he cannot see, biting fingers and pounding a face before a knee catches him and the struggle rolls over him. The shelter collapses under the mêlée. Only after the attackers have fought their way out do the cries of the youngest boys and Piggy’s gasping become audible again. The unseen threat that had seemed to be the beast is revealed as human assailants.

Injuries and the missing glasses

Ralph calls to the youngest boys to settle them, while Sam and Eric come over to check on him. The twins have been hurt: Eric’s face is bloody, and he says he was kicked while asleep before managing to strike back with his knee. Piggy is breathing more easily after the attack, but he has been caught in the violence too. Ralph also believes he injured one of the attackers, though in the darkness none of them can establish exactly who fought whom.

Piggy initially thinks the raiders came for The conch. Ralph runs down to the pale beach and finds it still beside the chief’s seat on the platform. That discovery sharpens the loss rather than relieving it: Piggy understands that the attackers came for something else, and the group soon has its answer. Three figures move along the beach toward Castle Rock, avoiding the forest; their leader carries Piggy’s broken glasses.

The fire’s loss and the raid’s significance

At dawn, Ralph tries to revive the fire from the blackened remains, blowing among grey ashes until the breeze scatters them. No spark remains. Piggy can see Ralph only indistinctly, while Ralph’s cheek is swollen and his eye nearly closed. The previous night’s theft is thus made concrete in the morning: the glasses are gone, and so is the group’s fire. Ralph recognizes that Jack’s side has taken their fire; Piggy, whose sight depends on the spectacles, describes the attack as having blinded him.

The raid’s violence and its practical consequence arrive as one reversal. Ralph’s group has survived the assault, but it has lost both Piggy’s glasses and the fire they had been tending. The conch is still there, a surviving emblem of their former order, yet it did not protect the shelter or prevent the theft. By carrying the glasses away to Castle Rock, Jack Merridew’s faction leaves Ralph’s group exposed and makes its struggle to maintain the fire more precarious.