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It is the British who have produced the "land ironclad" since Ireturned from France, and used it apparently with very good effect.I felt no little chagrin at not seeing them there, because I have a peculiar interest in these contrivances.It would be more than human not to claim a little in this matter.Idescribed one in a story in /The Strand Magazine/ in 1903, and my story could stand in parallel columns beside the first account of these monsters in action given by Mr.Beach Thomas or Mr.Philip Gibbs.My friend M.Joseph Reinach has successfully passed off long extracts from my story as descriptions of the Tanks upon British officers who had just seen them.The filiation was indeed quite traceable.They were my grandchildren--I felt a little like King Lear when first I read about them.Yet let me state at once that I was certainly not their prime originator.I took up an idea, manipulated it slightly, and handed it on.The idea was suggested to me by the contrivances of a certain Mr.Diplock, whose "ped-rail" notion, the notion of a wheel that was something more than a wheel, a wheel that would take locomotives up hill-sides and over ploughed fields, was public property nearly twenty years ago.Possibly there were others before Diplock.To the Ped-rail also Commander Murray Sueter, one of the many experimentalists upon the early tanks, admits his indebtedness, and it would seem that Mr.Diplock was actually concerned in the earlier stage of the tanks.
Since my return I have been able to see the Tank at home, through the courtesy of the Ministry of Munitions.They have progressed far beyond any recognisable resemblance to the initiatives of Mr.
Diplock; they have approximated rather to the American caterpillar.As I suspected when first I heard of these devices, the War Office and the old army people had practically nothing to do with their development.They took to it very reluctantly--as they have taken to every novelty in this war.One brilliant general scrawled over an early proposal the entirely characteristic comment that it was a pity the inventor could not use his imagination to better purpose.(That foolish British trick of sneering at "imagination" has cost us hundreds of thousands of useless casualties and may yet lose us the war.)Tanks were first mooted at the front about a year and a half ago;Mr.Winston Churchill was then asking questions about their practicability; he filled many simple souls with terror; they thought him a most dangerous lunatic.The actual making of the Tanks arose as an irregular side development of the armoured-car branch of the Royal Naval Air Service work.The names most closely associated with the work are (I quote a reply of Dr.
Macnamara's in the House of Commons) Mr.d'Eyncourt, the Director of Naval Construction, Mr.W.O.Tritton, Lieut.Wilson, R.N.A.S., Mr.Bussell, Lieut.Stern, R.N.A.S., who is now Colonel Stern, Captain Symes, and Mr.F.Skeens.There are many other claims too numerous to mention in detail.
But however much the Tanks may disconcert the gallant Colonel Newcomes who throw an air of restraint over our victorious front, there can be no doubt that they are an important as well as a novel development of the modern offensive.Of course neither the Tanks nor their very obvious next developments going to wrest the decisive pre-eminence from the aeroplane.The aeroplane remains now more than ever the instrument of victory upon the western front.Aerial ascendancy, properly utilised, is victory.But the mobile armoured big gun and the Tank as a machine-gun silencer must enormously facilitate an advance against the blinded enemy.Neither of them can advance against properly aimed big gun fire.That has to be disposed of before they make their entrance.It remains the function of the aeroplane to locate the hostile big guns and to direct the /tir de demolition/ upon them before the advance begins--possibly even to bomb them out.But hitherto, after the destruction of driving back of the defender's big guns has been effected, the dug-out and the machine gun have still inflicted heavy losses upon the advancing infantry until the fight is won.
So soon as the big guns are out, the tanks will advance, destroying machine guns, completing the destruction of the wire, and holding prisoners immobile.Then the infantry will follow to gather in the sheaves.Multitudinously produced and--I write it with a defiant eye on Colonel Newcome--/properly handled/, these land ironclads are going to do very great things in shortening the war, in pursuit, in breaking up the retreating enemy.Given the air ascendancy, and I am utterly unable to imagine any way of conclusively stopping or even greatly delaying an offensive thus equipped.
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The young of even the most horrible beasts have something piquant and engaging about them, and so I suppose it is in the way of things that the land ironclad which opens a new and more dreadful and destructive phase in the human folly of warfare, should appear first as if it were a joke.Never has any such thing so completely masked its wickedness under an appearance of genial silliness.The Tank is a creature to which one naturally flings a pet name; the five or six I was shown wandering, rooting and climbing over obstacles, round a large field near X, were as amusing and disarming as a little of lively young pigs.
