1
It is the British who have produced the “land ironclad” since I returned
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. I described 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.
2
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.
At first the War Office prevented the publication of any pictures or
descriptions of these contrivances except abroad; then abruptly the
embargo was relaxed, and the press was flooded with photographs. The
reader will be familiar now with their appearance. They resemble
large slugs with an underside a little like the flattened rockers of
a rocking-horse, slugs between 20 and 40 feet long. They are like
flat-sided slugs, slugs of spirit, who raise an enquiring snout, like
the snout of a dogfish, into the air. They crawl upon their bellies in
a way that would be tedious to describe to the general reader and
unnecessary to describe to the enquiring specialists. They go over the
ground with the sliding speed of active snails. Behind them trail two
wheels, supporting a flimsy tail, wheels that strike one as incongruous
as if a monster began kangaroo and ended doll's perambulator. (These
wheels annoy me.) They are not steely monsters; they are painted with
drab and unassuming colours that are fashionable in modern warfare, so
that the armour seems rather like the integument of a rhinoceros. At the
sides of the head project armoured checks, and from above these stick
out guns that look like stalked eyes. That is the general appearance of
the contemporary tank.
It slides on the ground; the silly little wheels that so detract from
the genial bestiality of its appearance dandle and bump behind it. It
swings about its axis. It comes to an obstacle, a low wall let us say,
or a heap of bricks, and sets to work to climb it with its snout. It
rears over the obstacle, it raises its straining belly, it overhangs
more and more, and at last topples forward; it sways upon the heap and
then goes plunging downwards, sticking out the weak counterpoise of its
wheeled tail. If it comes to a house or a tree or a wall or such-like
obstruction it rams against it so as to bring all its weight to bear
upon it--it weighs _some_ tons--and then climbs over the debris. I saw
it, and incredulous soldiers of experience watched it at the same time,
cross trenches and wallow amazingly through muddy exaggerations of small
holes. Then I repeated the tour inside.
Again the Tank is like a slug. The slug, as every biological student
knows, is unexpectedly complicated inside. The Tank is as crowded
with inward parts as a battleship. It is filled with engines, guns and
ammunition, and in the interstices men.
“You will smash your hat,” said Colonel Stern. “No; keep it on, or else
you will smash your head.”
Only Mr. C. R. W. Nevinson could do justice to the interior of a Tank.
You see a hand gripping something; you see the eyes and forehead of
an engineer's face; you perceive that an overall bluishness beyond the
engine is the back of another man. “Don't hold that,” says someone; “it
is too hot. Hold on to that.” The engines roar, so loudly that I doubt
whether one could hear guns without; the floor begins to slope and
slopes until one seems to be at forty-five degrees or thereabouts; then
the whole concern swings up and sways and slants the other way. You have
crossed a bank. You heel sideways. Through the door which has been left
open you see the little group of engineers, staff officers and naval men
receding and falling away behind you. You straighten up and go up hill.
You halt and begin to rotate. Through the open door, the green field,
with its red walls, rows of worksheds and forests of chimneys in
the background, begins a steady processional movement. The group of
engineers and officers and naval men appears at the other side of the
door and farther off. Then comes a sprint down hill. You descend and
stretch your legs.
About the field other Tanks are doing their stunts. One is struggling in
an apoplectic way in the mud pit with a cheek half buried. It noses its
way out and on with an air of animal relief.
They are like jokes by Heath Robinson. One forgets that these things
have already saved the lives of many hundreds of our soldiers and
smashed and defeated thousands of Germans.
Said one soldier to me: “In the old attacks you used to see the British
dead lying outside the machine-gun emplacements like birds outside a
butt with a good shot inside. _Now_, these things walk through.”
3
I saw other things that day at X. The Tank is only a beginning in a new
phase of warfare. Of these other things I may only write in the most
general terms.
But though Tanks and their collaterals are being made upon a very
considerable scale in X, already I realised as I walked through gigantic
forges as high and marvellous as cathedrals, and from workshed to
workshed where gun carriages, ammunition carts and a hundred such things
were flowing into existence with the swelling abundance of a river that
flows out of a gorge, that as the demand for the new developments
grows clear and strong, the resources of Britain are capable still of
a tremendous response. _If only we do not rob these great factories and
works of their men._
Upon this question certain things need to be said very plainly. The
decisive factor in the sort of war we are now waging is production and
right use of mechanical material; victory in this war depends now
upon three things: the aeroplane, the gun, and the Tank developments.
These--and not crowds of men--are the prime necessity for a successful
offensive. Every man we draw from munition making to the ranks brings
our western condition nearer to the military condition of Russia. In
these things we may be easily misled by military “experts” We have to
remember that the military “expert” is a man who learnt his business
before 1914, and that the business of war has been absolutely
revolutionised since 1914; the military expert is a man trained to think
of war as essentially an affair of cavalry, infantry in formation, and
field guns, whereas cavalry is entirely obsolete, infantry no longer
fights in formation, and the methods of gunnery have been entirely
changed. The military man I observe still runs about the world in spurs,
he travels in trains in spurs, he walks in spurs, he thinks in terms of
spurs. He has still to discover that it is about as ridiculous as if he
were to carry a crossbow. I take it these spurs are only the outward and
visible sign of an inward obsolescence. The disposition of the military
“expert” is still to think too little of machinery and to demand too
much of the men. Behind our front at the time of my visit there were,
for example, many thousands of cavalry, men tending horses, men engaged
in transporting bulky fodder for horses and the like. These men were
doing about as much in this war as if they had been at Timbuctoo. Every
man who is taken from munition making at X to spur-worshipping in khaki,
is a dead loss to the military efficiency of the country. Every man that
is needed or is likely to be needed for the actual operations of
modern warfare can be got by combing out the cavalry, the brewing
and distilling industries, the theatres and music halls, and the like
unproductive occupations. The under-staffing of munition works, the
diminution of their efficiency by the use of aged and female labour, is
the straight course to failure in this war.
In X, in the forges and machine shops, I saw already too large a
proportion of boys and grey heads.
War is a thing that changes very rapidly, and we have in the Tanks only
the first of a great series of offensive developments. They are bound to
be improved, at a great pace. The method of using them will change very
rapidly. Any added invention will necessitate the scrapping of old types
and the production of the new patterns in quantity. It is of supreme
necessity to the Allies if they are to win this war outright that the
lead in inventions and enterprise which the British have won over the
Germans in this matter should be retained. It is our game now to press
the advantage for all it is worth. We have to keep ahead to win. We
cannot do so unless we have unstinted men and unstinted material to
produce each new development as its use is realised.
Given that much, the Tank will enormously enhance the advantage of the
new offensive method on the French front; the method that is of gun
demolition after aerial photography, followed by an advance; it is a
huge addition to our prospect of decisive victory. What does it do?
It solves two problems. The existing Tank affords a means of advancing
against machine-gun fire and of destroying wire and machine guns without
much risk of loss, so soon as the big guns have done their duty by the
enemy guns. And also behind the Tank itself, it is useless to conceal,
lies the possibility of bringing up big guns and big gun ammunition,
across nearly any sort of country, as fast as the advance can press
forward. Hitherto every advance has paid a heavy toll to the machine
gun, and every advance has had to halt after a couple of miles or so
while the big guns (taking five or six days for the job) toiled up to
the new positions.
4
It is impossible to restrain a note of sharp urgency from what one has
to say about these developments. The Tanks remove the last technical
difficulties in our way to decisive victory and a permanent peace; they
also afford a reason for straining every nerve to bring about a decision
and peace soon. At the risk of seeming an imaginative alarmist I would
like to point out the reasons these things disclose for hurrying this
war to a decision and doing our utmost to arrange the world's affairs
so as to make another war improbable. Already these serio-comic Tanks,
weighing something over twenty tons or so, have gone slithering around
and sliding over dead and wounded men. That is not an incident for
sensitive minds to dwell upon, but it is a mere little child's play
anticipation of what the big land ironclads _that are bound to come if
there is no world pacification_, are going to do.
What lies behind the Tank depends upon this fact; there is no definable
upward limit of mass. Upon that I would lay all the stress possible,
because everything turns upon that.
You cannot make a land ironclad so big and heavy but that you cannot
make a caterpillar track wide enough and strong enough to carry it
forward. Tanks are quite possible that will carry twenty-inch or
twenty-five inch guns, besides minor armament. Such Tanks may be
undesirable; the production may exceed the industrial resources of
any empire to produce; but there is no inherent impossibility in such
things. There are not even the same limitations as to draught and
docking accommodation that sets bounds to the size of battleships. It
follows, therefore, as a necessary deduction that if the world's affairs
are so left at the end of the war that the race of armaments continues,
that Tank will develop steadily into a tremendous instrument of warfare,
driven by engines of scores of thousands of horse-power, tracking on
a track scores of hundreds of yards wide and weighing hundreds or
thousands of tons. Nothing but a world agreement not to do so can
prevent this logical development of the land ironclad. Such a structure
will make wheel-ruts scores of feet deep; it will plough up, devastate
and destroy the country it passes over altogether.
For my own part I never imagined the land ironclad idea would get loose
into war. I thought that the military intelligence was essentially
unimaginative and that such an aggressive military power as Germany,
dominated by military people, would never produce anything of the sort.
I thought that this war would be fought out without Tanks and that then
war would come to an end. For of course it is mere stupidity that makes
people doubt the ultimate ending of war. I have been so far justified
in these expectations of mine, that it is not from military sources that
these things have come. They have been thrust upon the soldiers from
without. But now that they are loose, now that they are in war, we have
to face their full possibilities, to use our advantage in them and press
on to the end of the war. In support of a photo-aero directed artillery,
even our present Tanks can be used to complete an invisible offensive.
We shall not so much push as ram. It is doubtful if the Germans can get
anything of the sort into action before six months are out. We ought to
get the war on to German soil before the Tanks have grown to more than
three or four times their present size. Then it will not matter so much
how much bigger they grow. It will be the German landscape that will
suffer.
After one has seen the actual Tanks it is not very difficult to close
one's eyes and figure the sort of Tank that may be arguing with Germany
in a few months' time about the restoration of Belgium and Serbia and
France, the restoration of the sunken tonnage, the penalties of the
various Zeppelin and submarine murders, the freedom of seas and land
alike from piracy, the evacuation of all Poland including Posen and
Cracow, and the guarantees for the future peace of Europe. The machine
will be perhaps as big as a destroyer and more heavily armed and
equipped. It will swim over and through the soil at a pace of ten or
twelve miles an hour. In front of it will be corn, land, neat woods,
orchards, pasture, gardens, villages and towns. It will advance upon its
belly with a swaying motion, devouring the ground beneath it. Behind it
masses of soil and rock, lumps of turf, splintered wood, bits of houses,
occasional streaks of red, will drop from its track, and it will leave
a wake, six or seven times as wide as a high road, from which all soil,
all cultivation, all semblance to cultivated or cultivatable land will
have disappeared. It will not even be a track of soil. It will be a
track of subsoil laid bare. It will be a flayed strip of nature. In the
course of its fighting the monster may have to turnabout. It will then
halt and spin slowly round, grinding out an arena of desolation with
a diameter equal to its length. If it has to retreat and advance again
these streaks and holes of destruction will increase and multiply.
Behind the fighting line these monsters will manoeuvre to and fro,
destroying the land for all ordinary agricultural purposes for ages to
come. The first imaginative account of the land ironclad that was ever
written concluded with the words, “They are the _reductio ad absurdum_
of war.” They are, and it is to the engineers, the ironmasters, the
workers and the inventive talent of Great Britain and France that we
must look to ensure that it is in Germany, the great teacher of war,
that this demonstration of war's ultimate absurdity is completed.
For forty years Frankenstein Germany invoked war, turned every
development of material and social science to aggressive ends, and at
last when she felt the time was ripe she let loose the new monster that
she had made of war to cow the spirit of mankind. She set the thing
trampling through Belgium. She cannot grumble if at last it comes home,
stranger and more dreadful even than she made it, trampling the German
towns and fields with German blood upon it and its eyes towards Berlin.
This logical development of the Tank idea may seem a gloomy prospect for
mankind. But it is open to question whether the tremendous development
of warfare that has gone on in the last two years does after all open a
prospect of unmitigated gloom. There has been a good deal of cheap and
despondent sneering recently at the phrase, “The war that will end war.”
It is still possible to maintain that that may be a correct description
of this war. It has to be remembered that war, as the aeroplane and
the Tank have made it, has already become an impossible luxury for any
barbaric or uncivilised people. War on the grade that has been achieved
on the Somme predicates an immense industrialism behind it. Of all the
States in the world only four can certainly be said to be fully capable
of sustaining war at the level to which it has now been brought upon the
western front. These are Britain, France, Germany, and the United States
of America. Less certainly equal to the effort are Italy, Japan, Russia,
and Austria. These eight powers are the only powers _capable of warfare
under modern conditions._ Five are already Allies and one is incurably
pacific. There is no other power or people in the world that can go to
war now without the consent and connivance of these great powers. If
we consider their alliances, we may count it that the matter rests now
between two groups of Allies and one neutral power. So that while on
the one hand the development of modern warfare of which the Tank is the
present symbol opens a prospect of limitless senseless destruction, it
opens on the other hand a prospect of organised world control. This
Tank development must ultimately bring the need of a real permanent
settlement within the compass of the meanest of diplomatic
intelligences. A peace that will restore competitive armaments has now
become a less desirable prospect for everyone than a continuation of the
war. Things were bad enough before, when the land forces were still in
a primitive phase of infantry, cavalry and artillery, and when the only
real race to develop monsters and destructors was for sea power. But the
race for sea power before 1914 was mere child's play to the breeding
of engineering monstrosities for land warfare that must now follow any
indeterminate peace settlement. I am no blind believer in the wisdom of
mankind, but I cannot believe that men are so insensate and headstrong
as to miss the plain omens of the present situation.
So that after all the cheerful amusement the sight of a Tank causes may
not be so very unreasonable. These things may be no more than one of
those penetrating flashes of wit that will sometimes light up and dispel
the contentions of an angry man. If they are not that, then they are the
grimmest jest that ever set men grinning. Wait and see, if you do not
believe me.