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 an