hoto-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 Germa