was given false information in great confidence in order to
keep it too occupied to pass on the true.

The new monster was called a tank because it was not like a tank; yet it
seemed to me as much like a tank as like anything else. As a tank is a
receptacle for a liquid, it was a name that ought to mask a new type of
armored motor car as successfully as any name could. Flower pot would
have been too wide of the mark. A tank might carry a new kind of gas or
a burning liquid to cook or frizzle the adversary.

Considering the size of the beast, concealment seemed about as difficult
as for a suburban cottager to keep the fact that he had an elephant on
the premises from his next-door neighbor; but the British Army has
become so used to slipping ships across the channel in face of submarine
danger that nobody is surprised at anything that appears at the front
unheralded.

One day the curtain rose, and the finished product of all the
experiments and testing appeared at the British front. Hundreds of
thousands of soldiers were now in the secret. "Have you seen the tanks?"
was the question up and down the line. All editors were inventing their
own type of tank. Though I have patted one on the shoulder in a familiar
way, as I might stroke the family cat, it neither kicked nor bit me.
Though I have been inside of one, I am not supposed to know at this
writing anything about its construction. Unquestionably the tank
resembles an armadillo, a caterpillar, a diplodocus, a motor car, and a
traveling circus. It has more feet than a caterpillar, and they have
steel toenails which take it over the ground; its hide is more resistant
than an armadillo's, and its beauty of form would make the diplodocus
jealous. No pianist was ever more temperamental; no tortoise ever more
phlegmatic.

In summer heat, when dust clouds hung thick on the roads behind the
shell clouds of the fields, when the ceaseless battle had been going on
for two months and a half, the soldiers had their interest stimulated by
a mechanical novelty just before a general attack. Two years of war had
cumulatively desensitized them to thrills. New batteries moving into
position were only so many more guns. Fresh battalions marching to the
front were only more infantry, all of the same pattern, equipped in the
same way, moving with the same fixed step. Machine gun rattles had
become as commonplace as the sound of creaking caisson wheels. Gas
shells, lachrymatory shells and