h filled
with dead, when they saw a tank on the road as they passed to the rear
threw up their hands with a guttural: "Mein Gott! There is another!
There is no fighting that! This is not war; it is butchery!" Yes, it was
butchery--and butchery is war these days. Wasn't it so always? And as a
British officer remarked to the protestants:

"The tank is entirely in keeping with Hague rules, being only armor,
machinery and machine guns."

Germans surrendered to a tank in bodies after they saw the hopelessness
of turning their own machine gun and rifle fire upon that steel hide.
Why not? Nothing takes the fight out of anyone like finding that his
blows go into the air and the other fellow's go home. There seemed a
strange loss of dignity when a Prussian colonel delivered himself to a
tank, which took him on board and eventually handed him over to an
infantry guard; but the skipper of the tank enjoyed it if the colonel
did not.

The surprising thing was how few casualties there were among the crews
of the tanks, who went out prepared to die and found themselves safe in
their armored shells after the day's fight was over, whether their ships
had gone across a line of German trenches, developed engine trouble, or
temporarily foundered in shell-holes. Bullets had merely made
steel-bright flecks on the tanks' paint and shrapnel had equally failed
to penetrate the armor.

Among the imaginary tributes paid to the tank's powers is that it "eats"
trees--that is to say, it can cut its way through a wood--and that it
can knock down a stone wall. As it has no teeth it cannot masticate
timber. All that it accomplishes must be done by ramming or by lifting
up its weight to crush an obstacle. A small tree or a weak wall yields
before its mass.

As foresters, the tanks had a stiff task in High Wood, where the Germans
had held to the upper corner with their nests of machine guns which the
preliminary bombardment of British artillery had not silenced and they
began their murderous song immediately the British charge started. They
commanded the front and the flanks if the men continued to advance and
therefore might make a break in the whole movement, which was precisely
the object of the desperate resistance that had preserved this strong
point at any cost against the rushes of British bombers, trench mortars
and artillery shells for two months.

Soldiers are not expected to undertake the impossible. Nobody who is
sane will leap into a