Thus, in its last moments of resistance, the German Army, now but the ghost of itself, was scattered by the ghost of a Tank!  What was being prepared for it, had the struggle gone on, is told in a memorandum on Tanks organisation which has come my way, and makes one alternately shudder at the war that might have been, and rejoice in the peace that is.  In the last weeks of the war, Tank organisation was going rapidly forward.  A new Tank Board, consisting of Naval, Military, and Industrial members, was concentrating all its stored knowledge on “the application of naval tactics to land warfare,” in other words, on the development of Tanks, and had the war continued, the complete destruction of the German Armies would have been brought about in 1919 by “a Tank programme of some six thousand machines.”  When one considers that for the whole of the three last victorious months in which Tanks played such an astonishing part, the British Armies never possessed more than four hundred of them, who travelled like a circus from army to army, the significance of this figure will be understood.  Nor could Germany, by any possibility, have produced either the labour or the material necessary, whereby to meet Tank with Tank.  The game was played out and the stakes lost.

* * * * *

But of fresh headings in this last tremendous chapter of England’s Effort, there might be no end.  I can only glance at one or two of them.

The Air Force?  Ah, that, indeed, is another story—­and so great a one, that all I can attempt here is to put together[12] a few facts and figures, in one of those comparisons of the “beginning,” with the “end,” of time with time, by which alone some deposit from the stream of history in which we are all bathed filters into the mind, and—­with good luck:  stays there.  Here, in Hertfordshire, in the first summer of the war, how great an event was still the passage of an aeroplane over these quiet woods!  How the accidents of the first two years appalled us, heart-broken spectators, and the inexorable military comment upon them:  “Accidents or no accidents, we have got to master this thing, and master the Germans in it.”  And, accidents or no accidents, the young men of Britain and France steadily made their way to the aviation schools, having no illusions at all, in those early days, as to the special and deadly risks to be run, yet determined to run them, partly from clear-eyed patriotism, partly from that natural call of the blood which makes an Englishman or a Frenchman delight in danger and the untried for their own sakes.  Thenceforward, the wonderful tale ran, mounting to its climax.  At the beginning of the war the military wing of the British Air Service consisted of 1,844 officers and men.  At the conclusion of the war there were, in round numbers, 28,000 officers and 264,000 other ranks employed under the Air Board.  From under 2,000 to nearly 300,000!—­and in four years!