So that Mr. Pennell’s sketchy and transient human figures seem altogether right to me.  He sees these forges, workshops, cranes and the like, as inhuman and as wonderful as cliffs or great caves or icebergs or the stars.  They are a new aspect of the logic of physical necessity that made all these older things, and he seizes upon the majesty and beauty of their dimensions with an entire impartiality.  And they are as impartial.  Through all these lithographs runs one present motif, the motif of the supreme effort of western civilisation to save itself and the world from the dominance of the reactionary German Imperialism of modern science.  The pictures are arranged to shape out the life of a shell, from the mine to the great gun; nothing remains of their history to show except the ammunition dump, the gun in action and the shell-burst.  Upon this theme all these great appearances are strung to-day.  But to-morrow they may be strung upon some other and nobler purpose.  These gigantic beings of which the engineer is the master and slave, are neither benevolent nor malignant.  To-day they produce destruction, they are the slaves of the spur; to-morrow we hope they will bridge and carry and house and help again.

For that peace we struggle against the dull inflexibility of the German Will-to-Power.

V. TANKS

1

It is the British who have produced the “land ironclad” since I returned from France, and used it apparently with very good effect.  I felt no little chagrin at not seeing them there, because I have a peculiar interest in these contrivances.  It would be more than human not to claim a little in this matter.  I described one in a story in The Strand Magazine in 1903, and my story could stand in parallel columns beside the first account of these monsters in action given by Mr. Beach Thomas or Mr. Philip Gibbs.  My friend M. Joseph Reinach has successfully passed off long extracts from my story as descriptions of the Tanks upon British officers who had just seen them.  The filiation was indeed quite traceable.  They were my grandchildren—­I felt a little like King Lear when first I read about them.  Yet let me state at once that I was certainly not their prime originator.  I took up an idea, manipulated it slightly, and handed it on.  The idea was suggested to me by the contrivances of a certain Mr. Diplock, whose “ped-rail” notion, the notion of a wheel that was something more than a wheel, a wheel that would take locomotives up hill-sides and over ploughed fields, was public property nearly twenty years ago.  Possibly there were others before Diplock.  To the Ped-rail also Commander Murray Sueter, one of the many experimentalists upon the early tanks, admits his indebtedness, and it would seem that Mr. Diplock was actually concerned in the earlier stage of the tanks.