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The young of even the most horrible beasts have something piquant and engaging about them, and so I suppose it is in the way of things that the land ironclad which opens a new and more dreadful and destructive phase in the human folly of warfare, should appear first as if it were a joke.  Never has any such thing so completely masked its wickedness under an appearance of genial silliness.  The Tank is a creature to which one naturally flings a pet name; the five or six I was shown wandering, rooting and climbing over obstacles, round a large field near X, were as amusing and disarming as a little of lively young pigs.

At first the War Office prevented the publication of any pictures or descriptions of these contrivances except abroad; then abruptly the embargo was relaxed, and the press was flooded with photographs.  The reader will be familiar now with their appearance.  They resemble large slugs with an underside a little like the flattened rockers of a rocking-horse, slugs between 20 and 40 feet long.  They are like flat-sided slugs, slugs of spirit, who raise an enquiring snout, like the snout of a dogfish, into the air.  They crawl upon their bellies in a way that would be tedious to describe to the general reader and unnecessary to describe to the enquiring specialists.  They go over the ground with the sliding speed of active snails.  Behind them trail two wheels, supporting a flimsy tail, wheels that strike one as incongruous as if a monster began kangaroo and ended doll’s perambulator. (These wheels annoy me.) They are not steely monsters; they are painted with drab and unassuming colours that are fashionable in modern warfare, so that the armour seems rather like the integument of a rhinoceros.  At the sides of the head project armoured checks, and from above these stick out guns that look like stalked eyes.  That is the general appearance of the contemporary tank.

It slides on the ground; the silly little wheels that so detract from the genial bestiality of its appearance dandle and bump behind it.  It swings about its axis.  It comes to an obstacle, a low wall let us say, or a heap of bricks, and sets to work to climb it with its snout.  It rears over the obstacle, it raises its straining belly, it overhangs more and more, and at last topples forward; it sways upon the heap and then goes plunging downwards, sticking out the weak counterpoise of its wheeled tail.  If it comes to a house or a tree or a wall or such-like obstruction it rams against it so as to bring all its weight to bear upon it—­it weighs some tons—­and then climbs over the debris.  I saw it, and incredulous soldiers of experience watched it at the same time, cross trenches and wallow amazingly through muddy exaggerations of small holes.  Then I repeated the tour inside.

Again the Tank is like a slug.  The slug, as every biological student knows, is unexpectedly complicated inside.  The Tank is as crowded with inward parts as a battleship.  It is filled with engines, guns and ammunition, and in the interstices men.