Given that much, the Tank will enormously enhance the advantage of the new offensive method on the French front; the method that is of gun demolition after aerial photography, followed by an advance; it is a huge addition to our prospect of decisive victory.  What does it do?  It solves two problems.  The existing Tank affords a means of advancing against machine-gun fire and of destroying wire and machine guns without much risk of loss, so soon as the big guns have done their duty by the enemy guns.  And also behind the Tank itself, it is useless to conceal, lies the possibility of bringing up big guns and big gun ammunition, across nearly any sort of country, as fast as the advance can press forward.  Hitherto every advance has paid a heavy toll to the machine gun, and every advance has had to halt after a couple of miles or so while the big guns (taking five or six days for the job) toiled up to the new positions.

4

It is impossible to restrain a note of sharp urgency from what one has to say about these developments.  The Tanks remove the last technical difficulties in our way to decisive victory and a permanent peace; they also afford a reason for straining every nerve to bring about a decision and peace soon.  At the risk of seeming an imaginative alarmist I would like to point out the reasons these things disclose for hurrying this war to a decision and doing our utmost to arrange the world’s affairs so as to make another war improbable.  Already these serio-comic Tanks, weighing something over twenty tons or so, have gone slithering around and sliding over dead and wounded men.  That is not an incident for sensitive minds to dwell upon, but it is a mere little child’s play anticipation of what the big land ironclads that are bound to come if there is no world pacification, are going to do.

What lies behind the Tank depends upon this fact; there is no definable upward limit of mass.  Upon that I would lay all the stress possible, because everything turns upon that.

You cannot make a land ironclad so big and heavy but that you cannot make a caterpillar track wide enough and strong enough to carry it forward.  Tanks are quite possible that will carry twenty-inch or twenty-five inch guns, besides minor armament.  Such Tanks may be undesirable; the production may exceed the industrial resources of any empire to produce; but there is no inherent impossibility in such things.  There are not even the same limitations as to draught and docking accommodation that sets bounds to the size of battleships.  It follows, therefore, as a necessary deduction that if the world’s affairs are so left at the end of the war that the race of armaments continues, that Tank will develop steadily into a tremendous instrument of warfare, driven by engines of scores of thousands of horse-power, tracking on a track scores of hundreds of yards wide and weighing hundreds or thousands of tons.  Nothing but a world agreement not to do so can prevent this logical development of the land ironclad.  Such a structure will make wheel-ruts scores of feet deep; it will plough up, devastate and destroy the country it passes over altogether.