第37章 TANKS(2)

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 20and 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.

"You will smash your hat," said Colonel Stern."No; keep it on, or else you will smash your head."Only Mr.C.R.W.Nevinson could do justice to the interior of a Tank.You see a hand gripping something; you see the eyes and forehead of an engineer's face; you perceive that an overall bluishness beyond the engine is the back of another man."Don't hold that," says someone; "it is too hot.Hold on to that." The engines roar, so loudly that I doubt whether one could hear guns without; the floor begins to slope and slopes until one seems to be at forty-five degrees or thereabouts; then the whole concern swings up and sways and slants the other way.You have crossed a bank.You heel sideways.Through the door which has been left open you see the little group of engineers, staff officers and naval men receding and falling away behind you.You straighten up and go up hill.You halt and begin to rotate.Through the open door, the green field, with its red walls, rows of worksheds and forests of chimneys in the background, begins a steady processional movement.The group of engineers and officers and naval men appears at the other side of the door and farther off.

Then comes a sprint down hill.You descend and stretch your legs.

About the field other Tanks are doing their stunts.One is struggling in an apoplectic way in the mud pit with a cheek half buried.It noses its way out and on with an air of animal relief.

They are like jokes by Heath Robinson.One forgets that these things have already saved the lives of many hundreds of our soldiers and smashed and defeated thousands of Germans.

Said one soldier to me: "In the old attacks you used to see the British dead lying outside the machine-gun emplacements like birds outside a butt with a good shot inside./Now/, these things walk through."3

I saw other things that day at X.The Tank is only a beginning in a new phase of warfare.Of these other things I may only write in the most general terms.

But though Tanks and their collaterals are being made upon a very considerable scale in X, already I realised as I walked through gigantic forges as high and marvellous as cathedrals, and from workshed to workshed where gun carriages, ammunition carts and a hundred such things were flowing into existence with the swelling abundance of a river that flows out of a gorge, that as the demand for the new developments grows clear and strong, the resources of Britain are capable still of a tremendous response.

/If only we do not rob these great factories and works of their men./Upon this question certain things need to be said very plainly.