“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.