第39章 TANKS(4)

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.

For my own part I never imagined the land ironclad idea would get loose into war.I thought that the military intelligence was essentially unimaginative and that such an aggressive military power as Germany, dominated by military people, would never produce anything of the sort.I thought that this war would be fought out without Tanks and that then war would come to an end.

For of course it is mere stupidity that makes people doubt the ultimate ending of war.I have been so far justified in these expectations of mine, that it is not from military sources that these things have come.They have been thrust upon the soldiers from without.But now that they are loose, now that they are in war, we have to face their full possibilities, to use our advantage in them and press on to the end of the war.In support of a photo-aero directed artillery, even our present Tanks can be used to complete an invisible offensive.We shall not so much push as ram.It is doubtful if the Germans can get anything of the sort into action before six months are out.We ought to get the war on to German soil before the Tanks have grown to more than three or four times their present size.Then it will not matter so much how much bigger they grow.It will be the German landscape that will suffer.