It would be more than human not to
claim a little in this matter. I described one in a story in _The Strand
Magazine_ in 1903, and my story could stand in parallel columns beside
the first account of these monsters in action given by Mr. Beach Thomas
or Mr. Philip Gibbs. My friend M. Joseph Reinach has successfully
passed off long extracts from my story as descriptions of the Tanks upon
British officers who had just seen them. The filiation was indeed quite
traceable. They were my grandchildren--I felt a little like King Lear
when first I read about them. Yet let me state at once that I was
certainly not their prime originator. I took up an idea, manipulated
it slightly, and handed it on. The idea was suggested to me by the
contrivances of a certain Mr. Diplock, whose "ped-rail" notion, the
notion of a wheel that was something more than a wheel, a wheel that
would take locomotives up hill-sides and over ploughed fields, was
public property nearly twenty years ago. Possibly there were others
before Diplock. To the Ped-rail also Commander Murray Sueter, one of the
many experimentalists upon the early tanks, admits his indebtedness,
and it would seem that Mr. Diplock was actually concerned in the earlier
stage of the tanks.
Since my return I have been able to see the Tank at home, through the
courtesy of the Ministry of Munitions.
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