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.
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