It will swim over and through the soil at a pace of ten or
twelve miles an hour. In front of it will be corn, land, neat woods,
orchards, pasture, gardens, villages and towns. It will advance upon its
belly with a swaying motion, devouring the ground beneath it. Behind it
masses of soil and rock, lumps of turf, splintered wood, bits of houses,
occasional streaks of red, will drop from its track, and it will leave
a wake, six or seven times as wide as a high road, from which all soil,
all cultivation, all semblance to cultivated or cultivatable land will
have disappeared. It will not even be a track of soil. It will be a
track of subsoil laid bare. It will be a flayed strip of nature. In the
course of its fighting the monster may have to turnabout. It will then
halt and spin slowly round, grinding out an arena of desolation with
a diameter equal to its length. If it has to retreat and advance again
these streaks and holes of destruction will increase and multiply.
Behind the fighting line these monsters will manoeuvre to and fro,
destroying the land for all ordinary agricultural purposes for ages to
come. The first imaginative account of the land ironclad that was ever
written concluded with the words, "They are the _reductio ad absurdum_
of war." They are, and it is to the engineers, the ironmasters, the
workers and the inventive talent of Great Britain and France that we
must look to ensure that it is in Germany, the great teacher of war,
that this demonstration of war's ultimate absurdity is completed.
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