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The young of even the most horrible beasts have something piquant and
engaging about them, and so I suppose it is in the way of things that
the land ironclad which opens a new and more dreadful and destructive
phase in the human folly of warfare, should appear first as if it were a
joke. Never has any such thing so completely masked its wickedness under
an appearance of genial silliness. The Tank is a creature to which one
naturally flings a pet name; the five or six I was shown wandering,
rooting and climbing over obstacles, round a large field near X, were as
amusing and disarming as a little of lively young pigs.

At first the War Office prevented the publication of any pictures or
descriptions of these contrivances except abroad; then abruptly the
embargo was relaxed, and the press was flooded with photographs. The
reader will be familiar now with their appearance. They resemble
large slugs with an underside a little like the flattened rockers of
a rocking-horse, slugs between 20 and 40 feet long. They are like
flat-sided slugs, slugs of spirit, who raise an enquiring snout, like
the snout of a dogfish, into the air. They crawl upon their bellies in
a way that would be tedious to describe to the general reader and
unnecessary to describe to the enquiring specialists. They go over the
ground with the sliding speed of active snails. Behind them trail two
wheels, supporting a flimsy tail, wheels that strike one as incongruous
as if a monster began kangaroo and ended doll's perambulator. (These
wheels annoy me.) They are not steely monsters; they are painted with
drab and unassuming colours that are fashionable in modern warfare, so
that the armour seems rather like the integument of a rhinoceros. At the
sides of the head project armoured checks, and from above these stick
out guns that look like stalked eyes. That is the general appearance of