will have to fight, and the skies were of a darkness seldom known in
America. The countryside was no longer smiling. After some two hours of
progress we came, in that devastated district near the front, to an
expanse where many monsters were clumsily cavorting like dinosaurs in
primeval slime. At some distance from the road others stood apparently
tethered in line, awaiting their turn for exercise. These were the
far-famed tanks. Their commander, or chief mahout--as I was inclined to
call him--was a cheerful young giant of colonial origin, who has often
driven them serenely across No Man's Land and into the German trenches.
He had been expecting us, and led me along a duck board over the morass,
to where one of these leviathans was awaiting us. You crawl through a
greasy hole in the bottom, and the inside is as full of machinery as the
turret of the Pennsylvania, and you grope your way to the seat in front
beside that of the captain and conductor, looking out through a slot in
the armour over a waste of water and mud. From here you are supposed to
operate a machine gun. Behind you two mechanics have started the engines
with a deafening roar, above which are heard the hoarse commands of the
captain as he grinds in his gears. Then you realize that the thing is
actually moving, that the bosses on the belt have managed to find a grip
on the slime--and presently you come to the brink of what appears, to
your exaggerated sense of perception, a bottomless chasm, with distant
steep banks on the farther side that look unattainable and
insurmountable. It is an old German trench which the rains have worn and
widened. You brace yourself, you grip desperately a pair of brass
handles in front of you, while leviathan hesitates, seems to sit up on
his haunches, and then gently buries his nose in the pasty clay and paws
his way upward into the field beyond. It was like sitting in a huge
rocking-chair. That we might have had a bump, and a bone-breaking one, I
was informed after I had left the scene of the adventure. It all depends
upon the skill of the driver. The monsters are not as tractable as they