survived in the trenches the constant hardship of such weather
as now, warmly wrapped and with the car-curtains drawn, we faced. The
inevitable, relentless rain of that region had set in again, the rain
in which our own soldiers 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 seem.

That field in which the tanks manoeuvre is characteristic of the whole
of this district of levelled village