the pocket of his
uniform blouse.

"That don't matter now," he said absurdly.

He was looking at the thing left in place of the tramp, as Sergeant
Walpole scribbled on one of the regulation report-forms of the Eastern
Coast Observation Force. And the thing he saw was enough to upset
anybody.

* * * * *

Where the tramp had been there was a single bit of bow-plating sticking
up out of the surf, and a bunch of miscellaneous floating wreckage
drifting sluggishly toward the beach. And there was a solid, rounded,
metallic shape apparently quite as long as the original tramp had been.
There was a huge armored tube across its upper part, with vision-slits
in two bulbous sections at its end. There were gun-ports visible here
and there, and already a monstrous protuberance was coming into view
midway along its back, as if forced into position from within. Where the
bow of the tramp had been there were colossal treads now visible. There
was a sort of conning-tower, armored and grim. There was a ghastly
steel beak. The thing was a war-machine of monstrous size. It emitted a
sudden roaring sound, as of internal-combustion engines operating at
full power, and lurched heavily. The steel plates of the tramp still
visible above water, crumpled up like paper and were trodden under. The
thing came toward the shore. It slithered through the shallow sea, with
waves breaking against its bulging sides. It came out upon the beach,
its wet sides glittering. It was two hundred feet long, and it looked
somehow like a gigantic centipede.

It was a tank, of sorts, but like no tank ever seen on earth before. It
was the great-grandfather of all tanks. It was so monstrous that for its
conveyance a ship's hull and superstructure had been built about it, and
its own engines had been the engines of that ship. It was so huge that
it could only be landed by blasting away a beached ship from about
itself, so it could run under its own power over the fragments to the
shore.

Now it stopped smoothly on the sandy beach, in which its eight-foot-wide
steel treads sank almost a yard. Men dropped down from ports in its
swelling sides. They made swift, careful inspections of predetermined
points. They darted back up the ladders again. The thing roared once
more. Then it swung about, headed for the sand-dunes, and with an
extraordinary smoothness and celerity disappeared inland.

PART II

"... The Wabbly was mean