e vision set screen.

"They ought to be worried," the 'copter man said wearily. "Even an
infra-red telescope can't pick up a damned thing through clouds like
this. And the Wabbly's in a mess without a bomber to help...."

Sergeant Walpole did not reply. He was exhausted. He sat looking tiredly
off through the rain in the direction of the approaching noise. Somehow
it did not occur to him to run away. He sat quite still, smoking a soggy
cigarette.

Something beaked and huge appeared behind a monstrous oak-tree. It came
on. The oak-tree crackled, crashed, and went down. It was ground under
by the monstrous war-engine that went over it. The Wabbly was
unbelievably impersonal and horrible in its progress. There had been a
filling-station for gyrocars close by the place where the
artillery-train had been wrecked. One of the eight-foot treads loomed
over that station, descended upon it--and the filling-station was no
more. The Wabbly was then not more than a hundred yards from Sergeant
Walpole, less than a city block. He looked at it in a weary detachment.
It was as high as a four-story house, and it was two hundred feet long,
and forty feet wide at the treads with the monstrous gun-bulges reaching
out an extra ten or fifteen feet on either side above. And it came
grumbling on toward him.

PART VI

"... Considered as a strategic move, the Wabbly was a
triumph. Eighteen hours after its landing, the orders
for troops called for half a million men to be
withdrawn from the forces at the front and in reserve,
and munitions-factories were being diverted from the
supply of the front to the manufacture of devices
designed to cope with it. This, in turn, entailed
changes in the front-line activities of the Command....
Altogether, it may be said that the Wabbly, eighteen
hours after its landing, was exerting the military
pressure of an army of not less than half a million men
upon the most vulnerable spot in our defenses--the
rear.... And when its effect upon civilian morale is
considered, the Wabbly, as a force in being,
constituted the most formidable military unit in
history." (_Strategic Lessons of the War of
1941-43._--U. S. War College. P. 93.)

As Sergeant Walpole saw the Wabbly, there was no sign of humanity
anywhere about the thing. It was a monstrous mass of metal,
powder-stained now where shells had burst against it, and it seemed
metallic