wn up that certain feeling and loyalty which time and
past deeds have done so much to foster and cherish. Here were we,
lacking traditions, history, and experience of any kind.

It is easy to realize the responsibility that lay not only upon the
Chief of this new Corps, but upon each individual and lowest member
thereof. It was for us all to produce _esprit de corps_, and to
produce it quickly. It was necessary for us to develop a love of the
work, not because we felt it was worth while, but because we knew that
success or failure depended on each man's individual efforts.

But, naturally, the real impetus came from the top, and no admiration
or praise can be worthy of that small number of men in whose hands the
real destinies of this new formation lay; who were continually
devising new schemes and ideas for binding the whole together, and for
turning that whole into a highly efficient, up-to-date machine.

[Illustration: KING GEORGE AND QUEEN MARY INSPECTING A TANK ON
THE BRITISH FRONT IN FRANCE]

"How did the tank happen to be invented?" is a common question. The
answer is that in past wars experience has made it an axiom that the
defenders suffer more casualties than the attacking forces. From the
first days of 1914, however, this condition was reversed, and whole
waves of attacking troops were mown down by two or three machine guns,
each manned, possibly, by not more than three men. There may be in a
certain sector, before an attack, an enormous preliminary bombardment
which is destined to knock out guns, observation posts, dumps, men,
and above all, machine-gun emplacements. Nevertheless, it has been
found in actual practice that despite the most careful observation and
equally careful study of aeroplane photographs, there are, as a rule,
just one or two machine guns which, either through bad luck or through
precautions on the part of the enemy, have escaped destruction. These
are the guns which inflict the damage when the infantrymen go over and
which may hold up a whole attack.

It was thought, therefore, that a machine might be devised which would
cross shell-craters, wire and trenches, and be at the same time
impervious to bullets, and which would contain a certain number of
guns to be used for knocking out such machine guns as were still in
use, or to lay low the enemy infantry. With this idea, a group of men,
in the end of 1915, devised the present type of heavy armoured car. In
order to keep the