r twenty tons or so, have gone slithering around
and sliding over dead and wounded men. That is not an incident for
sensitive minds to dwell upon, but it is a mere little child's play
anticipation of what the big land ironclads _that are bound to come if
there is no world pacification_, are going to do.

What lies behind the Tank depends upon this fact; there is no definable
upward limit of mass. Upon that I would lay all the stress possible,
because everything turns upon that.

You cannot make a land ironclad so big and heavy but that you cannot
make a caterpillar track wide enough and strong enough to carry it
forward. Tanks are quite possible that will carry twenty-inch or
twenty-five inch guns, besides minor armament. Such Tanks may be
undesirable; the production may exceed the industrial resources of
any empire to produce; but there is no inherent impossibility in such
things. There are not even the same limitations as to draught and
docking accommodation that sets bounds to the size of battleships. It
follows, therefore, as a necessary deduction that if the world's affairs
are so left at the end of the war that the race of armaments continues,
that Tank will develop steadily into a tremendous instrument of warfare,
driven by engines of scores of thousands of horse-power, tracking on
a track scores of hundreds of yards wide and weighing hundreds or
thousands of tons. Nothing but a world agreement not to do so can
prevent this logical development of the land ironclad. Such a structure
will make wheel-ruts scores of feet deep; it will plough up, devastate
and destroy the country it passes over altogether.

For my own part I never imagined the land ironclad idea would get loose
into war. I thought that the military intelligence was essentially
unimaginative and that such an aggressive military power as Germany,
dominated by military people, would never produce anything of the sort.
I thought that this war would be fought out without Tanks and that then
war would come to an end. For of course it is mere stupidity that makes
people doubt the ultimate ending of war. I have been so far justified
in these expectations of mine, that it is not from military sources that
these things have come. They have been thrust upon the soldiers from
without. But now that they are loose, now that they are in war, we have
to face their full possibilities, to use our advantage in them and press
on to the end of the war. In support of a p