n the traffic was densest. Only the motor-truck
drivers and battalions which were halted some distance away minded the
delay. Those near by were sufficiently entertained by the spectacle
which stopped them. They gathered around the tank and gaped and grinned.

The tank's driver was a brown-skinned, dark-haired Englishman, with a
face of oriental stolidity. Questions were shot at him, but he would not
even say whether his beast would stand without hitching or not; whether
it lived on hay, talcum powder, or the stuff that bombs are made of; or
what was the nature of its inwards, or which was the head and which the
tail, or if when it seemed to be backing it was really going forward.

By the confession of some white lettering on its body, it was officially
one of His Majesty's land ships. It no more occurred to anyone to
suggest that it move on and clear the road than to argue with a bulldog
which confronts you on a path. I imagined that the feelings of the young
officer who was its skipper must have been much the same as those of a
man acting as his own chauffeur and having a breakdown on a holiday in a
section of town where the population was as dense as it was curious in
the early days of motoring. For months he had been living a cloistered
life to keep his friends from knowing what he was doing, as he worked to
master the eccentricities of his untried steed, his life and the lives
of his crew depending upon this mastery. Now he had stepped from behind
the curtain of military secrecy into the full blaze of staring,
inquiring publicity.

The tank's inclination was entirely reptilian. Its body hugged the earth
in order to expose as little surface as possible to the enemy's fire; it
was mottled like a toad in patches of coloring to add to its low
visibility, and there was no more hop in it than in the Gila monster.

The reason of its being was obvious. Its hide being proof against the
bullets of machine guns and rifles, it was a moving "strong point" which
could go against the enemy's fixed strong points, where machine guns
were emplaced to mow down infantry charges, with its own machine guns.
Only now it gave no sign of moving. As a mechanical product it was no
more remarkable than a steam shovel. The wonder was in the part that it
was about to play. A steam shovel is a labor-saving, and this a
soldier-saving, device.

For the moment it seemed a leviathan dead weight in the path of traffic.
If it could not move of its