the enemy's lines to stay. There was
one tank which found itself out of gasoline and surrounded by Germans.
It could move neither way, but could still work its guns. Marooned on a
hostile shore, it would have to yield when the crew ran out of food.

The Germans charged the beast, and got under its guns, pounded at the
door, tried to bomb and pry it open with bayonets and crawled over the
top looking for dents in the armor with the rage of hornets, but in
vain. They could not harm the crew inside and the crew could not harm
them.

"A noisy lot!" said the tank's skipper.

Tactical objective be--British soldiers went to the rescue of their
tank. Secure inside their shell, the commander and crew awaited the
result of the fight. After the Germans were driven away, someone went
for a can of gasoline, which gave the beast the breath of life to
retreat to its "correct tactical position."

Even if it had not been recovered at the time, the British would have
regained possession with their next advance; for the Germans had no way
of taking a tank to the rear. There are no tractors powerful enough to
draw one across the shell-craters. It can be moved only by its own
power, and with its engine out of order it becomes a fixture on the
landscape. Stranded tanks have an appearance of Brobdingnagian
helplessness. They are fair targets for revenge by a concentration of
German artillery fire; yet when half hidden in a gigantic shell-hole
which they could not navigate they are a small target and, their tint
melting into the earth, are hard to locate.

Seen through the glasses, disregarding ordinary roads and traveled
routes, the tanks' slatey backs seemed like prehistoric turtles whose
natural habitat is shell-mauled earth. They were the last word in the
business of modern war, symbolic of its satire and the old strife
between projectile and armor, offensive and defensive. If two tanks were
to meet in a duel, would they try to ram each other after ineffectually
rapping each other with their machine guns?

"I hope that it knows where it is going!" exclaimed a brigadier-general,
as he watched one approach his dugout across an abandoned trench,
leaning over a little as it dipped into the edge of a shell-crater some
fifteen feet in diameter with its sureness of footing on a rainy day
when a pedestrian slipped at every step.

There was no indication of any guiding human intelligence, let alone
human hand, directing it; and, so far as o