I should like to say that I was the originator of the tank--one of the originators. In generous mood, I am willing to share honors with rivals too numerous to mention. Haven't I also looked across No Man's Land toward the enemy's parapet? Whoever has must have conjectured about a machine that would take frontal positions with less loss of life than is usual and would solve the problem of breaking the solid line of the Western front. The possibility has haunted every general, every soldier. Some sort of armadillo or caterpillar which would resist bullet fire was the most obvious suggestion, but when practical construction was considered, the dreamer was brought down from the empyrean, where the aeroplane is at home, to the forge and the lathe, where grimy machinists are the pilots of a matter-of-fact world. Application was the thing. I found myself so poor at it that I did not even pass on my plan to the staff, which had already considered a few thousand plans. Ericsson conceiving a gun in a revolving turret was not so great a man as Ericsson making the monitor a practicable engine of war. To Lieutenant-Colonel Swinton, of the Engineers, was given the task of transforming blue-print plans into reality. There was no certainty that he would succeed, but the War Office, when it had need for every foundry and every skilled finger in the land, was enterprising enough to give him a chance. He and thousands of workmen spent months at this most secret business. If one German spy had access to one workman, then the Germans might know what was coming. Nobody since Ericsson had a busier time than Swinton without telling anybody what he was doing. The whisperers knew that some diabolical surprise was under way and they would whisper about it. No censor regulations can reach them. Sometimes the tribe was given false information in great confidence in order to keep it too occupied to pass on the true. The new monster was called a tank because it was not like a tank; yet it seemed to me as much like a tank as like anything else. As a tank is a receptacle for a liquid, it was a name that ought to mask a new type of armored motor car as successfully as any name could. Flower pot would have been too wide of the mark. A tank might carry a new kind of gas or a burning liquid to cook or frizzle the adversary. Considering the size of the beast, concealment seemed about as difficult as for a suburban cottager to keep the fact that he had an elephant on the premises from his next-door neighbor; but the British Army has become so used to slipping ships across the channel in face of submarine danger that nobody is surprised at anything that appears at the front unheralded.