One day the curtain rose, and the finished product of all the experiments and testing appeared at the British front. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were now in the secret. "Have you seen the tanks?" was the question up and down the line. All editors were inventing their own type of tank. Though I have patted one on the shoulder in a familiar way, as I might stroke the family cat, it neither kicked nor bit me. Though I have been inside of one, I am not supposed to know at this writing anything about its construction. Unquestionably the tank resembles an armadillo, a caterpillar, a diplodocus, a motor car, and a traveling circus. It has more feet than a caterpillar, and they have steel toenails which take it over the ground; its hide is more resistant than an armadillo's, and its beauty of form would make the diplodocus jealous. No pianist was ever more temperamental; no tortoise ever more phlegmatic. In summer heat, when dust clouds hung thick on the roads behind the shell clouds of the fields, when the ceaseless battle had been going on for two months and a half, the soldiers had their interest stimulated by a mechanical novelty just before a general attack. Two years of war had cumulatively desensitized them to thrills. New batteries moving into position were only so many more guns. Fresh battalions marching to the front were only more infantry, all of the same pattern, equipped in the same way, moving with the same fixed step. Machine gun rattles had become as commonplace as the sound of creaking caisson wheels. Gas shells, lachrymatory shells and _Flammenwerfer_ were as old-fashioned as high explosives and shrapnel. Bombing encounters in saps had no variation. The ruins of the village taken to-day could not be told from the one taken yesterday except by its location on the map. Even the aeroplanes had not lately developed any sensational departures from habit. One paid little more attention to them than a gondolier pays to the pigeons of St. Mark's. Curtains of fire all looked alike. There was no new way of being killed--nothing to break the ghastly monotony of charges and counter-charges. All the brains of Europe had been busy for two years inventing new forms of destruction, yet no genius had found any sinuous creature that would creep into dugouts with a sting for which there was no antidote. Everybody was engaged in killing, yet nobody was able to "kill to his satisfaction," as the Kentucky colonel said. The reliable methods were the same as of old and as I have mentioned elsewhere: projectiles propelled by powder, whether from long-necked naval guns at twenty thousand yards, or short-necked howitzers at five thousand yards, or rifles and machine guns at twenty-five hundred yards, or trench mortars coughing balls of explosives for one thousand yards.