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 itself, the only way for traffic to pass was to build a road around it. Then there was a rumbling noise within its body which sounded like some unnatural gasoline engine, and it hitched itself around with the ponderosity of a canal boat being warped into a dock and proceeded on its journey to take its appointed place in the battle line. Did the Germans know that the tanks were building? I think that they had some inkling a few weeks before the tanks' appearance that something of the sort was under construction. There was a report, too, of a German tank which was not ready in time to meet the British. Some German prisoners said that their first intimation of this new affliction was when the tanks appeared out of the morning mist, bearing down on the trenches; others said that German sausage observation balloons had seen something resembling giant turtles moving across the fields up to the British lines and had given warning to the infantry to be on the lookout. Thus, something new had come into the war, deepening the thrill of curiosity and intensifying the suspense before an attack. The world, its appetite for novelty fed by the press, wanted to know all about the tanks; but instead of the expected mechanical details, censorship would permit only vague references to the tanks' habits and psychology, and the tanks were really strong on psychology--subjectively and objectively. It was the objective result in psychology that counted: the effect on the fighting men. Human imagination immediately characterized them as living things; monstrous comrades of infantry in attack. Blessed is the man, machine, or incident that will make any army laugh after over two months of battle. Individuals were always laughing over incidents; but here hundreds of thousands of men were to see a new style of animal perform elephantine tricks. The price of admission to the theater was the risk of a charge in their company, and the prospect gave increased zest to battalions taking their place for next day's action. What would happen to the tanks? What would they do to the Germans?