An average of about a month was spent by every soldier at the training depots and battle-practice grounds. Here each man did about ten days’ course as a driver or gunner, learned revolver-shooting, signalling, and the management of carrier pigeons, and went through a gas course. In view of the probability of casualties, each man was also given a working knowledge of every other man’s job. But most vital of all--the conditions under which Tank crews fought being out of the common trying and arduous--the scheme of training aimed at creating a high sense of discipline; that _esprit de corps_ and that tradition of valour which teaches men to endure the unendurable. This supreme end it achieved, as a perusal of the Tank Corps Honours List will show. Such, then, were the Tanks and their crews in the autumn of 1918. In the pages which follow, the reader will see from how crude an embryo the Tank sprang, and through what hair-breadth escapes alike from official overlaying and annihilation by the enemy, it passed in the four years of which we are about to relate the history. CHAPTER II THE EARLIEST TANKS--GENERAL SWINTON--ADMIRAL BACON--THE HOLT TRACTOR AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE “LAND CRUISER” I The War had only been in progress for a few weeks when the first idea of the first Tank was born almost simultaneously in the minds of General E. D. Swinton, Major Tulloch, Captain Hetherington and Mr. Diplock, and--if we are to believe rumour and their own account of the affair--of several hundreds of other gentlemen. “Born” is perhaps not quite the appropriate word. At any rate it is to be understood, if not in a Pickwickian, at least in a Pythagorean sense. For by 1914 the Tank had successively passed through several tentative and inconclusive incarnations. In 1482 Leonardo da Vinci invented a kind of Tank;[1] a wooden “War Cart” was used by the Scottish in the fifteenth century.[2] There were designs for a Tank for the Crimea, but the project of this weapon was abandoned as being barbarous. Lastly, a really practical design for a kind of “Caterpillar” to be driven by steam was made in 1888. A trial machine was even constructed. But Fate decreed that all trace of design and model should be instantly lost, only apparently to be rediscovered after the modern Tank had been thought out afresh. Why, if the Tank was constantly being invented, did it as constantly disappear? The reason appears to have been that, like the early aeroplanes, all these abortive machines had failed in one particular. The engine was not powerful enough. The steam Tank had not in the least answered the riddle. The horse-power could, it is true, be almost indefinitely increased, but, like a kind of Old Man of the Sea, the engine weight would have increased proportionately and the “free” power have been no more.