Further, our leaders particularly and temperamentally dislike a large butcher’s bill. It was, indeed, their extreme reluctance to send unprotected men to meet the hail of bullets from German machine-guns, that lay behind most of the ostensible reasons for which the Tanks were first given a trial. It was a deciding factor. We may even perhaps say without seeming fantastic that it was their inhumanity which cost the Germans the War. They had no bowels of compassion, and were just as ready to send the “infantry equivalent” (say seventy unprotected men) over the top as they were to put in seven men enclosed in armour. To them it was the coldest question of military expediency. Purely upon military considerations they decided against the seven clad in armour. Our Commanders, though in theory they were inclined to agree with the German Higher Command, though they recognised the ultimate cruelty of the policy of “cheap war,” and knew, with Nelson, that they had not come to the Western Front to preserve their lives, were yet tempted by the idea of using steel and petrol in place of flesh and blood. More than once in the course of the chequered career of the Tanks it was this consideration which saved the Corps from extinction. But it is not, of course, enough that the Tank offers protection to those who fight in it. A trench or a hole in the ground will do the same. But the Tank is essentially a mobile weapon of _offence_. It is the weapon for the nation which does not fight willingly, but when it fights, fights to win, and to win quickly with as little bloodshed as possible. It is the weapon for men who, if they must fight, like to fight like intelligent beings still subjecting the material world to their will, and who are most unwillingly reduced to the rôles of mere marching automata, bearers of burdens and diggers of the soil, rôles from which the patient German did not seem averse. IV The creed of the present writers can be very briefly summarised. A considerable amount of evidence points to the conclusion that in the phase at which military science has arrived, and at which it will probably remain for at least a generation, a superior force of Tanks can always tip the scales of the military balance of power. Within the period of a generation, a time may again come when we shall have to defend our lives and our liberties. We lead the world in the design and manufacture of Tanks. Let us not abandon that lead in the production and use of a vital weapon. We know too well the tragic cost of one day of war, and it has been said that had we been visibly prepared the Germans would not have attacked.