III
The present writers are ignorant whether we have determined to keep our lead or no. Shall we have the foresight, when it comes to the remodelling of the Army, to give to Tanks the place they ought to hold in it? Shall we be willing to spend money on experiments, money which we must spend if we want to keep that lead? Will the Tanks be given the facilities for both mechanical and tactical training that they ought to have? We may so easily slide back into our old groove. It is always hard to turn to new ways, and to give a preponderating place in the “New Model” to Tanks, would certainly be to effect a very radical change. There does seem to be a certain fear that the Army and the public may feel that the Tanks are all right for War, but hardly the thing for soldiering.
And yet how well the requirements of a strong force of Tanks would in reality fit the kind of framework which the wisest minds seem agreed should be our Army of the future. We ought to have, they say, a small and highly specialised Standing Army, and behind that a vast Citizen Army on the basis of the Territorial system. What weapon could be more suitably added to the gun and the aeroplane than the Tank in the Regular Army? Our Standing Army would thus consist of a nucleus of mechanical experts.
Nor need the question of finance ever rise spectre-like between us and the idea of a strong force of Tanks, for the Tank is an absurdly cheap weapon compared with its co-efficient of infantry.
But there is another direction in which, if it claim any considerable place in our Standing Army, the Tank must make good. That army may at any moment be called upon to undertake police work in any part of the world.
The Tank, even the old Mark I., is, as we saw at Gaza, suitable for desert warfare. The Mark V. and Whippets with General Denikin’s force in Russia have been prodigiously successful, and there are probably few species of campaign against a semi-civilised enemy in which the newer “Medium” Tanks would not do admirably.
Another point is that “minor wars” are fought by us with as much avoidance of bloodshed as is compatible with the bringing of our opponents to reason.
A weapon which admittedly affected the moral even of admirably disciplined troops like the Germans to a phenomenal degree, is particularly well adapted to this purpose.
It is infinitely more humane to appal a rioter or a savage by showing him a Tank than to shoot him down with an inoffensive looking machine-gun.[109]
There is yet one final consideration.
The reader may still very properly object: “Though the Tank may, as it rather begins to appear, have been the decisive factor in the last War, and though it might be very convenient to use it again, before we put our money on it, literally and metaphorically, for the future, are we sure that it is a weapon which suits the British soldier? Time was when at the direction of Military Experts we spent a great deal of money upon the building of forts at home and abroad which were never of the slightest use to any one, because they did not suit our style of fighting. What reason have we to suppose that we shall like the Tank as a permanent addition on a large scale to the equipment of our Army?” The present authors consider this line of criticism a very proper one. They differ from the “hardshell” advocates of the superior weapon in considering it of the greatest importance that the balance and poise of the broadsword should suit the hand that is to wield it. But they believe that the Tank, like the ship and the aeroplane, is a weapon peculiarly suited to the British temperament, and that fundamentally it was for that reason that we, and not some other nation, first evolved it. For good or ill, our Commanders both on land and sea have certain peculiarities. Our men dislike standing on the defensive. They hate digging, and in the present War were beaten by the Germans every time at this particularly unpopular form of activity. Also, almost worse than digging, do they hate carrying things on their backs, and we are noted among all nations as the least tolerant of burdens. All these peculiarities have filled the ranks of the Navy and of the Cavalry, and all these peculiarities are suited by the aeroplanes and the Land Ships. Our Commanders, like their men, prefer to be the attackers, and like a war of movement. Almost the whole creed of Nelson, our most popular fighting-hero, was expressed in his assertion that the first and last duty of an Admiral was to find out the enemy’s fleet and to attack it, and in his famous signal, “Engage the enemy more closely.”
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.