By November Colonel Swinton and Captain Tulloch were in close touch with one another, and the child of their fancy descended from the clear regions of pure thought to battle its slow way forward amid the fogs and thornbrakes of actual experiment and official memoranda.
Well-informed readers will perhaps wonder why the present authors have singled out Captain Tulloch and Colonel Swinton from amid “the press of knights.” Do they intend to lay the laurel on their brows? To declare that they alone invented the Tank?
The chroniclers pretend to no such judicial powers. Be theirs rather the genial rôle of the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland, who at the end of the Caucus-race allotted one of Alice’s comfits to each of the competitors.
As far, however, as they can disentangle the complexities of the evidence, it does appear to have been through these two enthusiasts that the Tank idea first took tangible shape. The notion was in the air, perhaps it took unsubstantial form in other minds before October, 1914,—it seems probable that it did in Mr. Diplock’s and Mr. McFee’s, for example. Perhaps, too, in other minds it was later to take clearer and more practical shape.
But it does seem to have been Colonel Swinton and Captain Tulloch who, first of the band of pioneers, had the courage and the practical energy to forward a somewhat startling notion in official quarters.
For Mr. Diplock’s first “Pedrail” machine, whose plans he laid before Lord Kitchener and Mr. Winston Churchill in November, 1914, was a Gun Tractor, not a fighting machine. It was not till February 1915 that Mr. Diplock (in conjunction with a Committee appointed by Mr. Churchill) officially so much as contemplated the building of a “Land Cruiser.”
Fortunately one of the first of the Swinton memoranda was submitted through Colonel Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, who was an early and active friend to the idea of the new arm.
Difficulties, however, abounded. Many were actual, some were imaginary.
For example, it was urged that to design and build such machines would take over a year. Surely the war would be over!
Then when the counsels of those kill-joys prevailed who believed that the war would “hold,” and it was decided to experiment with the “mobile machine-gun destroyers,” various technical difficulties arose.