This was the manufacture at Lincoln of the first 150 “Land Ships” ordered by the Government, in the space of six months, and in absolute secrecy.
The public discussed the phantom Russians who travelled through England by night. It discussed the Germans who nightly signalled to each other throughout the inland counties. But it did not discuss the large water-tanks or cisterns that were being made for Petrograd, Egypt, or Mesopotamia, or some such place.
That this vital secrecy was kept for months by hundreds of people was chiefly due to the happy effect of copious and imaginative lying.
There was no mystery about these grotesque armour-plated creatures! They were not really for Mesopotamia at all. Every one knew that.
The Russian Government had ordered them. They were ridiculous things? Of course they were. It was a Russian design. Was there not even an inscription in Russian characters on them? At least they might frighten the Germans if they served no other useful purpose.
Tradition relates that when the first drawings were brought to the manager’s office of the factory which had been selected for the manufacture of the “water-carriers,” the manager and his staff expressed themselves as being seriously concerned for the sanity of the designers, and of those who submitted such drawings to practical men like themselves.
They were, however, let into the secret of the real part which Tanks were to play, and though still profoundly incredulous, decided, like good citizens, to carry out whatever work was asked of them. The vital necessity of secrecy having been impressed upon them, they were asked—tradition continues—what arrangements they would like made about sentries and the isolation of their workpeople. After a little consideration they answered that they would only guarantee that the secret should be kept on condition that they were given a completely free hand and not interfered with.
They proposed to have no sentries, no “isolated area” to proclaim trumpet-tongued, “Here is a secret!”
They desired merely to propound a satisfactory system of lies, to give an “alternative explanation”—to put it more delicately—and to carry out their work with a disarming publicity.
After some hesitation the authorities consented to this strange system. We shall see how, on September 15, “wisdom was justified of her children.”