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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
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THE EARLIEST TANKS—GENERAL SWINTON—ADMIRAL BACON—THE HOLT TRACTOR AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE “LAND CRUISER”
I
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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.