TANKS AND THEIR CREWS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1687, 17 March 1917, Page 4

TANKS AND THEIR CREWS.

NEW YEAR’S EVE ON THEIR PLAYGROUND. (By Fils on Young). With the British Army in France. 1 spent the last grey afternoon of ISJIu in the company of those strangest of all the strange children of the year —the Tanks, or, as their human brethren out here call them, the Willies. Among all the Machine People who swarm over France and wander in companies on her roads and fields, a race by themselves—-motor-lorries, caterpillars, tractors, travelling workshops, motorkitchens, and tanks —the tanks are easily lords, being larger, heavier, cleverer, naughtier, more formidable, and more intelligent, than anything else. Like everyone else who has met them, 1 fell in love with their lumbering and yet ingratiating ways. They wandered about their playing ground like elephants; and, infants in lime though they be, seemed to belong to that ageless company of immense things that are informed with the wisdom of the ages. A group of little French children stood gaping at them, absorbed as in the pages of a story book that had come true. And a peasant, heavy footed with the mire of the field, watching one rolling past, said to me:

“.)e crois qu’il y a quelque chose de bon pour nous la; j’ai confianee en ca !” [I fancy there's something good for us there. I’ve confidence in those.]

“.J’iii conliance on ca” —that is above all the feeling' with which the Willie inspires the beholder. One can understand the almost superstitions reverence with which the Tommy regards him. He believes that the Willies can do anything, and a little more. This, be it said, is not (|nite fair lo the Willies. There are many things that they cannot do. They cannot sit up and beg. They are no use as transport vehicles. They will not fetch and carry. Yon cannot go joy-riding in them or lake them out for an early morning spin (o whip up the blood. They are very poor craft in which lo navigate deep waters, and they cannot lly. AN EASY GRACE. Their requirements in space, material, and lime are considerable; but two things they can do —they can proceed and they can tight. When a Willie is ordered to proceed anywhere', be proceeds with an inevitable and comprehensiveness that are entirely satisfactory. You simply have to lay him, by compass, like a gun on his objective, and he proceeds there, slowly, uncomfortably, expensively, and unquietly—but surely.

And this afternoon, when 1 was watching him crossing shell-crat-ers, going over trenches, and through mud that would hopelessly have bogged any other sort of vehicle, I began to see why he is so beloved of his young trainers and keepers. He is so very invulnerable and so very cflicient. He is gentle, withal, and bis movements have an easy grace that, to me, at any rale, come as a surprise.

1 had read so much of his nngainliness and general monstrousness that I expected to be almost alarmed by !;.'s near proximity. On the contrary, 1 found myself ('harmed, The AVillie is certainly big—(here is no gelling way from that; but he has his own beauties of shape and proportion, and there is a certain liveliness in the streaming lines of bis track —that endless caterpillar road on which his slug-like body slides.

You amy say n sing is not beaulif'ul; but if you bad u very big slug, a very intelligent slug, who would do all sorts of things you told him, and be a wateh-dog for your homestead, and go out and kill your enemies, and then eonio buck and go to sleep in a field — don’l you think yon would begin to delight in his smoothness and blackness and slowness—-in a word, in his sluggishness ? And would not you end by thinking him beautiful'? THE TANK EYE. Well, the men who man the Willies have developed the tank eye; they know the points of a tank as you know, or think you know, the points of a horse; and they love the Willies and know them to he beautiful even while they are removing the mud from a bearing with a shovel or cursing their particular charge for having done one of the very few things that tanks are forbidden to do. Thus, although the last day of the year was a Sunday, and in this particular place they might have been taking a few afternoon hours of holiday, they were foregathered with the Willies iu the field, testing them, playing around with them, cruising about the obstacle course, and generally consolidating that intimacy which.makes one thing of a man and his machine, one family of a ship and her crew. .For the tanks are passing out of their prodigious infancy into childhood; they will be in their second year to-morrow; and their education must be attended to.