TANKS CENTURIES AGO

Evening Star, Issue 16629, 11 January 1918, Page 7

TANKS CENTURIES AGO

One has to be inside of a tank, and feel i that strange, gliding motion with which it goes along, before he can realise what a tremendously' effective war machine it is ' (says the New Yo*k ‘Sun’). And as the sightseer stoops within those steel walls he perhaps has a queer feeling of reminiscence, for some ancestor of his hundreds of years ago may have gone to attack walled cities or to bridge the entrenchments of the foe in just such an engine of destruction as this. The tank, as we call it to-day, retains some of the principles of the battering rams of ancient days. It js not unlike those armored and protected platforms used by armed men of old in overcoming fortress and .castle. There is a wheeled war machine illustrated in an ancient tome, ‘De Re Militari,’ published in 1534. The picture of that device shows , that this old-time tank was of about the 1 same size as the modern device. It was a closed van, heavily armored for those days, and propelled by a treadmill de- i vice within, which kept its wheels in 1 1 motion. As is set forth in the Latin test 1 of the book, it Iras able to cross ditches. It had holes shaped not unlike eyes, from j which darts and arrows and even heavy | shafts could be discharged. A formidable 1 aid to warfare it was in its day, although i it was not until recently that its import- I ance was realised. Mobile land forts have 1 been used from time immemorial. The tank is fort and cruiser, a combination 1 made possible by the tremendous development o r tractors in the last few years.