But although the copybook maxims have always encouraged the improvement of one’s mind, the crew of the Hotstuff preferred to remember another copybook dictum, “Silence is golden,” and with the warnings of many months soaked into their very marrows, and with a cautious secrecy that by now had become second, if not first, nature to them, returned answers more baffling in their fullness than the deepest silence would have been.
“Is it true that them things will turn a point-blank bullet!” asked the dispatch-rider.
“Turn them is just the right word, Signals,” said the spokesman. “The armour plating doesn’t stop ’em, you see. They go through, and then by an in-genious arrangement of slanted steel venetian shutters just inside the skin, the bullets are turned, rico up’ard on to another set o’ shutters, deflect again out’ards an’ away. So every bullet that hits us returns to the shooters, with slightly decreased velocity nat’rally, but sufficient penetratin’ power to kill at con-siderable range.”
Signals stared at him suspiciously, but he was so utterly solemn and there was such an entire absence of a twinkling eye or ghostly smile amongst the biscuit-munchers that he was puzzled.
“An’ I hear they can go over almost anythin’ – trenches, an’ barbed wire, an’ shell-holes, an’ such-like?” he said interrogatively.
“Almost anything,” repeated the spokesman, with just a shade of indignation in his tone. “She’s built to go over anything without any almost about it. Why, this mornin’,” he turned to the crew, “what was the name o’ that place wi’ the twelve-foot solid stone wall round it? You know, about eleven miles behind the German lines.”
“Eleven miles?” said the Signaller in accents struggling between doubt and incredulity.
“About that, accordin’ to the map,” said the other. “That’s about our average cruise.”
“But – but,” objected the Signaller, “how wasn’t you cut off – surrounded – er – ”
“Cut off,” said the Hotstuff cheerfully, “why, of course, we was surrounded, and cut off. But what good was that to ’em? You’ve seen some of us walkin’ up an’ over their front lines, and them shootin’ shells an’ rifles an’ Maxims at us. But they didn’t stop us, did they? So how d’you suppose they stop us comin’ back? But about that wall,” he went on, having reduced the Signaller to pondering silence. “We tried to butt through it an’ couldn’t, so we coupled on the grapplin’-hook bands, an’ walked straight up one side an’ down the other.”
“Yes,” put in one of the other Hotstuffs, “an’ doin’ it the boxful o’ tea an’ sugar that was up in the front locker fell away when she upended and tumbled down to the other end. Spilt every blessed grain we had. I don’t hold wi’ that straight-up-and-down manoover myself.”
“Oh, well,” said the first man, “I don’t know as it was worse than when we was bein’ towed across the Channel. She makes a rotten bad sea boat, I must confess.”
“Towed across?” said the startled Signaller. “You don’t mean to say she floats?”
“Why, of course,” said the Hotstuff simply. “Though, mind you, we’re not designed for long voyages under our own power. The whole hull is a watertight tank – wi’ longtitoodinal an’ transverse bulkheads, an’ we’ve an adjustable screw propeller. I dunno as I ought to be talkin’ about that, though,” and he sank his voice and glanced cautiously round at the Skipper folding up his map. “Don’t breathe a word o’ it to a soul, or I might get into trouble. It’s a little surprise,” he concluded hurriedly, as he saw the Skipper rise, “that we’re savin’ up for the Hun when we gets to the Rhine. He reckons the Rhine is goin’ to hold us up, don’t he? Wait till he sees the Tanks swim it an’ walk up the cliffs on the other side.”
The Skipper gave a few quiet orders and the crew vanished, crawling, and one by one, into a little man-hole. The Signaller’s informant found time for a last word to him in passing. “I b’lieve we’re takin’ a turn down across the river an’ canal,” he said. “If you follow us you’ll most likely see us do a practice swim or two.”
“Well, I’ve met some dandy liars in my time,” the Signaller murmured to himself, “but that chap’s about IT.”
But he stayed to watch the Tank get under way, and after watching her performance and course for a few hundred yards he returned to his motor-bike with struggling doubts in his own mind as to how and in which direction he was likely to be the bigger fool – in believing or in refusing to believe.
The Hotstuff snorted once or twice, shook herself, and rumbled internally; her wheel-bands made a slow revolution or two, churning out a barrowload or so of soft mud, and bit through the loose upper soil into the firmer ground; she jerk-jerked convulsively two or three times, crawled out of the deep wheel-ruts she had dug, turned, nosing a cautious way between the bigger shell craters, and then ploughed off on a straight course towards the road across the sticky mud – mud which the dispatch-rider had utterly failed to negotiate, and which, being impassable to him, he had, out of the knowledge born of long experience, concluded impassable to anything, light or heavy, that ran on wheels. A wide ditch lay between the field and the road, but the Hotstuff steered straight for it and crawled tranquilly across. The dispatch-rider watched the progress across the mud with great interest, whistled softly as he saw the Tank breast the ditch and reach out for the far bank, with her fore-end and nearly half her length hanging clear out over the water, gasped as the bows dipped and fell downward, her fore-feet clutching at and resting on the further bank, her bows and under-body – the descriptive terms are rather mixed, but then, so is the name and make-up of a Land Ship – hitting the water with a mighty splash. And then, in spite of himself, he broke from wide grins into open laughter as the Hotstuff got a grip of the far bank, pushed with her hind and pulled with her fore legs and dragged herself across. If ever you have seen a fat caterpillar perched on a cabbage leaf’s edge, straining and reaching out with its front feet to reach another leaf, touching it, catching hold, and letting go astern, to pull over the gap, you have a very fair idea of what the Hotstuff looked like crossing that ditch.
She wheeled on to the road, and as the dispatch-rider, with mingled awe, amazement, and admiration, watched her lumbering off down it he saw an oil-blackened hand poked out through a gun port and waggled triumphantly back at him. “Damme,” he said, “I believe she can swim, or stand on her head, or eat peas off a knife. She looks human-intelligent enough for anything.”
But the Hotstuff on that particular trip was to display little enough intelligence, but instead an almost human perversity, adding nothing to her battle honours but very much to her skipper’s and crew’s already overcrowded vocabulary of strong language. The engineer showed signs of uneasiness as she trundled down the road, cocking his head to one side and listening with a look of strained attention, stooping his ear to various parts of the engines, squinting along rods, touching his finger-tips to different bearings.
“What’s wrong?” asked the Skipper. “Isn’t she behaving herself?”
The engineer shook his head. “There’s something not exactly right wi’ her,” he said slowly. “I doubt she’s going to give trouble.”
He was right. She gave trouble for one slow mile, more trouble for another half-mile, and then most trouble of all at a spot where the road had degenerated into a sea of thin, porridgy mud. We will say nothing of the technical trouble, but it took four solid hours to get the Hotstuff under way again. The road where she halted was a main thoroughfare to the firing line, and the locality of her break-down, fortunately for the traffic, was where a horse watering trough stood a hundred yards back from the road, and there
