Crash, bang, clang are the sounds of the factory, whether it makes cans, canister shot, or chocolate-coated peanuts. Echoing metal, booming walls, great open spaces turned inside out and into tight, cramped ones. And there’s no factory like a war factory for pace and noise and volume.
This one was making tanks.
CRASH! and down comes the cupola.
BANG! with the big main gun slamming into place, piece after piece. BANG!
CLANG CLANG CLANG! is the call of the tracks, as the nearly-finished tank comes rolling down, freshly minted, not yet painted, and trying to tell its hatch from its axles.
Outside, later on, the sounds become different. Softer, but somehow louder.
Boom, is the quiet voice of authority as it rolls onto the turf and lines up with its peers, hundreds of glistening periscope’d viewports bright in the spring breeze as they consider the world and each other. There are men all around them, with guns – little pea-shooters compared to the main guns they’re wielding, barely capable of hurting a fly, or a fellow man – and they’re all waiting for something.
And that something is the first noise, and it sounds a bit like the factory all over again.
Bang!
Off they go, a mile a minute, in a hurry and not really wanting to be. Needs must, guns speak, and the tank stands dead still in its tracks because it really isn’t all that sure about this.
“What’s your problem?” asked the man stashed inside its guts. “Go on, let’s go. Our unit’s up ahead. We’re falling behind. C’mon.”
The tank voiced its uncertainty. It was worried.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” said the man. “Hey, you’ve got it easy. You guys were made for this. You’ll knock ‘em dead. Let’s go. The early bird gets the worm.”
Mollified by his arguments, the tank gathered its steely, smoothly-plated nerves and trundled forward with all due caution and a little more besides, treading gingerly over already-rutted roads and slicing up all the just-settled puddles with its monstrous great weight. It was travelling in the tracks of its brothers, or maybe its sisters, and that cheered it up a bit.
Then it heard the sounds of explosions, and it became concerned a bit.
“Buck up,” was the man’s advice.
It bucked up. Then it smelt burning metal, and it grew worried.
“It’s probably nothing,” said the man sagely.
The tank discarded its worries as probably nothing. Then it rounded a corner in the road and almost ran over the smouldering wreckage of one of its siblings, and it became quite alarmed.
“I’ve seen worse,” claimed the man.
The tank expressed disbelief at this statement, and shut off its engine.
The argument that followed was long and convoluted. Suffice it to say that the man first attempted to appeal to the tank’s blocking of the road, and the unfortunate strategic implications thereof (the tank pointed out that they were the last of their unit in line, and that it was a sideroad and therefore likely to be unneeded after their initial sally along it), then to its sense of fair play (the tank didn’t think ending up like the rather large heap of gently-roasting debris next to it would be fair at all, and that the debris itself was past worry about such things), and finally resorted to straight pleading that it go forwards, pretty please, pretty pretty please.
The tank remained silent on this point.
“Look,” said the man, “what would happen if all the other tanks had done the same thing? You’d have all been blown up into little pieces together.”
The tank advocated that this was likely happening right now because the other tanks hadn’t done the same thing, and it would rather not try it and find out. Besides, it was rather pretty here. There were trees, and birds in the trees. Aside from the smouldering corpse of its sibling, it doubted it would find anywhere nicer to stop.
“Well, screw this,” said the man. He got out and walked back to base, where he complained to some other men, who told yet other men, who decided to do something about it. As for the man himself, he proceeded onwards to a career somewhere halfway up the ladder of rank for the rest of his days, where he developed a small reputation for achieving expectations exactly, not an inch beyond or below.
First, the other men sent a chaplain.
“Do not fear,” he told the tank, “for if men fall on the field of battle, they shall be elevated to heaven for their reward. Or something like that.”
The tank asked if that applied to tanks as well.
“Hmm,” said the chaplain. “I don’t think there’s any tanks in the bible. I’m sure they would have been mentioned. You know, I think there could be a paper in there somewhere. Thank you very much.”
The chaplain left, wrote the paper over the next three years, and received modest praise for it. The tank remained in the middle of the road, unreassured and unmoving.
Next, the other men sent a sergeant.
“Hey, are you moving?” he asked the tank.
The tank asserted its lack of locomotion.
“Get off your ass and give me ten, solder,” said the sergeant, scratching his side and checking his pocket for spare matches.
The tank pointed out its lack of ass and inability to give ten.
The sergeant shrugged as he extracted a battered, beaten match without a container from the depths of his jacket. “Have it your way then. Got a smoke?”
The tank offered some rather cheap cigarettes that the first man had left under his chair, and the sergeant spent a happy half-hour smoking and idly discussing sports with the tank, which was puzzled by the notion of men throwing things at each other that didn’t explode.
“Welp, that’s all she wrote,” said the sergeant as he threw the last butt into the treeline. “I’m back to the barracks now. With any luck I’ll be out there by next Monday.”
The tank questioned the luck of this.
“I didn’t say it was good luck, did I?” asked the sergeant. He shrugged, walked back to the barracks, and after being dressed down thoroughly for taking his time was out in the field by next Sunday, where he managed to escape the brunt of the fighting and go home with four medals, earning him some acclaim locally.
The tank, of course, heard none of this. It sat in the road and marveled at how different the smoke from nicotine and cordite smelt.
The next man to come walking down the road – the patriot – didn’t. He strode, each leg flinging itself out with reckless determination towards the ground and making contact with the grim authority of a baron dealing with a freeloading peasant.
“What’s this about then?” he snapped. “Have you no backbone?”
The tank was halfway through explaining its anatomy again before it realized the patriot hadn’t stopped talking, and tried to listen. “-blatant ingratitude, it is,” he was shouting. “Disrespect to the country that shaped you, that made you, that gave you everything you have, and all in exchange for one little thing: obedience! Why can you not be obedient then, in this one little thing, eh? Ingratitude! Impertinence! Insubordination! I’d court-martial you if you had a rank, if I had a rank! Now get out there and show the world that our tanks are the finest that exist!”
The tank was quite intimidated, and had a mind to roll forwards, but a question caught it just as its treads made to turn: how were their tanks the finest that existed?
“They’re fast, strong, tough, and they do what they’re told,” said the patriot in a voice so crisp that it brought fresh lettuce to shame.
The tank pointed out that it was not doing what it was told, and that perhaps if it were to go out there so late and only after such a lambasting, it would be taken as animate proof that their tanks were not the best in the world. Also, why was being the best in the world so important?
“So we will be respected,” said the patriot. “When you are respected, no one dares to act against you.”
The tank postulated that if they were so respected, they wouldn’t need it, the tank’s, services right now. Therefore they were not sufficiently respected, were thus not the best in the world, and as it, the tank, could not singlehandedly create this reputation, perhaps it would be best if it stayed here, thank you very much. Perhaps the gentleman would do it the favour of shooing away the birds that had begun to poke about its main gun? It was beginning to worry that they might start a nest there.
As it transpired, the patriot was also an entirely unenthusiastic amateur birdwatcher, and upon this excuse to expound upon his subject, listlessly identified over ten species of “something like a bluetit” in the nearby trees before departing, four freshly-laid eggs in hand (alas, the nesting had proceeded too far too fast, and the parents would not return). He went home, raised them, taught them many intricate tricks in exchange for delicious snacks he prepared himself, and became moderately famous on television some years after the war.
The final man that was sent was the general who had sent the other men. He did not walk either; he drove in a big car, scribbling in a notebook and consulting maps as another, much smaller man handled the wheel.
“Mornin’,” he said to the tank without looking up. “Still not moving?”
The tank confirmed this.
The general shook his head. “Damned shame. I’d have you towed out, but all the vehicles that could do it are tied up farther behind us evacuating civilians. I’d have you blown up, but all our munitions are scattered up at the front. And I’d get someone to drive you out of here but all our drivers have vanished all over the place and I can’t find one for life nor money. Ah well.”
The tank timidly noted that the general possessed a driver.
“Look, someone has to look at these maps,” said the general with some irritation. “And someone has to drive around making other people look at them too. And both of those someones are me. Now, I’m supposed to be somewhere else ten minutes ago, unless that was another place. Goodbye.”
The general drove off. He was half an hour late for his interview with the press, which prevented him from his appointed leaking of some trivial aspect of his supply lines or another to placate them, for which he thanked his driver (who went on to found a reasonably respectable chauffeur business some years later). He left the war behind him and devoted his later years to his family, in mutually mixed affection and annoyance.
The tank was left alone for a while. It felt itself growing a bit lonesome, and wished that it knew the names of the ten different kinds of birds in the trees that were something like bluetits. Then it heard a new sound, not really a birdcall at all, but a sort of whistling.
It was an old man, older than any of the men it had met. He was bent and nobbled and used a crooked stick to support his crooked self, bent over double at the waist and forever clutching at his side.
“Hello there,” he said to the tank. “Mind if I sit a spell?”
The tank agreed to this.
“Thank you,” said the old man. He put down his cane as he seated himself, and rubbed the tip of his right leg-stump ruefully. “Too long a walk all in one go, nowadays. Should’ve known, more fool me.”
The tank asked, pardoning its curiosity, how the old man had acquired his stump. Or lost his leg. Either. Both.
“War,” said the old man. “About twenty years ago, I’d guess. I was lucky in the first one – just took a little scratch over the ribs, right here, where I keep my hand – but that last one, well, I wasn’t as young as I should’ve been. Lied my way into frontline duty again, and took a shot and a shell for my trouble. Now the scratch’s a scar and my leg’s a memory. Ah well. Can’t be helped.”
The tank asked, excusing its bafflement, why in the world the old man had gone back. And however had he made himself go in the first place?
“Someone had to,” said the old man with a shrug. “It might as well have been me. If I go, someone else doesn’t have to. If I get shot up, someone else doesn’t have to be. And someone has to go. That’s what I was told.”
The tank asked why.
“That’s the way it is,” the old man said. He got up and stretched, and the tank saw that stripped of his pain from the long hobble, he didn’t look as old as he had before. Aged, maybe.
“Thank you for the seat,” said the old man, and he wobbled his way away down the road and out of sight.
The tank sat. And the tank thought. The tank looked at the charred hull of its sibling a bit more – the fire had gone out some time ago. And eventually, reluctantly, not quite one hundred percent sure of why it was doing it, the tank fired up its big gasoline engine and lurched its way down the road. It swiveled its turret about and looked back many times.
Up ahead was a fork. Down one road was something or other, the tank didn’t know what, only that it was strange and mysterious.
Down the other was an awful lot of explosions.
It paused for a very long moment, then it turned towards the explosions.
There, up ahead, were its siblings. Bang, bang, bang, such noise – and all from their big guns, like its own, the gun the tank had never fired. Clang, clang – the rumble and thunder of metal smashing metal and metal grinding itself.
The tank heaved itself up and surveyed the battlefield. It was terrifying, but not any more than its noise was. It paused one last time, spun its turret for good luck, set its sights, drove forwards, and went
CRASH
right on top of a mine almost immediately, right underneath it. The treads screamed, the hull shuddered, the main gun cracked, and the tank blew apart into a million pieces, one after another, all over the place.
“Look at that!” exclaimed a few of the men and their tanks, amazed at the fireworks. “Look at that!”
There was some disagreement about the facts after the event. Some people said they hadn’t known there were mines there, some argued that until that moment, they hadn’t a clue. A few had planned to drive over it, a few more had been strictly told not to and that they had no business on that ground.
What wasn’t disagreed was that the tank was a gallant hero, a symbol of national pride, a true soldier, and guaranteed to cut the line past the pearly gates as soon as someone sorted out whether or not tanks qualified or something.
And so the biggest piece of it that could be found – that was part of its big frontal glacis armour plate – was scavenged from the battlefield and enshrined personally by several very important men in a very important place during some very important event or another that many people said something about. It was scribbled down and argued about in history books and mentioned in footnotes and asides and for years was a cherished and prized piece in many a grandfather’s collection of old war stories.
No one asked the old man what he thought about it.
No one asked what the tank had thought about it.