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“Hullo,” said the helicopter man in a dreary levity, “there’s a portable vision set in this car. Let’s call up the general and see how he is?”

Sergeant Walpole spat. Then he held up his hand. He was listening. Far off in the drumming downpour of the rain there was a rumbling sound. He had heard it before. It was partly made up of the noise of internal-combustion engines of unthinkable power, and partly of grumbling treads forcing a way through reluctant trees. It was a long way off, now, but it was coming nearer.

“The Wabbly,” said Sergeant Walpole. “Comin’ back. Why? Hell’s bells! Why’s it comin’ back?”

“I don’t know,” said the ‘copter man, “but let’s get some rockets fixed up.”

The two of them worked almost lackadaisically. They were tired out. But they took the tiny Bissel batteries and twisted the attached wires about the rocket-heads. They had twenty or thirty of them fixed by the time the noise of the Wabbly was very near. There was the noise of felled trees, pushed down by the Wabbly in its progress. Great, crackling crashes, and then crunching sounds, and above them the thunderous smooth purring rumble of the monster. The ‘copter man climbed into the upside-down staff car. He turned the vision set on and fiddled absurdly with the controls.

“I’m getting something,” he announced suddenly. “The bomber up aloft is sending its stuff down a beam, a tight beam to the Wabbly. Listen to it!”

* * * * *

The uncouth, clacking syllables of the enemy tongue came from the vision set. Someone was speaking crisply and precisely somewhere. Blurred, indistinct flashes appeared on the vision set screen.

“They ought to be worried,” the ‘copter man said wearily. “Even an infra-red telescope can’t pick up a damned thing through clouds like this. And the Wabbly’s in a mess without a bomber to help….”

Sergeant Walpole did not reply. He was exhausted. He sat looking tiredly off through the rain in the direction of the approaching noise. Somehow it did not occur to him to run away. He sat quite still, smoking a soggy cigarette.

Something beaked and huge appeared behind a monstrous oak-tree. It came on. The oak-tree crackled, crashed, and went down. It was ground under by the monstrous war-engine that went over it. The Wabbly was unbelievably impersonal and horrible in its progress. There had been a filling-station for gyrocars close by the place where the artillery-train had been wrecked. One of the eight-foot treads loomed over that station, descended upon it–and the filling-station was no more. The Wabbly was then not more than a hundred yards from Sergeant Walpole, less than a city block. He looked at it in a weary detachment. It was as high as a four-story house, and it was two hundred feet long, and forty feet wide at the treads with the monstrous gun-bulges reaching out an extra ten or fifteen feet on either side above. And it came grumbling on toward him.

PART VI

“… Considered as a strategic move, the Wabbly was a
triumph. Eighteen hours after its landing, the orders
for troops called for half a million men to be
withdrawn from the forces at the front and in reserve,
and munitions-factories were being diverted from the
supply of the front to the manufacture of devices
designed to cope with it. This, in turn, entailed
changes in the front-line activities of the Command….
Altogether, it may be said that the Wabbly, eighteen
hours after its landing, was exerting the military
pressure of an army of not less than half a million men
upon the most vulnerable spot in our defenses–the
rear…. And when its effect upon civilian morale is
considered, the Wabbly, as a force in being,
constituted the most formidable military unit in
history.” (Strategic Lessons of the War of
1941-43.–U. S. War College. P. 93.)