As early as December 1914 a visionary young officer of the Royal Engineers, Ernest Swinton, having recognised that only a revolutionary means could break what was already the stalemate of barbed wire and trench on the Western Front, had proposed the construction of a cross-country vehicle, armoured against bullets, that could bring firepower to the point of assault. The idea was not wholly new – it had been anticipated, for example, in H.G. Wells’s short story The Land Ironclads of 1903, and in an imprecise form by Leonardo da Vinci
