The Land Ironclads
"The Land Ironclads" | |
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pedrail wheels | |
Country | United Kingdom |
Genre(s) | Science fiction |
Publication |
"The Land Ironclads" is a short story by British writer
Plot summary
The story opens with an unnamed war correspondent and a young lieutenant surveying the calm of the battlefield. They reflect philosophically on the war between two unidentified armies. The time appears to be 1903 and the opponents are dug into trenches, each waiting for the other to attack, of the sort then common and being reported on daily from the Boer War. The men on the war correspondent's side are confident they will prevail, because they are all strong outdoor-types – men who know how to use a rifle and fight – while their enemies are townspeople, "a crowd of devitalised townsmen . . . They're clerks, they're factory hands, they're students, they're civilised men. They can write, they can talk, they can make and do all sorts of things, but they're poor amateurs at war."[2] The men agree that their "open air life" produces men better suited to war than their opponents' "decent civilization."
In the end, however, the "decent civilization," with its men of science and engineers, triumphs over the "better soldiers" who, instead of developing land ironclads of their own, had been practising shooting their rifles from horseback, a tactic rendered obsolete by the land ironclads. Wells foreshadows this eventual outcome in the conversation of the two men in the first part, when the correspondent tells the lieutenant "Civilization has science, you know, it invented and it made the rifles and guns and things you use."[2]
The story ends with the entire contemporary army captured by thirteen land ironclads, with the defenders managing to disable only one. In the last scene, the correspondent compares his countrymen's "sturdy proportions with those of their lightly built captors",[2] and thinks of the press story he is going to write about the experience. He notes that that the captured officers are thinking of ways they will defeat tanks with their already-existing weaponry, rather than developing their own land ironclads to counter the new threat. He further notes that the "half-dozen comparatively slender young men in blue pajamas who were standing about their victorious land ironclad, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, had also in their eyes and carriage something not altogether degraded below the level of a man."[2]
The Ironclads
The term "
Riflemen are installed in cabins in the "monsters", being "slung along the sides of and behind and before the great main framework". There the men operate what appear to be mechanically targeting, semi-automatic rifles.[3]
Impact
Contemporaries saw Wells' battle between countrymen "defenders" (who rely on cavalry and entrenched infantry) and attacking townsmen as echoing the
Wells's story did predict the use of armoured vehicles in combat, but numerous authors (for example
Inspiration
In his later War and the Future (1917), H. G. Wells specifically acknowledges Bramah Diplock's pedrail wheel as the origin for his idea of an all-terrain armoured vehicle in The Land Ironclads:[7]
The idea was suggested to me by the contrivances of a certain Mr. Diplock, whose "ped-rail" notion, the notion of a wheel that was something more than a wheel, a wheel that would take locomotives up hill-sides and across ploughed fields, was public property nearly twenty years ago.[7]
Indeed, within the story itself the war correspondent, upon his first sight of the machine's pedrails, recalls hearing about them from Diplock in person on a previous journalistic assignment.
According to one biographer, Wells initially had the idea for land ironclads using "pedrails" from an inventor J. W. Dunne, who spoke of "big fat pedrail machines" in a letter to Wells. Dunne later also influenced Wells's novel The War in the Air (1908).[8]
See also
References
- ^ Wells, H.G. (1903). "The Land Ironclads". The Strand Magazine. 23 (156): 751–769.
- ^ a b c d The Land Ironclads, H. G. Wells, 1909
- ^ H.G. Wells, "The Land Ironclads," in The Short Stories of H.G. Wells (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), pp. 131–32.
- ISBN 978-0-9551829-7-6.
- ^ In the first biography of Wells published after his death, Vincent Brome noted that Wells's reputation as a prophet was "one of the legends sustained by the newspaper world" – H.G. Wells: A Biography (London: Longsmans, Green, 1951), pp. 235–36).
- ^ Budrys, Algis (December 1968). "Galaxy Bookshelf". Galaxy Science Fiction. pp. 149–155.
- ^ ISBN 9780497970789.
- ^ Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, H.G. Wells: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 222 & 432.
External links
- The complete short fiction of H. G. Wells at Standard Ebooks
- "The Land Ironclads" (reproduced online)
- The Land Ironclads public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- H.G. Wells's Land Ironclad paper model