Morale by Murray Leinster — Read

". 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 Eighteen hours after its landing, the orders / for troops called for half a million men to be / withdrawn from the forces at the front and in reserve, / and munitions-factories were being diverted from the / supply of the front to the manufacture of devices /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.)

As Sergeant Walpole saw the Wabbly, there was no sign of humanity anywhere about the thing. It was a monstrous mass of metal, powder-stained now where shells had burst against it, and it seemed metallically alive, impersonally living. The armored tube with vision-slits at its ends must have been the counterpart of a ship's bridge, but it looked like the eye-ridge of an insect's face. The bulbous control-rooms at the ends looked like a gigantic insect's multi-faceted eyes. And the huge treads, so thick as to constitute armor for their own protection, were so cunningly joined and sprung that they, too, seemed like part of a living thing.