a modern bus like noah's ark with 12 pygmies inside

Tudor Hart's WWI tank camouflage

Above A couple of years ago, we blogged about the World War I camouflage innovations of a Canadian artist named Percyval Tudor Hart (1873-1954). It was a detailed, fairly lengthy blog, and may merit being revisited here. He proposed a style of camouflage in whch he covered the surfaces of a ship, tank and sniper's cloves with multi-colored, high-density zigzags. I actually saw the camouflaged gloves many years ago in an exhibition in Ontario. Above is an AI-colorized photograph of his tank camouflage proposal.

•••

Ilya Ehrenburg, People and Life: memoirs of 1891-1917. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1961, p. 184—

Here is how in 1916, I described the first tank I had seen: “There is about it something majestic and nauseating. It may be that once there existed a breed of gigantic insects; the tank is like them. It has been brightly decorated for camouflage; the flanks resemble the paintings of the Futurists. It creeps along slowly, like a caterpillar; trenches, bushes, barbed wire, nothing can stop it. Its feelers twitch: they are guns and machine guns. In it, the archaic is combined with the ultra-American, Noah’s Ark with a twenty-first century bus. Inside there are men, twelve pygmies, who innocently believe that they are the tank’s masters.”