[1] It features tank-like "land ironclads," 80-to-100-foot-long (24 to 30 m) armoured fighting vehicles that carry riflemen, engineers, and a captain, and are armed with semi-automatic rifles.

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.

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 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.

[...] the captain [...] had look-out points at small ports all round the upper edge of the adjustable skirt of twelve-inch ironplating which protected the whole affair, and [...] could also raise or depress a conning-tower set above the port-holes through the centre of the iron top cover."

[4] But the story served to contribute to Wells' growing reputation as a "prophet of the future", something that many early socialists and newspaper editors were keen to promote.,[5] especially when real tanks first appeared on the battlefield 12 years later in 1916.