The proving ground outside Tours echoed with the groan and clatter of steel monsters.
In the brittle winter air, crews labored over the latest designs, heavy and super-heavy tanks, lumbering shapes draped in camouflage nets, their guns yawning like siege cannons from another age.
General de la Marche stood with a line of officers, his gloved hands clasped behind his back, as the behemoths trundled past on the frozen earth.
Each weighed nearly twice as much as its older model, its guns bored to take shells heavier than any in service before.
The French "lesson" from Spain had been simple, almost childlike in its clarity: they had lost because their armor and guns were not enough.
Speed? Reliability? Mobility? Those words were for the weak, for armies who could not trust their armor to stop a hit.
France, they believed, would build machines so massive that nothing short of an artillery battery could breach them.
