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 correspondents 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 . . . Theyre clerks, theyre factory hands, theyre students, theyre civilised men. They can write, they can talk, they can make and do all sorts of things, but theyre poor amateurs at war." 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." 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 countrymens "sturdy proportions with those of their lightly built captors", 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."
