Lieutenant Charles Henkart owned two Minerva touring cars. In August 1914 he had them armoured at the Cockerill works in Hoboken — four millimetres of plate, a Hotchkiss gun in the back — and drove them at the German army. That is the origin of Belgian armour: one man's private motor cars and a boilerplate shop. About thirty were built before the Germans took the Minerva works at Antwerp. They were superb while the war still moved, and useless the moment it stopped. Four millimetres will turn a rifle bullet and nothing heavier, and once the line ran from the sea to Switzerland there was nowhere left to drive.

Three men ride in the open box: the gunner at the Hotchkiss, a second with his carbine, a third down behind the plating. They wear black with red-topped caps. The car is armoured and the crew is not — no roof, no overhead cover — which is the honest picture of 1914, and the name is still painted on the side because nobody had yet thought to stop doing that. In a diorama it belongs to the Belgian autumn: run it with the dogcart machine gun team, the other Belgian answer to the same problem, and the army at Second Ypres, where the movement ended for good. For what replaced it, the Mark V is the machine built for the ground a Minerva could not cross.

Tradition of London model 830. 54mm, white metal, hand-painted in gloss enamel. Minerva armoured car with three crew, 1914. Supplied in the Tradition Classic Red Box. Allow 2–3 weeks delivery.