r which shook the nation because of the
comicality, the grotesque surprise, the possibility of quicker victory,
which caught hold of the imagination of people who heard for the first
time of those new engines of war, so beast-like in appearance
and performance. The vagueness of our descriptions was due to the
censorship, which forbade, wisely enough, any technical and exact
definition, so that we had to compare them to giant toads, mammoths, and
prehistoric animals of all kinds. Our accounts did, however, reproduce
the psychological effect of the tanks upon the British troops when
these engines appeared for the first time to their astonished gaze on
September 13th. Our soldiers roared with laughter, as I did, when they
saw them lolloping up the roads. On the morning of the great battle of
September 15th the presence of the tanks going into action excited all
the troops along the front with a sense of comical relief in the midst
of the grim and deadly business of attack. Men followed them, laughing
and cheering. There was a wonderful thrill in the airman's message,
"Tank walking up the High Street of Flers with the British army cheering
behind." Wounded boys whom I met that morning grinned in spite of their
wounds at our first word about the tanks. "Crikey!" said a cockney lad
of the 47th Division. "I can't help laughing every time I think of them
tanks. I saw them stamping down German machine-guns as though they were
wasps' nests." The adventures of Creme de Menthe, Cordon Rouge, and the
Byng Boys, on both sides of the Bapaume road, when they smashed down
barbed wire, climbed over trenches, sat on German redoubts, and received
the surrender of German prisoners who held their hands up to these
monsters and cried, "Kamerad!" were like fairy-tales of war by H. G.
Wells.

Yet their romance had a sharp edge of reality as I saw in those battles
of the Somme, and afterward, more grievously, in the Cambrai salient
and Flanders, when the tanks were put out of action by direct hits of
field-guns and nothing of humankind remained in them but the charred
bones of their gallant crews.

Before the battle in September of '16 I talked with the pilots of the
first tanks, and although they were convinced of the value of these new
engines of war and were out to prove it, they did not disguise from
me nor from their own souls that they were going forth upon a perilous
adventure with the odds of luck against them. I remember one young
pil