ot--a tiny fellow like a jockey, who took me on one side and said, "I
want you to do me a favor," and then scribbled down his mother's address
and asked me to write to her if "anything" happened to him.

He and other tank officers were anxious. They had not complete
confidence in the steering and control of their engines. It was a
difficult and clumsy kind of gear, which was apt to break down at a
critical moment, as I saw when I rode in one on their field of maneuver.
These first tanks were only experimental, and the tail arrangement was
very weak. Worse than all mechanical troubles was the short-sighted
policy of some authority at G.H.Q., who had insisted upon A.S.C. drivers
being put to this job a few days before the battle, without proper
training.

"It is mad and murderous," said one of the officers, "These fellows
may have pluck, all right--I don't doubt it--but they don't know their
engines, nor the double steering trick, and they have never been under
shell-fire. It is asking for trouble."

As it turned out, the A.S.C. drivers proved their pluck, for the most
part, splendidly, but many tanks broke down before they reached the
enemy's lines, and in that action and later battles there were times
when they bitterly disappointed the infantry commanders and the troops.

Individual tanks, commanded by gallant young officers and served by
brave crews, did astounding feats, and some of these men came back dazed
and deaf and dumb, after forty hours or more of fighting and maneuvering
within steel walls, intensely hot, filled with the fumes of their
engines, jolted and banged about over rough ground, and steering an
uncertain course, after the loss of their "tails," which had snapped at
the spine. But there had not been anything like enough tanks to secure
an annihilating surprise over the enemy as afterward was attained in the
first battle of Cambrai; and the troops who had been buoyed up with the
hope that at last the machine--gun evil was going to be scotched were
disillusioned and dejected when they saw tanks ditched behind the lines
or nowhere in sight when once again they had to trudge forward under the
flail of machine-gun bullets from earthwork redoubts. It was a
failure in generalship to give away our secret before it could be made
effective.

I remember sitting in a mess of the Gordons in the village of
Franvillers along the Albert road, and listening to a long monologue
by a Gordon officer on the future of