Life in a Tank

G OF THE T

NK

the name conjures up a picture of an iron monster, breathing fire and exhaling bullets and shells, hurling itself against the enemy, una

year of its being. On the Somme we had seen a derelict tank, wrecked, despoiled of her guns, and forsaken in No Man's Land. We had swarmed a

n face to face with Death in its fullest and most realistic uncertainty. In soldier jargon he "gets most awful wind up." It is five minutes before "Zero Hour." All preparations are complete. You are waiting for the signal to hop over the parapet. Very probably the Boche knows that you are coming, and is already skimming the sandbags with his machine guns and knocking little pieces of earth and stone into your face. Extraordinary, how maddening is the sting of these harmless little pebbles and bits of dirt! The bullets ricochet away with a peculiar singing hiss, or crack overhead when they go too high. The shells which burst on the oth

duty to keep up a front for their sake. Probably, at the same time, they are keeping up a front for him. Then the Sergeant Major comes along, cool and smiling, as if he were out for a stroll at home. Suddenly he is an immense comfort. One forgets that sinking feeling in the stomach

more sporting chance with a shell than with a bullet. The enemy infantryman looks along his sight and he has you for a certainty, but the gunner cannot be so ac

eeded sorrowfully and joyfully away from the trenches. Sorrowfully, because it is a poor thing to leave your men and your

g and training of the new units. Each unit had a nucleus of men who had alread

of his own Branch; and a wonderfully healthy rivalry and affection sprang up between them. The gunner twitted the sapper, the cavalryman made j

science for the benefit of the whole-would prove a very difficult and painstaking task. But the wonderful development, however, in a few months, of a large, hetero

build, and still more important from a practical point of view, no experience from which to draw for guidance, either in training or in action. In the Infantry, the attack has resulted from a steady development in ideas and tactics, with past wars to give a foundation and this present one to suggest changes and to bring about remedies for the de

discipline of the troops engaged,-all old regiments have their staff of regular instructors to drill and teach recruits. In them has grown up that certain f

er thereof. It was for us all to produce esprit de corps, and to produce it quickly. It was necessary for us to develop a love of the

er of men in whose hands the real destinies of this new formation lay; who were continually devising new schemes

INSPECTING A TANK ON THE BR

ine guns, each manned, possibly, by not more than three men. There may be in a certain sector, before an attack, an enormous preliminary bombardment which is destined to knock out guns, observation posts, dumps, men, and above all, machine-gun emplacements. Nevertheless, it has been found in actual practice that despite the most care

his idea, a group of men, in the end of 1915, devised the present type of heavy armoured car. In order to keep the whole plan as secret as possible, about twenty-five square miles of ground in Great Britain were set aside and surrounded with armed guards. There, through all the spring and early summer of 1916, the