f I
hadn't been a non-com with a certain small amount of responsibility
to live up to, I should have gone crazy.

I managed to pull myself together and placed my men as comfortably
as possible. The Germans were five hundred yards away, and there
was but little danger of an attack, so comparatively few had to
"stand to." The rest took to the shelters.

I found a little two-man shelter that everybody else had avoided
and crawled in. I crowded up against a man in there and spoke to
him. He didn't answer and then suddenly I became aware of a stench
more powerful than ordinary. I put out my hand and thrust it into a
slimy, cold mess. I had found a dead German with a gaping,
putrefying wound in his abdomen. I crawled out of that shelter,
gagging and retching. This time I simply couldn't smother my
impulse to run, and run I did, into the next traverse, where I sank
weak and faint on the fire step. I sat there the rest of the night,
regardless of shells, my mind milling wildly on the problem of war
and the reason thereof and cursing myself for a fool.

[Illustration: HEAD-ON VIEW OF A BRITISH TANK.]

It was very early in the morning when Wells shook me up with, "Hi
sye, Darby, wot the blinkin' blazes is that noise?"

We listened, and away from the rear came a tremendous whirring,
burring, rumbling buzz, like a swarm of giant bees. I thought of
everything from a Zeppelin to a donkey engine but couldn't make it
out. Blofeld ran around the corner of a traverse and told us to get
the men out. He didn't know what was coming and wasn't taking any
chances.

It was getting a little light though heavily misty. We waited, and
then out of the gray blanket of fog waddled the great steel
monsters that we were to know afterwards as the "tanks." I shall
never forget it.

In the half darkness they looked twice as big as they really were.
They lurched forward, slow, clumsy but irresistible, nosing down
into shell holes and out, crushing the unburied dead, sliding over
mere trenches as though they did not exist.

There were five in all. One passed directly over us. We scuttled
out of the way, and the men let go a cheer. For we knew that here
was something that could and would win battles.

The tanks were an absolutely new thing to us. Their secret had been
guarded so carefully even in our own army that our battalion had
heard nothing of them.

But we didn't need to be told that they would be effective. One
look was enough to conv