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Photograph by Underwood & Underwood

A Tank bringing in a Captured German Gun under Protection
of Camouflage 112
Photograph by Underwood & Underwood

A British Tank in the Liberty Loan Parade in New York 124
Photograph by Underwood & Underwood

LIFE IN A TANK

I

THE MEANING OF THE TANK CORPS

TANKS!

To the uninitiated--as were we in those days when we returned to the
Somme, too late to see the tanks make their first dramatic
entrance--the name conjures up a picture of an iron monster, breathing
fire and exhaling bullets and shells, hurling itself against the
enemy, unassailable by man and impervious to the most deadly engines
of war; sublime, indeed, in its expression of indomitable power and
resolution.

This picture was one of the two factors which attracted us toward the
Heavy Branch Machine-Gun Corps--as the Tank Corps was known in the
first 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 around and over her, wild with curiosity, much as the
Lilliputians must have swarmed around the prostrate Gulliver. Our
imagination was fired.

The second factor was, frankly, that we were tired of going over the
top as infantrymen. The first time that a man goes into an attack, he
as a rule enjoys it. He has no conception of its horrors,--no, not
horrors, for war possesses no horrors,--but, rather, he has no
knowledge of the sudden realization of the sweetness of life that
comes to a man when he is "up against it." The first time, it is a
splendid, ennobling novelty. And as for the "show" itself, in actual
practice it is more like a dream which only clarifies several days
later, after it is all over. But to do the same thing a second and
third and fourth time, is to bring a man 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
overhe