I
The Reconnaissance Officers were the first of the Junior personnel to learn that operations were contemplated for early April, and that the new battle was to be fought before the town of Arras on the banks of the river Scarpe. By the beginning of March, the first small parties of Battalion and Company Reconnaissance Officers had begun to leave Bermicourt.
It was rumoured that this offensive was going to be the blooding of the 1st Brigade; it was to be on a much larger scale than any the Tanks had taken part in on the Somme. It was said that sixty machines would be thrown in in one action. The Tanks were going to have an opportunity of making a name for themselves, and of justifying all the embarrassingly pleasant things that the newspapers had said of them in the previous September. For this lavish praise had spread a gloom over the Tank Corps; they had been unmercifully twitted by unfeeling gunners and infantrymen who knew the real facts.
The newspapers had succeeded in making their intercourse with any but battalions fresh from England one unbearable round of facile jest. Never had any unit, save, perhaps, the London Scottish, been so unmercifully hailed as “Mother’s blue-eyed boy.”
By March they lusted for blood, and the first whispers of battle were listened to with a satisfied expectancy.
The new 1st Brigade of the Heavy Branch Machine Gun Corps was a very much more assured body than the little band of pioneers who had waited so anxiously for the dawn on September 15, 1916.
Owing to delays in manufacture, they were still only equipped with 60 Mark I. Tanks instead of about 120 Mark I.’s and Mark IV.’s, as had been hoped. Still, the March 1917 Mark I. was very different from the September 1916 Mark I. The most striking improvement was the shedding of the cumbersome and ineffectual “Tail” or hydraulic stabiliser.
Most of the machines had also undergone a most careful overhauling at the hands of the indefatigable vulcan, at the Battalion workshops, and those innumerable tiny adjustments, repairs and improvements which constitute “tuning up” had been made.
The machine-gun armament, too, had been modified, the Hotchkiss being replaced by the Lewis gun. A new contrivance for use on soft ground had also been fitted, consisting of stout little cigar-shaped splinter-bars, a yard or so in length, attached to the track by means of chains.
But more particularly crews had had proper time to train and they knew that they knew their work. Their officers, too, were sure that they would this time be properly supplied with maps and detailed orders. Therefore, officers and crews got on with their own battle preparations, or, later, rehearsed the coming action with the infantry, with a good heart.