“Exercise II.—The student was asked to sketch the outline of a cottage from about 800 yards distant. He then had to consider from the position of the house on the map, and the contour lines of the ground, what the appearance of that cottage would be likely to be from a different point of view. Of this hypothetical elevation he had then to make an outline sketch, and finally to walk over the ground and compare his imaginings with actuality.”
Practices for approach marches were also given by means of an exercise on tape laying and the taking of compass bearings.
III
And still the Germans stayed their hands, and still we waited and speculated upon what the coming campaign might hold for us. For the Tank Corps it seemed certainly to portend a new form of warfare—the Tank duel.
All sorts of things were rumoured concerning the German preparations, and the sheets of the Tank Corps Intelligence Summary for late February are full of little items of information of a perfectly new kind.
Tanks of some sort were certainly being made at Krupp’s.
Prisoners had been caught who described them as larger and heavier than the British machines. We had reason to believe that men were being withdrawn from certain other units to form Tank crews.
Then, in the next day’s Summary, it would be reported that airmen had found out that in certain Regimental, Brigade, and Divisional training schemes which were being carried out by the enemy, horses and wagons were being used, representing Tanks. Combined infantry and Tank attacks of all sorts appeared to be being rehearsed. Again, some recently captured prisoners said that a few derelict Tanks, which the Germans had taken at Cambrai, were being put into order, they seemed to think, as training rather than as fighting machines.
It is to be imagined that the notion of the new warfare, of meeting their kind in combat for the first time, was exceedingly interesting to all ranks of the Tank Corps; and there was not a single hut in a single camp where wonderful new ideas for tactics and manœuvres wherewith to annihilate the new enemy, were not really elaborated.
We did not know that the bitterness and anxiety of a long retreat lay before us; a retreat whose gall and wormwood were to enter into our very souls, and of whose confused events it is even now almost impossible to write either with accuracy or impartiality.