VI
At three o’clock on the morning of July 4, almost before the sky had begun to lighten, the Tank engines were swung up all along our line, and at two minutes past the hour sixty graceful Mark V.’s slid forward after their infantry, two low-flying aeroplanes escorting them. As the Tanks moved along, the crew’s blessed the sweet running of their new machines, for there had not been a single mechanical hitch of any sort, and they knew that the shrewd eyes of the Australians had been fixed like gimlets upon them.
But the whole day was to be one long triumph for the Mark V.
Here and there as the attack surged forward the Tanks were leading, following close behind the bursting shells. Here and there the Australians were ahead. The enemy’s infantry put up little or no fight, but their machine-gunners resisted us with the tenacious courage which we had learned to expect.
But our onrush was inexorable. The new Tanks were possessed, the Germans found, of a deadly power of manœuvre which they used to the full, expending little ammunition upon machine-gun nests, but, even when they had passed an emplacement by in the first rush, swinging swiftly round on the wretched gunners and crushing guns and crews beneath them. As a Tank chronicler somewhat grimly remarks: “This method eliminated all chance of the enemy coming to life again after the attack had passed by.”
Over 200 machine-guns were accounted for during the day. There were also other and rarer little groups of picked men which the Tanks here and there routed out of the standing crops.
These little parties, generally consisting of three men, were armed with a special rifle of gigantic size designed to be fired—like our Lewis gun—from a bipod. Its projectile was a heavy steel-cored armour-piercing bullet.
It was a new anti-Tank weapon, a weapon from which the Germans hoped great things.
With the 13th Battalion, a Tank which had advanced ahead of the infantry, came upon some enemy dug-outs, on the far side of a trench too broad for their machine to cross. From these dug-outs the enemy were keeping up a hot fire.
The Tank Commander, Second Lieutenant Edwards, and Private Benns, immediately got out of their Tank and attacked the garrison on foot. Between them the two killed seven of the enemy with their revolvers, and the rest they took prisoners, and handed over to the infantry at the first opportunity.