“The first Company to go out had to work at tremendous speed. The Tanks did not arrive till the last minute, and I and my crew did not have a Tank of our own the whole time we were in England ... as our Tank went wrong the day it arrived.... Again we had no reconnaissance or map reading ... no practices or lectures on the compass.... We had no signalling ... and no practice in considering orders. This was a thing I very much missed when I got out to France. When you work with a Division you get very long orders, and you have to analyse these orders to discover what concerns you and what does not.... We had no knowledge of where to look for information that would be necessary for us as Tank Commanders, nor did we know what information we should be likely to require.”
No one, in short, had sat down to imagine a Tank in action from within.
We had official painters in France, but alas! we had no official writers of prophetic fiction.
The history of the attack on Morval shows that this probably inevitable lack of, say, an official clairvoyant, this dependence upon methods of trial and error, though it ultimately did little to hurt the development of Tanks, did very much to prevent the Tank personnel from feeling satisfied by their début.
Part II
I
It must have been with some sense of having taken a momentous step that the authorities sanctioned the manufacture of 150 Tanks after witnessing the trials at Hatfield.
We were short of men and short of steel, and to divert steel from shells and men from the infantry was a grave decision. Our rulers were for a moment, perhaps, granted the gift of prevision. They saw that the new weapon might prove the sword that was ultimately to tip the level balance, and to break the intolerable equilibrium which had settled on the line from the Alps to the sea.
This prophetic mood did fitfully visit the authorities.
For a few months they would, as it were, have faith, and personnel would be granted and machines would be ordered.