This is not taking them seriously, you may say. In that case, I am only reflecting the feelings of the army. Even if the tanks had taken Bapaume or gone to the Kaiser's headquarters, the army would have laughed at them. It was the Germans who took the tanks seriously; and the more seriously the Germans took the tanks the more the British laughed.
"Of all the double-dyed, ridiculous things, was the way that Crème de Menthe person took the sugar factory!" said a Canadian, who broke into a roar at the recollection of the monster's antics. "Good old girl, Crème de Menthe! Ought to retire her for life and let her sit up on her haunches in a café and sip her favorite tipple out of barrel with a garden hose for a straw—which would be about her size."
However, there was a variation of opinions among soldiers about tanks drawn from personal experience, when life and death form opinions, of the way it had acted as an auxiliary to their part of the line. A tank that conquered machine-gun positions and enfiladed trenches was an heroic comrade surrounded by a saga of glorious anecdotes. One which became stalled and failed in its enterprise called for satirical comment which was applied to all.
We did not personify machine guns, or those monstrous, gloomy, big howitzers with their gaping maws, or other weapons; but every man in the army personified the tanks. Two or three tanks, I should have remarked, did start for Berlin, without waiting for the infantry. The temptation was strong. All they had to do was to keep on moving. When Germans scuttling for cover were the only thing that the skippers could see, they realized that they were in the wrong pew, or, in strictly military language, that they had got beyond their "tactical objective."
Having left most of their ammunition where they thought that it would do the most good in the German lines, these wanderers hitched themselves around and waddled back to their own people. For a tank is an auxiliary, not an army, or an army staff, or a curtain of fire, and must coöperate with the infantry or it may be in the enemy's lines to stay. There was one tank which found itself out of gasoline and surrounded by Germans. It could move neither way, but could still work its guns. Marooned on a hostile shore, it would have to yield when the crew ran out of food.
The Germans charged the beast, and got under its guns, pounded at the door, tried to bomb and pry it open with bayonets and crawled over the top looking for dents in the armor with the rage of hornets, but in vain. They could not harm the crew inside and the crew could not harm them.
"A noisy lot!" said the tank's skipper.
Tactical objective be—British soldiers went to the rescue of their tank. Secure inside their shell, the commander and crew awaited the result of the fight. After the Germans were driven away, someone went for a can of gasoline, which gave the beast the breath of life to retreat to its "correct tactical position."
Even if it had not been recovered at the time, the British would have regained possession with their next advance; for the Germans had no way of taking a tank to the rear. There are no tractors powerful enough to draw one across the shell-craters. It can be moved only by its own power, and with its engine out of order it becomes a fixture on the landscape. Stranded tanks have an appearance of Brobdingnagian helplessness. They are fair targets for revenge by a concentration of German artillery fire; yet when half hidden in a gigantic shell-hole which they could not navigate they are a small target and, their tint melting into the earth, are hard to locate.
Seen through the glasses, disregarding ordinary roads and traveled routes, the tanks' slatey backs seemed like prehistoric turtles whose natural habitat is shell-mauled earth. They were the last word in the business of modern war, symbolic of its satire and the old strife between projectile and armor, offensive and defensive. If two tanks were to meet in a duel, would they try to ram each other after ineffectually rapping each other with their machine guns?