It was at Beaumont-Hamel, about September 16th, that I got my chance to command a "tank."
The dear girl was named "Razzle Dazzle." She was very young, having been in service only three months, but rather portly. Matter of fact, she weighed something over thirty tons. And in no way could you call the dear little woman pretty. She was a pallid gray and mud-splashed when I got her and there was no grace in the bulging curves of her steel shape. Or of her conical top. Or her ponderous wheels.
The fact is that she showed every aspect of being a bad, scrappy old dearie. The minute I saw her in her lovely ugliness I knew she would like trouble and lots of it. Her metabolism was a marvel. She carried a six-hundred-horse-power motor. And out of her gray steel hoods protruded eight guns. An infernal old girl, you can bet she was. All ready to make battle in large quantities.
When I boarded "Razzle Dazzle" she was full of dents. She had rocked around among several trench charges. But the reason for my assignment to her was prosaic. Her captain had not been killed. He was just sick—some stomach complaint. I was drafted on an hour's notice to the job, this, because of long training in handling rapid-fire guns.
It was all new to me, but highly interesting. My crew consisted of seven men—five of them well experienced. And a black cat. Although she was a lady-cat she had been named "Joffre" and I can't tell you why because I never received any explanation on this point myself. But "Joffre" was very friendly and insisted on sitting either on my knee or shoulder from the moment I sealed myself and my men in the tank. We had our outlook from several periscopes above the turret and from spy holes in the turret itself.
The order had come to me about one in the morning, and it was nearly three when we started lumbering out toward the enemy trenches. We had about six hundred yards to cover. I knew little or nothing of her motor power or speed. My concern was with the efficiency of the guns. She pumped and swayed "across No Man's Land" at about four miles an hour. She groaned and tossed a great deal. And in fact, made such poor progress that my regiment, the Oxfords and Bucks, beat the old dearie to the enemy lines. Our men were among the barbed wire of the first line, fighting it, cutting it, knocking it down before the old "Razzle Dazzle" got into action.
But she "carried on" just the same. And when she smote the barbed-wire obstacles, she murdered them. She crushed those barriers to what looked like messes of steel spaghetti.
Instead of sinking into trenches as I feared she would, she crushed them and continued to move forward. Of course, we were letting go everything we had, and from my observation hole, I could see the Germans didn't like it.
They had put up something of a stand against the infantry. But against the tank they were quick to make their farewells. It was a still black night, but under the star-shells we could see them scurrying out of our way.
This was very sensible of them because we were certainly making a clean sweep of everything in sight and had the earth ahead throwing up chocolate showers of spray as if the ground we rode was an angry sea of mud.