“For strange, unusual drama, far beyond the most fantastic imagination, this attack on the Hindenburg line before Cambrai has never been approached on the Western Front; and the first act began when the Tanks moved forward, before the dawn, towards the long wide belts of wire which they had to destroy before the rest could follow.  These squadrons of Tanks were led into action by the General Commanding their corps, who carried his flag on their own Tank—­a most gallant gentleman, full of enthusiasm for his monsters and their brave crews, and determined that this day would be theirs.  They moved forward in small groups, several hundreds of them, rolled down the Germans’ wire and trampled down its lines, and then crossed the deep gulf of the Hindenburg main line, pitching nose downward as they drew their long bodies over the parapets, and rearing themselves again with forward reach of body, and heaving themselves on to the German parados beyond....  The German troops, out of the gloom of the dawn, saw these grey inhuman creatures bearing down upon them, crushing down their wire, crossing their impregnable lines, firing fiercely from their flanks and sweeping the trenches with machine-gun bullets.”  A captured German officer thought “he had gone mad,” as he watched the Tanks, while his men ran about in terror, trying to avoid the bursts of fire, and crying out in surrender.  “What could we do?”

Meanwhile, our own men, English, Irish, and Scottish troops, went behind the Tanks, “laughing and cheering when they saw them get at the German wire and eat it up, and then head for the Hindenburg line, and cross it as though it were but a narrow ditch.”

And yet, after this experience, the Germans still delayed to make Tanks!  No doubt they argued that, after all, the Cambrai attack, in spite of the Tanks, had ended in a check for the British, and in the loss of much of the ground which had been gained by the surprise attack of the “grey monsters.”  Meanwhile, the Russian front was rapidly breaking down, and in their exultant anticipation of the fresh forces they would soon be drawing from it to throw against the British Armies, the standing contempt of the German Command for “British ideas” and a “battle of material” won the day.

The German General Staff, therefore, maintained its refusal to spare labour and material to make Tanks, and the refusal must have seemed to them fully justified by the initial success of their March offensive.  Tanks played practically no part in the fighting withdrawal of the British Armies in March and April, 1918.  But all this time Tank development was going on; and the believers in Tanks were working away at the improvement of the types, convinced now, as ever, that their day would come.  It dawned with the Australian attack at Villers-Bretonneux on April 24th, when the fortunes of battle were already changing; it rose higher on July 4th, when the Australians again took Hamel and Vaire Wood, the Tanks splendidly helping; it was at the full on and after August 8th, at the Battle of Amiens, the first page in the last chapter of the war.