Energy books

Our flying
scouts, however low they flew, risking the Archies and machine-gun
bullets, often mistook khaki for field gray, and came back with false
reports which led to tragedy.


XI

People who read my war despatches will remember my first descriptions
of the tanks and those of other correspondents. They caused a
sensation, a sense of excitement, laughter which shook the nation
because of the comicality, the grotesque surprise, the possibility of
quicker victory, which caught hold of the imagination of people who
heard for the first time of those new engines of war, so beast-like in
appearance and performance. The vagueness of our descriptions was due
to the censorship, which forbade, wisely enough, any technical and
exact definition, so that we had to compare them to giant toads,
mammoths, and prehistoric animals of all kinds. Our accounts did,
however, reproduce the psychological effect of the tanks upon the
British troops when these engines appeared for the first time to their
astonished gaze on September 13th.


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