Our soldiers roared with laughter,
as I did, when they saw them lolloping up the roads. On the morning of
the great battle of September 15th the presence of the tanks going
into action excited all the troops along the front with a sense of
comical relief in the midst of the grim and deadly business of attack.
Men followed them, laughing and cheering. There was a wonderful thrill
in the airman's message, "Tank walking up the High Street of Flers
with the British army cheering behind." Wounded boys whom I met that
morning grinned in spite of their wounds at our first word about the
tanks. "Crikey!" said a cockney lad of the 47th Division. "I can't
help laughing every time I think of them tanks. I saw them stamping
down German machine-guns as though they were wasps' nests." The
adventures of Creme de Menthe, Cordon Rouge, and the Byng Boys, on
both sides of the Bapaume road, when they smashed down barbed wire,
climbed over trenches, sat on German redoubts, and received the
surrender of German prisoners who held their hands up to these
monsters and cried, "Kamerad!" were like fairy-tales of war by H.
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