In some cases they were mistaken. It was enfilade fire from German batteries. But often it happened according to the way of that telephone conversation in the tent by Bronfay Farm. The difference between British soldiers and German soldiers crawling over shell-craters or crouching below the banks of a sunken road was no more than the difference between two tribes of ants. 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. 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. G. Wells. Yet their romance had a sharp edge of reality as I saw in those battles of the Somme, and afterward, more grievously, in the Cambrai salient and Flanders, when the tanks were put out of action by direct hits of field-guns and nothing of humankind remained in them but the charred bones of their gallant crews.