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. Every man in the tank was shouting and yelling with the excitement of the thing and we were tossed up against each other like loosened peas in a pod. Only Joffre remained perfectly cool. Somehow she maintained a firm seat on my swaying shoulder and as I glanced around to peer at her she was calmly licking a paw and then daintily wiped her face. Suddenly out of a very clever camouflage of tree branches and shrubbery a German machine-gun emplacement was revealed. The bullets stormed and rattled upon the tank. But they did themselves a bad turn by revealing their whereabouts, for we made straight for the camouflage and went over that battery of machine guns, crunching its concrete foundation as if it were chalk. Then we turned about and from our new position put the Germans under an enfilade fire that we kept up until every evidence was at hand that the Oxfords and Bucks and supporting battalions were holding the trenches.