The German Press was also very generally inclined to attribute the German failure to the Allied use of Tanks, and their attitude is well illustrated by the following paragraph which appeared early in October, a time when German journalists seem to have been most carefully instructed from official quarters. It was their task to prepare the German people for surrender. “The successes which the Allies have gained since the First Battle of Cambrai do not rest on any superior strategy on the part of Foch or on superiority in numbers, although the latter has undoubtedly contributed to it. The real reason has been the massed use of Tanks. Whereas the artillery can only cut wire and blot out trenches with an enormous expenditure of ammunition, the Tank takes all these obstacles with the greatest of ease, and will make broad paths in which the advancing infantry can follow. They are the most dangerous foe to hostile machine-guns. They can approach machine-gun nests and destroy them at close range. The great danger of the Tank is obvious when one considers that the defence of the front battle zone chiefly relies on the defensive value of the machine-guns, and that the armour of the Tank renders it invulnerable to rifle fire, and that only seldom and in exceptional cases is machine-gun fire effective. The infantry is therefore opposed to an enemy to whom it can do little or no harm.” II The question of the place of Tanks in the next war has been answered with the greatest emphasis by some enthusiastic advocates of this arm. The possession of a superior weapon, they say, ensures victory to the army which possesses it. In war, any army, even if led by a mediocre General, can safely meet an army of the previous century, though the old force be led by the greatest military genius of his age. [108]“Napoleon was an infinitely greater general than Lord Raglan, yet Lord Raglan would, in 1855, have beaten any army Napoleon could have brought against him, because Lord Raglan’s men were armed with the Minie rifle. “Eleven years after Inkerman Moltke would have beaten Lord Raglan’s army hollow, not because he was a greater soldier than Lord Raglan, but because his men were armed with the needle gun. “Had Napoleon, at Waterloo, possessed a company of Vickers machine-guns, he would have beaten Wellington, Blücher, and Schwartzenburg combined, as completely as Lord Kitchener beat the Soudanese at Omdurman. It would have been another ‘massacre of the innocents.’” In every case, they say, the superior weapon would have defeated the great tactician before he had had time to show his mettle. To repeat the words of the German journalist: “Their infantry would be opposed to an enemy to whom it could do little or no harm.”