It was, in fact, impossible for infantry alone to attack such positions without the most extensive artillery preparation. The enemy and his trenches and his wire must be blown out of the ground. This was the accepted answer to the problem of the deadlock. But as yet we had not got the shells. We were straining every nerve to reach the solution by bombardment, but in February 1916 we had not got the necessary ammunition. Was there no other answer to the problem? Nothing that could be done meanwhile? This was the mood in which the missionaries of the “mobile machine-gun destroyer” found the High Command. Had we had shells in February 1916 we should not have had the Tank. We must have waited another year for it, till, in fact, we had found out the defects of the hoped-for solution by bombardment. The German, who was full fed with ammunition, felt at this early date no urging to go out and seek any such fantastic remedy. His High Command would have laughed at the idea of Tanks as Dives may have laughed at hungry Lazarus’ antics over broken victuals. II So, while our shells were making, we built Tanks. And Fate, whose taste in humour is not ours, and who knew what we did not, namely, that the Tank and prolonged artillery preparation are alternative weapons, decreed that both shells and Tanks should be ready for the Somme offensive. It was thus upon a “substructure” of the new artillery preparation that we gaily imposed the Tank. We were to take fourteen months in working out the proposition that they could never be effectively used together. The Tanks had been designed for the sort of conditions which had prevailed at Loos. Their training grounds had been carefully modelled on the “Loos” pattern. By the time Tanks could be put into the field, a year later, our artillery superiority had completely changed the nature of the fighting. At Beaumont-Hamel in November 1916, for example, we fired off as much ammunition as was expended in three weeks at the Battle of Loos. On the Somme--owing to our having advanced--four miles of churned-up, shell-pitted ground had to be crossed before the front line could be reached. It had also--to state the case after the manner of the author of _Erewhon_--become the fashion, just before the day of battle, for the attacking side to blast the ground which they were about to cross to the condition of plum pudding on stir-up Sunday. This blasting process, moreover, necessarily gave the enemy several days’ warning of any proposed attack. It had also incidentally had another effect upon the industrious German. When we were bombarded our chief idea was retaliation; when the German was shelled he dug.