However, at 5 p.m. on the day before the battle, these written orders were cancelled and new verbal instructions substituted. Roughly, the Tanks were to operate as follows:-- _On the right_ with the 14th Corps, ten Tanks were to work with the Guards Division, and seven with the 6th and 56th Divisions, their objectives being Ginchy and the Quadrilateral. _On the left_ eight Tanks were allotted to the 3rd Corps, operating through High Wood and East of Martinpuich. The 15th Corps had seventeen Tanks attached, and the Reserve (5th) Army--fighting between Pozières and Martinpuich--had six tanks. With all these groups of Tanks the preliminary moving up into the first-line positions--in the pitch dark, through the mud and in and out of the shell-holes of badly crumped ground--proved most arduous, and a good many Tanks broke down in the process. One Tank Commander who struck a narrow sunken road remarks: “It was full of the bodies of dead Boches, and my driver did not like going along it.” For the Tanks’ crews the remainder of the night passed in a final tightening of loose tracks and adjustment of the engines, and in listening to the steadily increasing crash and roar of the British bombardment. The strain on men and officers had been tremendous. Most of them seem to have started the battle having had no sleep for over twenty-four hours. They were desperately anxious, too, that Tanks should prove their worth, and the Mark I. machine was too capricious to give them much assurance. To this list of discomforts must be added that most of the men had never heard guns before, and that the lying-up places were close to our batteries. II The morning of the 15th was fine with a thin ground mist, and at six o’clock the thunder of the British artillery rose to a final hurricane. The barrage crept forward, and our Tanks and infantry crossed the parapets. The Germans seemed to have heard no breath of the nature of the new arm which was to be used against them, and the light haze added greatly to the looming mystery of the approaching Tanks. Official documents that were later on captured from the enemy revealed something of the deep psychological effect that our Tanks had had on the German infantry. These significant admissions might have done more to convince our own High Command of the great potentialities of the new weapon than they actually did. One of the best known individual Tank exploits was that of the machine belonging to “C” Company, which helped a New Zealand and an English division in their assault upon Flers. This was the furthest penetration achieved by any Tank that day. This machine led its infantry, and these had their first taste of entering a village which they knew bristled with enemy machine-guns without suffering a single casualty.