For as the campaign drew on conditions became worse and worse. By the beginning of October the Army in general, and particularly the Tanks, had a foretaste of the miseries of Flanders. The general conditions of this part of the campaign are admirably described by Colonel Buchan in his _History of the War_: “October was one long succession of tempestuous gales and drenching rains. “To understand the difficulties which untoward weather imposed on the Allied advance, it is necessary to grasp the nature of the fifty square miles of tortured ground which three months’ fighting had given them, and over which lay the communications between their fighting line and the rear.... Not the biggest mining camp or the vastest engineering undertaking had ever produced one tithe of the activity which existed behind each section of the battle line. There were places like Crewe, places like the outskirts of Birmingham, places like Aldershot or Salisbury Plain.... “There were now two No Man’s Lands. One was between the front lines; the other lay between the old enemy front and the front we had won. The second was the bigger problem, for across it must be brought the supplies of a great army.... “The problem was hard enough in fine weather; but let the rain come and soak the churned-up soil, and the whole land became a morass. There was no _pavé_, as in Flanders, to make a firm causeway. Every road became a water-course, and in the hollows the mud was as deep as a man’s thighs.... “The expected fine weather of October did not come. On the contrary, the month provided a record in wet, spells of drenching rain being varied by dull, misty days, so that the sodden land had no chance of drying. The carrying of the lower spurs--meant as a preliminary step to a general attack--proved an operation so full of difficulties that it occupied all our efforts during the month, and with it all was not completed. The story of these weeks is one of minor operations, local actions with strictly limited objectives undertaken by only a few battalions. In the face of every conceivable difficulty we moved gradually up the intervening slopes.” Such was the setting of this batch of experimental actions. The first of them took place on September 25, when two small parties of Tanks were employed in two distinct actions; the first with the 3rd Corps, and the second on September 25 and 26 with the 15th Corps near Gueudecourt. The first was a failure. Only two Tanks had been allotted; one was ditched on the way to the starting-point, and the other machine was caught in the enemy barrage and knocked out. Very different is the story of the Tanks operating with the 15th Corps at Gird Trench near Gueudecourt, when with the help of a low-flying aeroplane 1500 yards of trench and 370 prisoners were taken by one Tank at a cost to us of five casualties. The story is told in the Somme Despatch: