The German defences, the famous Hindenburg Line, lay wide and strong across the spurs. The main line of resistance had been everywhere well placed on the reverse slopes of the main ridges, and was invisible from our lines. Only from the air and from rare posts of vantage could we see a length of it. There were three lines of trenches, each trench anything up to 15 ft. wide, with an outpost line thrown forward to screen these main defences. In front of the main line lay band upon band and acre upon acre of dense wire; nowhere was it less than 50 yards deep, and here and there it jutted out in great salients flanked by batteries of machine-guns. Never had we before been faced with such a wilderness of wire. It was calculated that to cut it with artillery would have taken five weeks and cost twenty millions of money. Not only was the actual “ditch” of the trench believed to be in most places some 12 ft. wide and 18 ft. deep, but at either side, the parados and parapet (each about 2 ft. 6 in. high) were, we had reason to believe, so sloped as to increase the effective width to about 16 to 18 ft. These were the dimensions of some trenches captured by us at Arras, and for such trenches we had to be prepared. The space to be cleared was too wide for a Tank. A special means of crossing was, however, devised by the Staff of the Central Workshops at Erin. This was a special huge fascine made of about seventy-five ordinary bundles of brushwood, strongly compressed and bound by heavy chains. It was carried on the nose of the machine, and could be released by a touch from inside the Tank by a specially ingenious releasing gear, and dropped neatly into the trench. The manufacture of the 350 fascines and the fitting of the Tanks with the releasing gear was a piece of work of which the Central Workshops have reason to be proud. They received the order for 350 fascines and 110 Tank sledges on October 24, when they had already for some months been working at high pressure, chiefly upon Tanks salved from the Salient. To fulfil the new order the shops worked day and night for three weeks. To make the fascines, 21,000 ordinary stout bundles of brushwood, such as are used for road repairing, were unloaded at the Central Workshops. Here eighteen Tanks had been specially fitted up, for binding and fastening these into bundles of sixty or seventy. The Tanks acted in pairs, pulling in opposite directions at steel chains which had been previously wound round and round the bundles. So great was the pressure thus exerted that, months afterwards, an infantryman in search of firewood, who found one of these fascines and gaily filed through its binding chain, was killed by the sudden springing open of the bundle.