Standing, cheerless and cold, near a group of officers, the Field Marshal was not surprised to see Robert among the civilian experts and politicians who had gathered. Lloyd George moved between the groups, excited, enthusiastic and full of mordant wit.
‘There’s nothing very surprising about what you’re going to see, when you come to think of it,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing but the logical adaptation of the automobile to trench warfare. We used cars with armour on them in 1914 at Antwerp and the idea was suggested more than once before the war, in England, Austria, and Germany. Needless to say, H G Wells thought of it, too, and just as naturally, the military rejected it and it was pushed into a pigeon hole. Fortunately the German military had the same sort of mind and they marked it “No importance for military purposes!”’
There were a few sidelong glances among the officers. Lloyd George never hesitated to make known his view of soldiers.
‘Let’s have the demonstration, David,’ one of the politicians suggested. ‘We all know what you think of the army.’
The politician gave a sly grin. ‘For myself,’ he went on, ‘I can’t imagine why, if a civilian could foresee the type of warfare we would be facing, the War Office couldn’t. However—’ he smiled and gestured ‘—it’s become very clear that we need some sort of mobile fort to overcome barbed wire and machine gun fire, something armed and armoured which is capable of crossing very rough country.’
He gestured and a tall slender officer wearing what appeared to be a leather skull cap took over.
‘We’re obviously not entirely happy with what we’ve produced,’ he said. ‘Because haste has been the order of the day, there’s been little time for research and the perfection of design. Only by adapting existing components to meet the rough specifications we’ve been given have we been able to get enough machines ready for the campaign this spring.’
‘If this feller knows about the coming campaign,’ someone asked, ‘how many others do?’
‘Wait, wait!’ Lloyd George gestured. ‘Let him finish.’
‘We tried various lines,’ the man in the leather cap went on. ‘Eventually we began to look at the idea of caterpillar tracks and in the end produced a pressed-steel affair which, gentlemen, was the birth of what you’re going to see today.’
‘And a long time it took, too,’ Lloyd George murmured.
There was a little angry muttering among the group of officers and the man in the leather cap flushed. But he went on doggedly.
‘We’ve been asked for a trench-crossing capability of eight feet,’ he said, ‘and the ability to climb a five-foot parapet—’
‘We came to see the bloody thing in action,’ one of the politicians behind him interrupted. ‘Not hear people spout about it.’
They hadn’t long to wait. Cars were brought up and they drove to where a mock-up of a trench system had been prepared. A deep ditch had been dug and lined with sandbags. In front of it, coils of barbed wire caught the grey gleam from the sky. Behind it a five-foot stone barrier had been constructed. Along one side of the trench was a raised mound where they could stand and watch.
‘Hey, presto,’ Lloyd George said. ‘Here it comes!’
Emerging from the valley came a grey shape over thirty feet long, shaped like a lozenge. From sponsons on either side poked the snouts of guns, and endless caterpillar tracks moved over the top of the eight-foot-high hull. The thing looked like a grey slug as it approached the barbed wire, waddling forward through deep mud, followed by a pair of wheels with which it appeared to be steered.
It climbed the green slope slowly, cutting the turf with two dark tracks like the trail of a snail until it came to the barbed wire. Twanging and clattering, the wire gave beneath the enormous weight then the monster raised its snout over the parapet of the trench, paused, and dropped with a nerve-shattering crunch with its nose down on the other side.
‘Reason for its shape,’ the man in the leather hat pointed out. ‘The trailing stern holds it down until the raised bow is across the trench and it can safely fall into place to bridge it.’
Scattering clods of earth, the monster was churning across the trench now, heaving its ugly snout up against the wall. The caterpillar tracks clattered and scraped and the bow lifted, then hung, poised on top, before dropping with a crash over the other side.
‘Good God!’ the Field Marshal said.
The tank had swung round in a wide circle and was stopped now for inspection. A door in the side opened and the crew climbed out and stood alongside. Despite the chill of the day, their clothing was thin. On their heads they wore leather helmets like the man who had explained the monster’s functions, and a mask of chain mail.
The Field Marshal moved warily forward. ‘What’s it like in there, my boy?’ he asked the commander.
The officer was a pink-faced youth, his cheeks damp with perspiration and streaked with oil.
‘Hot, sir,’ he said.
‘Difficult?’
‘There
are
difficulties, sir. We have to have four men driving and the idea’s to have four others to fire the guns. It’ll not be easy, but I think we’ve got something here and I expect we shall manage.’
‘Your clothes are thin, boy.’
‘That’s because of the heat, sir.’
‘What about the engine? She seems very slow.’
‘It ought to be faster, sir. Everybody acknowledges that.’
The officer who had stage-managed the demonstration interrupted. ‘The navy and the flying corps have first call on all engines,’ he explained. ‘We have to make do with what we can get.’
Aware of his lack of knowledge even of the car he owned, the Field Marshal turned to the tank commander again. ‘I’d like to see inside.’
A few eyebrows were raised but the tank commander was more than willing.
‘It’s pretty dirty in there, though, sir,’ he warned.
‘Damn the dirt! This is the most exciting thing I’ve seen for months.’
The inside of the tank was stifling and stank of hot oil. There were projecting pieces of hot metal and only limited vision through open slits.
‘How about communication with each other?’
‘Hand signals, sir. You can’t shout above the engine and the noise of the tracks.’
‘How about with outside?’
‘Pigeon, sir. We shove ’em out through the hole there.’
‘Then how do you lead your people into action?’
The boy shrugged. ‘That’s something we’re trying to work out, sir. So far, we can only think of the commanding officer walking in front.’
‘And that,’ the Field Marshal said in a flat voice, ‘will be bloody dangerous.’
The demonstration was followed by lunch and drinks which made the Field Marshal wonder why it was that politicians seemed unable to decide anything without feeding their faces. Robert, he noticed, had disappeared and he decided he’d gone deliberately rather than have to offer his father a lift in his car.
Because of the late hour when he returned to London, the Field Marshal decided to eat in the West End before meeting his wife and daughter-in-law. The Cavalry Club didn’t appeal because he wasn’t in the mood to listen to flattery or to satisfy the old men waiting in the leather armchairs for the latest news from France or the War Office. Instead, he took a taxi to Claridge’s, and he was sitting in a dark corner of the lounge drinking coffee and brandy when he saw Robert enter. He was about to rise to greet him, wondering why he was there, when he realised his son wasn’t alone and that the woman with him was Lady Balmael. They spoke to the clerk at the reception desk and turned to go upstairs.
As they reached the lift, Robert’s eyes met his father’s. For a moment he hesitated, awkward and embarrassed, then he defiantly followed Lady Balmael.
For a long time the Field Marshal sat in silence, staring straight ahead, as if he’d seen nothing, then he rose, paid his bill, and headed for the street. Feeling he needed to be alone, he headed for the Cavalry Club. He couldn’t face his daughter-in-law at that moment.
As he walked, deep in thought, he realised he was in the middle of the park and could hear sirens going. As he stopped, wondering about his safety, it occurred to him that, despite the whistles, he was probably in the safest place in the whole of London. Nothing but a direct hit from a bomb could hurt him. In the distance, he could hear the screams of women heading for the shelters and the shouts of the men with them. The street lamps had gone out and the place was in darkness but, standing in the park, he saw that searchlights had sprung up all round the city. Lifting his head, at the apex of two or three beams, he saw a long cigar-shaped object raising its nose towards the clouds that were reflecting the light of the searchlights. Guns began to fire from all directions and he saw the sparkle of shells in the sky, then over the East End several flashes lighting the sky told him bombs had fallen. Pity one couldn’t fall on Robert, he thought savagely.
Next morning, he was at King’s Cross before most of London was about. As he rode back north he found his mind occupied partly by Robert’s stupidity and partly by what he’d seen at Hatfield Park.
Gradually, Robert faded to the back of his mind and he began to grow excited. It still bewildered him a little that the army had allowed so many months of trench warfare to pass without considering some means of overcoming its special problems. Doubtless they were too busy, like the politicians in the House, with their private squabbles; and it was typical that it was Churchill who had risked his reputation and Admiralty money on the new invention.
It was quite obvious that in the tanks they had a weapon which must not be squandered or presented to the enemy too soon. The first time they appeared on the battlefield they must appear in the largest possible numbers so that they could reintroduce the long-forgotten quality of surprise and tear a hole in the enemy front big enough to be properly exploited by fast-moving troops – even men on horses.
When his wife arrived home, she was looking worried. She kissed her husband abstractedly, and as she took her hat off, he fished a little.
‘Something wrong?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘Come on, Gussie. You’ve never told fibs to me before. What’s it all about?’
She sighed. ‘Robert,’ she said. ‘All that nonsense of Elfrida’s about going shopping in London was just show. She wanted to talk. She thinks Robert’s carrying on with another woman.’
The Field Marshal drew a deep breath. ‘He is,’ he said. ‘I went to Claridge’s for a meal and he was there with that damned Balmael woman.’
Everywhere you looked the earth was brown with humanity. Every field seemed to be choked with men and horses, and the arrow-straight road was jammed with more guns and vehicles than the Field Marshal had ever seen.
As the Crossley car that carried him drove towards the east, convoy after convoy came past, rumbling carts with screeching axles and square-nosed, brass-bonneted ASC lorries, nose-to-tail, their drivers nodding at the wheel. Thousands of pack mules with tossing heads and wild eyes trudged southwards and westwards from the front, their legs and bellies caked with the chalky mud of the forward areas. Near every village carpenters were at work, both civilian and military, smocked and uniformed men working alongside each other to hammer bunks together outside barns and sheds.
‘There’ll be no mistake this time, sir—’ The pink-cheeked young major with the red tabs and arm brassard who had been wished on the Field Marshal at headquarters spoke enthusiastically as his eye roved over the ranks of guns, battery on battery, that were waiting ready in the fields, the men behind them stacking great piles of shining shells into dumps.
The Field Marshal wasn’t so sure. Remarkably little seemed to have been done to disguise the approach of the offensive and, as he lifted his eyes to the high ground in the distance, he was in no doubt whatsoever that the Germans were aware of it.
Listening to the soldiers, he was worried by their cynicism, sufficiently an old soldier to know what lay behind their guarded comments. The New Army men who had seen action seemed to have lost that eagerness that had led them to enlist and were now doing their job without sentiment or emotion. There was also no religious feeling, because the New Army men had sufficient intelligence to see that their God was the same as the Germans’ Gott, but what appalled him most was the intense hatred for the staff that was obvious everywhere. He had always been aware of the fighting soldier’s dislike for the men who mislaid his rations and got his friends killed in pointless attacks, but here in France so much fun was being poked at the red tabs, the glossy field boots and the elegant breeches it was almost a campaign of derision. Unhappily, it seemed well-deserved, because there were clearly far too many young men at the headquarters he had visited who had been selected less for their ability than for their family connections.
Among them were some splendid men, many of whom had been wounded in action, but there were others who were almost caricatures of brass-hats, and the general impression seemed to be that they lived in luxury, never missed a meal, consorted regularly with smart Frenchwomen, and seemed less concerned with fighting than with conducting distinguished visitors round the safe rear areas.
Despite the Field Marshal’s wishes, his visit had been well publicised by the government and there was a major general, a brigadier, several colonels, a whole battalion of less senior officers and a posse of newspapermen to follow him around.
‘I didn’t ask for this, dammit,’ he snapped.
‘With respect, sir—’ the brigadier was a smooth man in immaculate uniform who seemed to be remarkably untouched by the war ‘—it has to be done. Government instructions. War Office instructions. The people are interested. It’s a morale-building exercise.’
‘What damn morale can an old man like me build?’ the Field Marshal snarled.
But he went along with the arrangements. Battalions were inspected at Querrieux and Bus and Coigneux, batteries in front of Albert and Sailly, and a training school for bayonet fighting at Verquemont where he listened appalled to the instructions offered to young men being inoculated with blood lust. In a South African Division facing Delville Wood, he found men with familiar names, one of them even a Burger and a grandson of the man who had been his second-in-command in the Zulu War. But no one remembered him.