Elles knew that this was a make-or-break event, requiring a maximum effort from every officer and man in each tank.Įlles glanced at his watch, then looked straight ahead into the predawn gloom. The tank was a new weapon of war, and its debut the year before was anything but auspicious. Its outcome would determine the fate of Elles’s newly minted Tank Corps and change the face of warfare on the Western Front and beyond. It was the morning of November 20, 1917, and the British Third Army was about to attack the Germans at Cambrai. Within moments he had all but disappeared only his head and shoulders remained in view. Elles then climbed aboard, gingerly squeezing into Hilda’s open hatch. He stopped abruptly at tank H1, nicknamed “Hilda,” and banged its metal side with his ash walking stick, alerting the crew that he had arrived. Hugh Elles walked past the Mark IV tanks of H Company, a solitary figure amid metal monsters that looked, according to one jaundiced observer, like giant toads.
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