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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.

The adventure had all the exhilaration of surprise, and the men, who had nerved themselves for the usual ordeal of house-to-house fighting, laughed at the astonishing anticlimax presented by their own and the Tanks’ stately progress down an almost empty street.

“All dressed up and no one to fight.”

It was on this occasion that the airmen’s now famous message was sent back, a message whose repetition rather galled the Tank Corps in the days of ill-rewarded effort that still lay between it and its final triumphs:

“A Tank is walking up the High Street of Flers with the British Army cheering behind.”