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Not until the Mark IV. machine was well into delivery could a guarantee as to its degree of mechanical reliability be given, and by that time the trend of the year’s campaigning was unalterably fixed.

And so it was that it was our fate up to the first Cambrai battle to “chip in when we could” in conditions entirely unfavourable.

The employment of Tanks in Flanders has often been criticised, without intelligent appreciation of the fact that had they not fought in Flanders they would have probably fought nowhere. Better, therefore, that they should fight and pull less than half their weight, and still save lives, than that they should stand idle while tremendous issues were at stake.

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If employment in the field was a struggle between policy and expediency, the principles of production and design represented a direct conflict of opposing policies, resulting happily in compromise. The fighting man, conscious of the weaknesses of the earlier weapons, and visualising development which he believed to be obtainable, and knew to be necessary, and the soldier-engineer overburdened with difficulties of maintenance and cursed with the nightmare of Spares and Spares and more Spares—both cried aloud from France for rapid progress in design.