SOMEBODY – I wish I could remember who it was – once said that if Napoleon Bonaparte had only put up a reward of a million francs for the invention of a weapon superior to the flint-lock musket he would have become master of the world. In this there is much truth, but only because Napoleon controlled his War Office. It would have been technically possible to have put a percussion rifle, breech-loading like the Ferguson, into the hands of French soldiers in the early 1800s with incalculable results.
In England we arrange matters differently. It would have been equally possible to have produced a tracked and armoured vehicle driven by an internal combustion engine in the early 1900s. The inventor, however, would not have been rewarded. He would have been lucky to avoid a visit by two doctors accompanied by men in white coats. The story lingers of the Nottingham plumber who submitted designs of just such a machine; they were, naturally, placed in a War Office file with a minute on them saying, ‘The man’s mad.’
It seems impossible to pick up any book on the subject without encountering the trite observation that nobody invented the tank. John Charteris, Sir Douglas Haig’s Director of Military Intelligence was, more often than not, wrong in his conclusions but here he hit the nail on the head. ‘The idea of a mobile strong-point, out of which the tank developed, probably occurred to most minds after our first experiences of attacking strongly entrenched positions. I first heard it suggested by an Intelligence Corps officer as early as the Battle of the Aisne. His idea took the form of a group of men carrying a section of bullet-proof shield. Very elementary calculations of weight proved that idea impracticable and the suggestion of using the ‘Caterpillar’ tractor, which had been experimented with at Aldershot in 1914, immediately arose. I remember discussing the possibility of this with Colonel Swinton in 1914. But it was so obvious a development that it must have occurred simultaneously in many regimental and Staff messes.’
That the Army had fared as well as it had under a Liberal Government was due entirely to one man, Richard Burdon Haldane. Even so, it did not fare well. The Navy, the sure shield, got, however grudgingly, its Dreadnoughts, its turbines and its big guns. The Army, up to 1914, was still Wolseley’s army. It was given a superb rifle, better field guns and sensible webbing equipment but that was about all. A man going into battle either walked or was carried by an animal. Should he and his fellows need to dig a hole in the ground they did it in the same way and using the same tools as the builders of the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids of Egypt. And this at a time when mechanical and electrical engineering had reached a degree of skill not far behind that of today. The steam engine was obsolescent but the petrol and Diesel ones were widely used and of high efficiency. British engineers were held in respect everywhere; but nobody asked them to take an interest in military affairs. These were not for civilians, compendiously regarded by the highest military authorities as outsiders and not to be trusted.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was possessed of a fertile imagination allied to robust common sense. His articles in the Strand Magazine, foretelling exactly what would happen when the Germans unleashed their submarines, were regarded as highly entertaining. When, early in the war, he buttonholed Mr Montagu at the Ministry of Munitions to demand the making of some form of shield he found himself pushing on an open door. ‘Sir Arthur, there is no use your arguing here, for there is no one in this building who does not know that you are right. The whole difficulty lies in making the soldiers accept your views.’ When all was over Sir Arthur wrote of it again. ‘We can never be grateful enough to the men who thought out the Tank, for I have no doubt at all that this product of British brains and British labour won the war, which would otherwise have ended in a peace of mutual exhaustion. Churchill, d’Eyncourt, Tritton, Swinton and Bertie Stern, these were in sober fact, divide the credit as you may, the men who played a very essential part in bringing down the giant’. Even the well-informed Conan Doyle seems to have been unconscious of the existence of a man quite as important as any of these. If Walter Gordon Wilson meant nothing to him it is hardly surprising that most people never heard of him. Yet, but for him there would have been no tank. Not, at any rate, in 1916.
Another well-worn apophthegm is that the effect of tanks in the First War was largely moral. There is something in this, but it calls to mind a remark by Scheibert, the historian of the American Civil War: ‘The difference between a Spencer carbine and an Enfield rifle is by no means a mere matter of sentiment.’ A great many infantrymen owed their lives to the tank; and to it the Army owed a good part of its greatest victories.
These things did not come about painlessly. As most if not all, of the men involved are long dead it is possible to give a candid account of their doings, successful and otherwise, without hurting the feelings of all who tried their best. That they quarrelled – furiously at times – is hardly surprising, for these were strong-willed men and great affairs were at stake. Who was right and who was wrong no longer matters. There is honour enough for all of them.
When the prophet Joel’s palmerworms and locusts had done with the next twenty years the Pioneers were summoned back. By then, however, they were no longer Pioneers but had become in their turn nearer to Mr Kipling’s ‘eavy-sterned amateur old men. There is a moral in this, somewhere.