The noise almost deafened Richard! At Charleroi, 115 kilometres away from where Frankie and Taz were sitting in a trench, Richard Rix was hunched at his post by the big gun in the nose of Mephisto. With its dual 100-horsepower, 4-cylinder petrol engines straining, the tank was being put through its paces in a gently sloping Belgian field. This was Richard’s first time inside the tank while underway and it was not a pleasant experience.

Apart from the thunderous noise from the engines right behind him, noise which reverberated around the interior of the metal tank, there was also the unpredictability of the vehicle’s movement to deal with. Papa Heiber, sitting up in the driver’s seat, beside but a little behind the seat of Lieutenant Skopnik, was steering the monster by using gears on the two engines – one drove the linked metal track on Mephisto’s left side, while the other drove the track on the right side. To turn the tank left or right, Heiber had to move the gear lever for one engine, slowing the track on that side, which then caused the opposite track to rotate faster, jerkily dragging the tank in the desired direction.

When Heiber put one engine into reverse, while leaving the other engine in forward, and applied the accelerator, he could spin the massive machine right around on the spot. This was an impressive sight to onlookers outside, but for Richard and the other crewmen inside the tank, it was disorienting. Mephisto’s movements were abrupt and, with all the engine noise, there was no way for Heiber to alert the crew to manoeuvres he was about to perform. Without warning, the tank would veer left or right, or jag up or down an incline, sending the crew lurching all over the place.

For standing crewmen like Richard, there were rope handles hanging from the metal ceiling. But even when Richard did hang on, he was often swung around the tank’s interior like a circus performer at the end of a rope, as Mephisto jerked and dipped and swayed its way over rough ground. If the gun was being fired as the tank rumbled along, Richard needed both leather-gloved hands to do his job as gun loader. He could only brace his feet as he dragged a 57 mm shell from an ammunition locker behind the gun to slide it into the cannon’s breech. Once the shell was loaded, he would close the breech while Sergeant Eckhardt peered out a small opening beside the gun to take aim on a target, spinning two metal wheels on the gun mount to turn the barrel left or right, or to raise or lower it.

Because of engine noise, talking was virtually impossible for the crew once the tank was underway, and this was accentuated when Mephisto’s guns were firing. Written instructions were sometimes passed down from Lieutenant Skopnik, but hand signals and taps on the back were the main ways to communicate. There was a single piece of technology to allow the commander to communicate the location of an enemy target to gunner Eckhardt – a metal box containing round red lights, situated above the gun. The commander could depress a switch in front of him that lit up one of those lights. If the light in the middle lit up, the enemy was directly ahead. A light to the left or right meant the enemy was in that direction.

As Richard had learned, Mephisto had been one of four tanks of Abteilung 1 to take part in an assault against British lines at St Quentin at the commencement of the Spring Offensive, an operation that the Supreme High Command of the German Army had given the codename ‘Michael’. Those four tanks, all bearing the skull and crossbones emblem, had helped Germany’s 18th Army halt a British counterattack.

But three had been damaged, with a number of crewmen injured, and all four vehicles had been withdrawn to the tank base at Charleroi to regroup. Mephisto, with Lieutenant Skopnik in command, had come back scarred by bullet and shell but was otherwise undamaged, and had been transferred to Abteilung 3. More new tanks had arrived at Charleroi from the Daimler-Benz factory in Berlin. Twenty massive A7Vs were now at Charleroi, making up the entire German-made component of the Kaiser’s tank corps. The seventy other tanks operated by the German Army were all captured British vehicles.

Now, with Maxim MG08 machine guns jutting out the side and rear gun ports, and the main gun poking out the snout, Mephisto was manoeuvring in the open with the three other A7Vs of Abteilung 3. The tanks’ commanders were training to operate as a group while new crewmembers, such as Richard, became accustomed to their machines. Doing four kilometres an hour, Mephisto led the way across fields where a Belgian farmer had once run his dairy herd. Ahead in Mephisto’s path stood a fence of barbed wire that stretched across the field.

The other three tanks spread out beside Mephisto, forming a ragged line as they advanced towards the wire. Smoke from their exhausts wafted over the landscape while several hundred fully armed German infantry ‘shock troops’ training in tank cooperation techniques walked behind the tanks, rifles in their hands.

Up to the barbed wire the tanks lumbered. Without a pause or a bump they rolled over the top of the wire, pressing it hard into the earth under their thirty-tonne weight before continuing on. The shock troopers coming up behind were able to step nimbly across the gaps in the wire made by the tanks. This was how it was intended they would attack the British in the next stage of the Michael Offensive – with the tanks driving pathways for the infantry through British lines.

Inside Mephisto, Richard was hanging on to one of the ceiling handles. He had loaded a shell into the tank’s gun, and Sergeant Eckhardt was peering out the narrow opening of the right front port. Lieutenant Skopnik had sent down a note for the gunner: Target – stone barn ahead. In the panel above the gun, the middle light glowed red. Richard, knowing what was coming, clamped his hands over his ears.

Eckhardt yanked the firing handle. With an almighty boom, the gun fired. The tank rocked up and back on its springs. As acrid cordite fumes filled the tank’s interior, gunner Eckhardt and commander Skopnik watched the shell speed towards the assigned target; Eckhardt from his observation port, and Skopnik from the open commander’s port up in the cupola.

The shell struck the barn one hundred metres away in an explosion of grey smoke and dust. Once the haze cleared, it was possible to see that one end of the old barn had collapsed as a result of the hit. Lieutenant Skopnik applauded as Mephisto powered on across the field. A beaming, nodding Private Wagner, one of the machine-gunners, enthusiastically repeated the applause for the benefit of his crewmates. Eckhardt’s reputation as the unit’s best gunner had been validated.

The commander of the tank group, Colonel Wilhelm Kessel, and several other German officers had come to observe the tanks train, and they now watched as the four metal monsters lumbered down the slope towards a dry stream bed. Lieutenant Skopnik took Mephisto slipping down the incline, then bucking up the other side and out again, with engines roaring and smoke pouring from the exhausts. Gretchen followed suit, and so too did Cyklop, but Baden 1 came to a sudden halt in the depression, with nose down and tail jutting into the air. The tank’s commander poked his head up through a hatchway in the top of the cupola while several of his crewmen piled out of the vehicle’s front left hatch and began a close inspection of the tank’s predicament.

Colonel Kessel, a bulky grey-haired man, turned to his adjutant with a scowl. ‘My God, Theunissen, I thought these panzers could go anywhere. Has that machine been defeated by a simple riverbed?’

‘Baden 1 has a new crew, Herr Oberst,’ Theunissen replied. ‘They are still becoming accustomed to their panzer.’

‘Humph!’ the colonel returned, unimpressed. ‘Get all the panzers ready for immediate action, Theunissen. They are needed at the front for the next phase of the offensive on the Somme.’

‘Yes, Herr Oberst.’ Taking out a notebook and pencil, the adjutant opened the book to a blank page and wrote: All machines must be ready for immediate action. By command of Oberst Kessel.

 

After two hours of mashing around the fields, Mephisto, Gretchen and Cyklop came rumbling back to their base at the mill. Baden 1 was still out in the stream bed with mechanics working on its repair.

Richard, exhausted by the constant battering his eardrums had received, and carrying bruises after being bounced around inside Mephisto like a baby in a runaway pram, gratefully joined the others climbing out through the hatches. Lieutenant Skopnik and Papa Heiber threw back the hatch covers on the cupola and clambered down.

‘Refuel without delay, Heiber,’ Skopnik instructed, removing his leather gloves. ‘This is a thirsty beast.’

‘Indeed it is, Herr Oberleutnant,’ Heiber returned. ‘Ten litres of fuel every kilometre, it consumes.’

Skopnik nodded. ‘Fill the fuel tanks to the brim, Feldwebel. We will soon be on the move again.’

‘At once, Herr Oberleutnant,’ Heiber acknowledged, saluting. He watched the lieutenant stride away, then noticed Richard standing close by. ‘Well, boy, what did you think of your first outing in the old fellow?’ he inquired.

‘I don’t think I’ll ever hear properly again, Feldwebel Heiber,’ said Richard, banging one ringing ear with the flat of his hand.

Heiber laughed. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said, before heading off with Hartmann to organise Mephisto’s refuelling.

Private Hess, the assistant mechanic and signaller, was at that moment clambering out the rear compartment hatch on the right side of the hull. Richard noticed that Hess was gingerly carrying a small rectangular wire cage containing half-a-dozen pigeons.

‘What on earth were pigeons doing in the panzer?’ Richard asked.

‘What do you think they were doing?’ Hess replied. ‘They weren’t coming along for the ride and they weren’t there for our lunch.’

‘I have no idea,’ Richard confessed.

‘For communication, dolt! These are carrier pigeons!’ Bringing the cage up to his face, Hess spoke tenderly to the birds inside. ‘Aren’t you, my beauties?’

‘Communication?’ said Richard. ‘Who with?’

‘With headquarters, of course! The commander writes a note containing vital information, I attach the note to the leg of one of my girls here, and I send her off on the wing through one of the ports, and she flies to headquarters with it. Simple.’

‘Oh.’

‘How else would we communicate with headquarters? With smoke signals, perhaps, like the wild Indians of America? Or maybe you think we could magically send our words through the air by a magic telephone that needs no wires?’ With that, Hess tramped away, carrying the birdcage and talking soothingly to the pigeons.

‘Rix!’ called Sergeant Eckhardt. ‘Don’t just stand there! Replace the used shell at once. The panzer’s ammunition lockers are to be full at all times.’

‘Yes, Feldwebel,’ Richard acknowledged, before setting off for the quartermaster’s store behind the barns.

Private Wagner fell in beside Richard. ‘So, new boy, your gun hit the target today.’

‘Yes,’ said Richard. ‘Feldwebel Eckhardt seems to be a crack shot.’

‘Just like at St Quentin. You should have seen us, Rix. Mephisto truly was a devil that day. Our guns destroyed their positions until we ran out of ammunition. Blam! Blam! Blam! And we ran down so many of the enemy, our tracks were red with British blood!’

Richard gulped. ‘Red with blood? Really?’

‘It was the most exciting, exhilarating day of my life,’ Wagner confessed. ‘And we have more such days ahead of us. You will see. Mephisto is unstoppable! Our panzers will win the war for Germany!’

‘Ah, but Leutnant Biltz thinks that –’

‘Lightning Biltz? Have you seen the Iron Cross he wears? We’ll all be wearing them before long! The Kaiser will present the crewmen of Mephisto with the Iron Cross, for winning the war. And we’ll all be heroes back home. You wait and see.’

Before Richard could say anything, Wagner peeled away and headed towards the barns. Tramping on alone, Richard weighed up the conflicting opinions of Wagner and Lieutenant Biltz. In the end, he decided it was best to wait and see. Time would tell which of the two was right. Richard hoped that it would be Wagner, not that he particularly wanted a medal. The thought of his country losing the war, as Lieutenant Biltz had seemed to predict, was too horrible a fate to consider.

He knew that the people back home were having to ration food. Before Christmas, most of Grandfather Rix’s pigs had been confiscated by the German Government, to help feed the army. Richard’s grandfather hadn’t complained. He’d written to tell Richard that he was proud to contribute to the war effort. But how much more difficult would it be if Germany lost the war? Richard knew enough about history to be aware that victors rarely treat the defeated well. Would the Allied forces come and take the last of Grandfather Rix’s pigs and perhaps even confiscate his farm? After all, the German Army had taken over this very farm where the tank group was stationed, dispossessing its farmer and his family of their land.

Suppressing these negative thoughts, Richard filled out the necessary paperwork at the quartermaster’s store and walked back to Mephisto, cradling a 57 mm shell. He reached the tank just as Papa Heiber and Corporal Hartmann were pumping fuel from large drums into Mephisto’s 500-litre fuel tank. With difficulty, Richard clambered in through the hatchway, carrying his deadly load. Once he’d gingerly stowed the artillery shell, blunt end down, beside scores of other shells in an ammunition locker behind the gun, Richard closed the hatch door and headed for the cooking fires now smoking on the bank of the stream.

As he reached the cooking place, where crewmen from all of the unit’s tanks were gathering for lunch, adjutant Lieutenant Theunissen also arrived on the scene, accompanied by Lieutenant Skopnik and the other tank commanders.

‘You men,’ Theunissen said in a raised voice, ‘prepare your personal equipment, your vehicles and the stores. Movement orders have arrived. We are boarding a goods train at Charleroi-South Station at midnight tonight.’ He waved what looked to be a telegram in the air.

Captain Greiff, deputy to Colonel Kessel, stood beside Theunissen. ‘We are to join the Michael Offensive,’ he told the men. ‘We are to push those British Tommies all the way back to the sea.’ Smiling, he added loudly, ‘Glory awaits us all!’

‘Where are we headed, Herr Hauptmann?’ a burly sergeant asked.

‘The Somme,’ Greiff replied. ‘First, we return to St Quentin, scene of our panzers’ last great victory. And from there, to the Somme. Our first objective is Amiens. You know, there is an ancient Roman road that runs from St Quentin to Amiens, as straight as straight can be. We and our panzers will follow that ancient path. To victory!’

Cheers rose up from the tank men.

Wagner, standing beside Richard, nudged him in the ribs. ‘What did I tell you, Rix?’ he said. ‘We are bound for victory!’

Richard smiled weakly. Victory? Perhaps, he thought, but at what cost?