A COMPANY OF TANKS.*
MAJOR WATSON'S A Company of Tanks is a personal narrative. Perhaps to those who have not had the experiences which he describes his methods do not quite call up a picture. If we are not to have strategy and tactics—and indeed we are almost all of us heartily sick of the theoretical side of war—we want to know, in the words of Mr. Kipling, " What the elephant had for • A Company of Tanks. By Major Watson. London W. Blackwood and
Bons. Od. net.j dinner." We should like to be told exactly what it feels like to be inside a Tank at night, on a hot day, under shell fire, or surrounded by hostile infantry. We want to be given a visual impression of a line of Tanks moving up behind the barrage. We want to feel ourselves helpless in a ditched Tank. The stay- at-home reader does not quite get all this, but there is no doubt that to those who have personal knowledge of the Tank Corps Major Watson's book rings extraordinarily true. It is entirely the fruit of first-hand observation and real experience, and if a civilian cannot say, " It must have been just like that," a man who was in the Tank Corps will certainly say, " That's just how it was." Perhaps the beat part of the book is that which deals with the terrible third battle of Ypres—that martyrdom of the Tank Corps—while expert readers will be interested in Major Watson's first hand account of the controversial and unfortunate first battle of Bullecourt, a battle in the snow which set the Australians against Tanks till the events of 1918 changed their views.
War books are said to be going out of fashion again, having had a brief revival about six months ago, but there is no doubt that the general reader ought to read war books. We are in danger of forgetting the spirit which during the war upheld us. We all for once caught the knack of real co-operation and real fellow feeling. We forgot the doctrine " the devil take the hindermost," which we are now all of us, alas ! diligently re- learning in " self-defence." Defence by self-assertion, by a kind of hostility to the rest of the world, is the most infectious mental attitude imaginable. It is obviously a snowball, and if two or three people in a community adopt it they force suoh an attitude upon the others, individually and collectively. Into the workings of this vicious spiral the world is now plunging itself. Major Watson's book is the sort of war book which it is most meet for us to read, for it is with men and their relations to war, and to each other—aa individuals, as regiments, as corps, or as Tank companies—that Major Watson is dealing throughout, and we have the word of those who were there for the truth of his picture. Perhaps the inter-dependance of the various parts of any army are never so obviously demonstrated as in the case of the Tank. Towards the end of the war it became a commonplace that just as Tanks without field guns were impossible, so were infantry without Tanks. As it was the job of the infantry to make effective work which Tanks had initiated, so it was the part of the Tanks at all times to succour and to protect the infantry, no matter what the sacrifice. It was a tradition in the corps that the Tank was an apparatus for the saving of lives among the infantry. In what section of the civilian community does such a spirit presently obtain ?
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