ALBION

_{By An Unnamed Tank Operator. ????-1917.}

7/5/2020
Edited 19/1/2024

‘...Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire.

They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!’

‘Attack’- Siegfried Sasson.

Exegesis

For the last six years, society has reflected upon the events and dates of the Great War as its centenary came and went. In looking back at history, we often find that we remember more easily the names of battlefields than the names of those who died, and I think the popular knowledge and history of WWI feels this more acutely than others. It is, after all, the birthplace of the ‘Unknown Soldier,’ whose sacrifices and moments of heroism will never be told or commemorated. It is also the site of untold tragedies, of senseless, and sometimes coldly calculated acts of violence, that have no memorial or plaque. This story is about one of them.

It is not the intent of this story to provide a factual retelling of Flers-Courcelette, though pains have been taken to remove as much inaccuracy as possible. The characters are entirely fictional. Major-General Ernest Swinton, the ‘father’ of the tank (Swinton 1918), makes a brief cameo at the onset, but the rest is invention. Champagne and Clan Leslie were both real Mark I’s that were ditched in the battle of Flers-Courcelette (Landships 2020), but I chose the name Albion myself. The firing of tanks on British troops on their first deployment did occur, and a bloodbath was only avoided by the brave actions of the soldiers who were being killed by their own invention (Prior & Wilson p. 236). There is no easy record of the aftermath, but the tank captain was to receive a medal for his actions during the battle.

As they say, ‘So it goes.’

Historically, I drew heavily from the memoirs of Wilfred Bion (Bion 1997), a British tank commander whose writings deeply influenced my writings on the trials of the tank crew. My image of the tank was further shaped by the work of Trudi Tate (1997) And the International War Museum (2018) for building on the perception of the tank by contemporary soldiers. When writing in the first person, I tried to subtly emulate the often restrained, understated writing that was common amongst the contemporary accounts of soldiers in the trenches (The National Archives 2020). I found that the almost reluctant and detached manner in which these men discussed terrible tragedy was perhaps the most unique aspect of WWI writing from a modern view.

From an academic perspective, Perry’s (2010) work on writing as research and Stewart’s (2001) article on practitioner research informed my understanding of the creative component that academic work could entail, and vice versa. However, I also took direction from two works I was reading for my thesis, Peter Burke’s What Is Cultural History (2008) and Sarah Maza’s Thinking About History (2017). These works talk about the personal and human aspects of historical work, and it sparked a desire in me to communicate history in new ways, and to attempt to relay historical moments in a manner that is engaging and humanizing to the modern world.

It is desirable, and often more palatable, when writing on bleak portions of human history, to focus on the sliver of hope. To highlight and develop that hope, to showcase that no matter how bleak, the end of such evil would come, and better days would arrive. I think that makes for good writing, but I don’t know if it’s good history. Hindsight is a poor comfort to the lived past, and remains out of reach until it is beyond any sort of use. If there is a greater point to this story, it is to stay in the moment, to feel the point of time as it is, not in context, but as a single moment of terror that brooks no conciliation with the future.

I do hope it rings true.


Edit note – Four years later, I remember this exists and decide to revisit it. It’s incredible how much better you are at proofreading when you’ve forgotten the original text entirely. Aside from tense and grammar errors, very little was changed aside from the final words, which felt a bit asinine. The replacement is equally pretentious but is at least a callback. As a final note: Jesus I was depressed back when I wrote this.


It was a sunny afternoon in June when we met Albion.

There were a few dozen of us in the compound. The engineers and drivers were in a cagey huddle to the left. They held an air of distrust, as if we were all about to be drawn into a horrible joke. To our right were the officers, a small group of smartly dressed RNAS commanders, starched uniforms sweating in the heat. And were were in the middle, the gunners, the backups, the bodymen. We had no training, no background; our only skill was a demonstrated ability to keep our mouths shut.

I was infantry, a new recruit detoured from the Front to join the new regiment, but the rest were not so fresh. They were the cast off remnants of missing platoons and consolidated brigades, glad for the diversion from the Front the barn doors promised us.

The Major paced up and down the field, his face switching between self-satisfaction and intense concern. “What you are about to witness is the new nature of war, a weapon that will be our killing blow against Jerry, and one which will change the face of the battlefield forever.”

Us recruits began to pay attention, while the officers stiffened their already arched backs. As for the veterans, they’d already seen war change once, and had little appetite for a second viewing.

The pacing stopped, “Men, I give you the Tank.” The major smiled as he finished the introduction, two aides pulling aside the barn doors, and in the dim rays of light I saw the nature of war, and met Albion.

The Mark I’s were fearsome beasts. A roaring engine and clanking tracks greeted us as they rolled into the yard. As the dust settled and the beasts came to a halt, the Major stepped into view, grinning ear to ear.

“These weapons will be your new home. Over the coming months you are to enmesh yourself with this vehicle and its operations, to operate in coordination with your crew, and to achieve a tactical prowess that will send the Hun running home to Berlin!”

There was a muted cheer to this, but mostly confusion. To us initiates, the vehicle resembled nothing less than a frankenstein tractor. There was no question that the tanks were impressive, but what exactly was the point?

This was answered by a live test.

Suddenly it became obvious why the officers were naval proteges. The tanks were glorified land-barges, they trundled along like the dinosaurs in a museum, lurching forward on caterpillar tracks before aligning to face a firing range. No other weapon ever wielded in war was so clumsy, so intractably slow and so ponderous.
The Major gave the command to fire, and then the world changed. The ground shook as two six-pound broadsides heaved fire and fury across the range. Dust flew up, briefly obscuring the carnage from our eyes. The major was in front of us again, trumpeting more epithets of victory, but nobody could hear him. It didn’t matter, the message was clear: In a war of stasis, we were to deliver mobile death.

I later learned that Albion was a ‘male’ tank, which meant that he carried the giant naval cannons that were stapled to each side. The females carried light machine guns, were faster and easier to maneuver, were less likely to bog in a trench and break down, and were a smaller target for enemy artillery; and we had the guns. At the time I could only recall that dinosaurs, however slow, were the kings of the world in their day. And I knew this beast would be as well.

Our captain had been part of the RNAS’ armoured car company, was a career officer, and a cad. He barked orders in clipped phrases that were lost inside the clamoring interior of the beast. I was the rightward gunner, to my left was a fresh recruit, Archie. Like me, he was eager fresh blood, untested by battle and brimming with false bravado. Our engineers were a violent group, two swearing gearsmen and their cantankerous driver. The driver was the only one who talked to us, a naturally boisterous personality that had weathered two years of war, and had every intention of carrying that manic smile to the end.

“You two are the lucky ones,” He once said to us, in a rest between training exercises.
“Why?” I asked, as the left gunner was upbraided by the captain for being too slow to hit his target marks.

“We’re stuck in the back of this devil, while you two get all the glory!” He laughed, a sound filled with phlegm and soot. “And a view to boot!”

Machine guns held post behind our field guns. Our right machine gunner was the first casualty of Albion. He fainted an hour into exercises in the heat of the tank, and was only discovered when one of the gearsmen stepped on him during the exercise, puncturing a lung. Our left machine-gunner was silent, ears lost to the rattle of a Lewis gun in a pillbox at Ypres. We were the lucky ones, to be on the field guns.


By August we were deemed ‘ready for the front,’ our right machine gun still empty. There was no one at the course to replace him and no time to find a new one. The captain was ecstatic. “Just wait till Jerry gets a view of us!” He crowed, having picked up the Major’s jingoism during the training. “We’ll be in Berlin by Christmas!” We believed him wholeheartedly; and even the gearsmen swore less.

We shipped overseas to Pas-de-Calais. Ours was a secret cargo, just shy of 50 landships, all told. We rendezvoused with the Fourth Army in early September; the great meat grinder of the Somme in full force. The artillery had spent the last two months slowly churning the countryside into mud, and it was less than a week till we were to join the madness. We were to be accompanied by two other tanks, Clan Leslie and Champagne, to push a hole through a ‘tank track’ into the German lines, accompanied by a creeping artillery barrage. The soldiers of the Fourth shied away from us, equal parts jealousy and awe of our station, so we drew our wagons in solitude. Our crews were almost strangers, isolated by our steel cages, but there was a shared understanding amongst us. A communal claustrophobia, which, perhaps, drove the slowly growing fear that the very machines we drove were going to kill us one by one.

As we waited in the evening, listening to the thumping beat of war, I wondered how the world would turn tomorrow. Overhead, the artillery roared, exchanging shells for mud and blood beyond the horizon. The last hope of a quick end to the war was on our shoulders, and we all felt it. The smiles among the crew were thin, the laughter hollow. This battle would be our crucible.

By 3 A.M. we were on the move. The captain gave us our orders before we embarked, His bristled speech feeling strangely quiet in the night air. Then we were inside, our final words and seal anointed as we entered the iron sarcophagus. The gearsmen took position, the engineer offering a low prayer as he stoked the engine. I was not a religious man, nor will I ever be, but I too offered a prayer to Albion, asking for his blessing in this valley of death, that our treads were clean, our guns unjammed, and our sights true. The low rumble of the beast as the engine came to life felt like an answer, a pig-iron god coming alive to feast on our terror. The heat became as perdition; our own personal level of hell. Every training maneuver we had done before felt as though we were in charge of a particularly abhorrent tractor; now, Albion's true nature was revealed. We were caged in, unable to leave the sweltering, toxic prison of our own design. Infantry flowed around us as we moved forwards along the track. The great swell of man and machine charging towards certain death or certain victory.

*CLUNK*

To our left, we saw Clan Leslie shudder to a halt. Our trio was now a duo. Smoke from the broken engine hissed out of the gunports, and we felt ourselves lucky that we at least had the blessing of movement to ease the agony. Behind us, Champagne veered aside to avoid the collision, but the right tread seized on the turn. The ranks broke trying to escape the runaway behemoth. As we rolled past, the faint ‘crunch’ of bone under metal reached us in the distance.

We were now on our own.

The creeping barrage had done its awful work, demolishing any sense of the landscape in front of us, all directions obscured except for the chassis in front and the track below. I chanced a look through my viewport to get bearings, and saw for a single moment how large the battlefield was; how we must look like slugs, crawling through mud with graceless death.
There was no more time for observation, no more time for anything. As the last wave of artillery thundered overhead, we crested the hill, and Albion roared.

It is a weighty task to relay the accounts of a battle that you yourself barely witnessed, much less from the position of a tank crew. It feels as if you are trapped inside the belly of a fumbling, swaying beast, frightened to madness by the roar of the crossfire. Your eyes in the gunport flail across the battlefield, a witness to a graveyard in the process of self-creation. Soon, all measure of tactic and strategy abandons you, and you throw yourself into the madness. Your 16-pounder lets loose judgement against concrete bastions. Rebar and limb flying up in a cloud of choking smoke. A hoarse scream carries over to you from the belly of the beast, your gearsman bleeds out on the floor: a victim of shrapnel, perhaps from your own doing. Leaving your post, you grab the arms and help the driver pull the body to the side. The captain wheels around, yelling at you, his wild eyes locking with yours from across the tank, then screams at Archie to take your spot. The viewport closed half an hour ago, and you’ve been driving blind through the battlefield this entire time, the only sign of the outside world being the screams and gunfire roaring in your ears. There was no more shock and awe on arrival, no more element of surprise. Albion was another number to the equation of war, adding shells and subtracting blood and bones.
Small arms fire is peppering the interior, like a neverending hailstorm raining from all sides. You’re at the crest now, you can feel it, the next dip and sway will bring you straight on top of the German trench. For a moment, the entire tank is silent, even the engineer momentarily stalls the engine, waiting for the signal to cross the point of no return. Then, the lewis gun begins to roar, the machine gunner cackling in a madness. It’s infectious, the captain screams till his voice gives out, shooting his revolver out of the gunport, Archie catches the fire too, firing round after round into the trenches as Albion lurches up, then down, down into the depths below. The anxiety, the terror, the hatred and fear that has been building ever since the first day you bound yourself to this beast is let out in one moment of pure, sadistic violence. The screams begin to filter in, only egging you on to fire faster; bullet after bullet, shell after shell. The screams turn to laughter until the tank is filled with that mad sound, drowning the engine, the bullets, and all else. Til finally, there is silence.

There is no return fire, shells nor grenades. The captain looks around, as if unsure what insanity had gripped him. The low moan of the dying gearsman fills the belly, breaking the reverie. And it is at that moment that a pitiful knocking sound begins to beat on the roof of the tank.

*thump* *thump* *thump*

A muffled voice could be heard, screaming gibberish. We’d broken them, the Hun wanted to surrender! As the realisation spread through the belly, the captain let out a sob, tears streaking through his soot-covered face. The only person who wasn’t crying in relief was Archie, who was staring out the gun port in silence. The captain grinned at me, his anger and terror forgotten, I was to open the hatch and accept the German capitulation. There was a strange feeling, like a drowning man reaching for the surface, as I climbed the ladder, the thumping growing louder as I slowly unlocked the hatch and took in our hard won victory.

There were no Germans to surrender.
The man on the roof grabs me, his eyes wild, shouting down my ear and reaching all the way down to the belly. He’s unintelligible, his words mashed together in fear and anger. Letting me go, he sobs, wordlessly pointing down to the trench, where the bodies of our righteous slaughter lay. They were wearing British uniforms.
In the distance, the battle moves forward, the rearward troops charging past, taking your spot in the meat grinder. The Albion already forgotten in the throng as a pebble in the river.

I close the hatch, and re-enter sanctuary. The captain and driver are in each other’s arms, the gearsman laid beside his brother. Archie was still staring, looking at the craters filled with limbs and mangled flesh. Only the machine gunner meets my eyes.


We were the new nature of war. God save us.

References

_{Burke, P. (2008). What is Cultural History. Polity Press.
Bion, W. R., & Bion, F. (1997). War Memoirs 1917-1919. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Karnac Books.
Prior, R., & Wilson, T. (2005). Lumbering Tanks: The Battle of 15 September. In The Somme. London, UNITED STATES: Yale University Press.
List of Mk I Male Tanks. (2020). Landships. Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/landships/home/lists/listofmkimaletanks
Letters from the First World War, part one. (2020). The National Archives. Retrieved from https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/letters-first-world-war-1915/
Maza, S. (2017). Thinking About History. University of Chicago Press
Perry, G. (2010). History Documents, Art Reveals: Creative Writing as Research. In Barrett, E., & Bolt, B. (Eds.). Practice as research : Approaches to creative arts enquiry.
Stewart, R. (2000). ‘Practice vs Praxis: Constructing Models for Practitioner-Based Research’ University of Southern Queensland
Swinton, E. (1919). THE “TANKS.” New York, USA. George H. Dorian Company
Tate, T. (1997). The Culture of the Tank, 1916-1918. Modernism/Modernity, 4(1), 69-87.
VOICES OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR: TANKS ON THE SOMME. (2018). Imperial War Museum. Retrieved from https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-tanks-on-the-somme
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