Tracks Magazine

Index

Index (cont)

Although it would be difficult to find a less desirable situation than in the cannon's mouth, in these days, almost as much nervous excitement attaches to the breech, or rear end, of the apparatus. Tank-gunners, particularly, remark on this. The head of a tank-gunner is never more than a fraction of an inch from some tons of recoiling, rocketing, kicking machinery.

A tank is a late development of an ancient Roman idea, and it requires all an ancient Roman's toughness and hardihood to subdue. Docile and submissive enough in conflict, at rest it is an imp of wickedness that will snap off, without any provocation, just those limbs and organs which the fighting man can least afford to spare. Even the casual nudge of such a monster is sufficient to bring any officers' mess down in a heap of dust and broken bottles. This can be proved.

Embedded in the constitution of a tank are a crew of three, four or five souls.

One is given as a living sacrifice to the engine.He is the driver.

A second keeps pressing a confusing selection of triggers and burrowing his low and ape-like brow into a fetid sponge. In after years (should and come his way) chronic water on the brain limit his enjoyment of life. He is the gunner.

A third is in a very moving coil. He has been trained to tie firm knots in the short-wave bands and, by and large, to arrest the progress of radio communication. He is the wireless operator and in battle he make the tea and sits quietly by himself, ruminating upon the wasted years.

In some Oxford and Cambridge crews then would be an entity called a Crew Commander, to command the crew, load the guns, keep the party clean, command the crew, look out of the periscope, comment on the weather, select nice targets, command the crew, hope for the best, stand aside from the recoil, converse with himself on the internal telephone and command the crew. In more democratic crews this rather honorary post is usually dispensed with and everybody does something.

There is sometimes a fourth member in the forward part of the tank distracting the driver's attention with remarks about the general situation and a fifth is occasionally presumed to be present although caught up in the brake-linings.

The gunner is selected because he is already stone-deaf, with three hands and one eye. Orders and ideas are conveyed to him by the medium of hard knocks, and as the excitement grows these knocks are apt to become savage blows. At the end of an engagement the gunner is regularly punch-drunk and irritable.

The driver is selected because he has short leg and well-developed, massive feet. His mind is untamed by education, so the thirty-five dials on the dashboard hold no terrors for him. He drive psychically, horizontally and vertically. If the engine should develop a defect, he locks himself in and falls into a deep sleep until a technician has repaired the fault. But if the technician knows his job properly and sets the tank on fire, then the driver is painlessly consumed and becomes a casualty.

Any man with well-cared for finger nails an pink ears will be selected for the wireless operator At the start, some attempt is made to instruct him in the elementary process known as "Netting-in' which is the most roundabout way yet devised by man to produce simple chaos. When he is familiar with the three fundamental formulae for muddle, pandemonium and misdirection of energy, he is turned loose to weave variations of his own on these themes. In between variations he finds the ethereric presence of Vera Lynn most soothing.

No hairless young chartered accountant can escape being made into a crew commander. Preference is given to men already bald, as their hair automatically falls out during their first experience of crew commanding, and it is liable to get mixed up with the breech mechanism and cause irreparable damage to a very expensive instrument. The commander's main pre-occupation is the conservation of ammunition. If he shoots it all off and wins a battle, he will get hell from the Q. Walla. If he shoots off none of it and loses a battle, he will get hell from Ops. In the course of one engagement he might total up his shot, shell, smoke and small-arms ammunition as often as twenty-seven times. Then by taking an average of the twenty-seven different answers he would arrive at an estimate resulting in hell from both. Quite hairless they are.

And no matter how few may be in the belly of the monster, the impression is of being one of a closely-packed multitude.

Most of the cavalry regiments have now been rounded up and pressed into tanks or armoured motor-cars. They have all the sensations of a saloon-bar person in public-bar circumstances.

Richard the Third, as hereditary Master-General and immortal Honorary Colonel of the First (the Old-Gold) Plantagenets, has ceased to call in frenzy for a horse.

is now his desolate and unpoetic wail.

The Royal Tank Regiment (the tankmen) is a creation apart.It is composed of the rude mechanicals who despise the horse for not being an internal combustion unit. They wear black garments, and the standard countenance if of this pattern, stamped out of hard steel.

They spend their lives stripping their charges down to their basic factors and carefully putting them together again without any little parts left over.

An affection is bred between man and tank that often shows itself in impressive fashion. Perhaps a broken arm on Trooper A, or a compound fracture of the occiput on Trooper B, or on Trooper C, a flattened and distorted foot.

They live only for (and by courtesy of) their armoured fighting vehicles. On seeing a tank, their fierce gimlet eye lights up with a tender ray serene.

They are educated in how to distinguish one from another almost at a glance.

This priceless attribute is grafted into their resistant cerebellum by a system of association. Simply explained, this secret method hinges upon the following premises. If Snow White is instantly recognised by the presence of the Seven Dwarfs, then the Churchill tank is instantly recognisable by the presence of eleven bogies.

In the army, there are many things that are even simpler than this.

But you won't believe that.

In the evening when the sun goes down, it is affecting to see these blackened articifers tucking up their tanks in tarpaulin wraps and camel hair counterpanes, and casting over the slumbering mass a camouflage-net embellished all over with knots of vegetation, posies of wild flowers, and patches of moss, lichen and yellow sprouting broccoli.

I could, of course, go on forever — or at least for a few thousand more words — but time and space leaves me with only one remark permitted ...

COULD THIS BE YOU?

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