Mark Urban

You know, if you got pitched by the ground and fell and put your hand on the engine, you'd get terrible burns.

I mean, the whole thing was a sort of absolute health and safety nightmare in a box, really.

I mean, you couldn't have devised a more hellish place to go to battle.

But...

But they did realize that a bullet or a fragment of shell could kill the man walking beside them.

But they were protected in many circumstances.

But your wider point is absolutely right, because, of course, early in 1918, the so-called Kaiserschlacht, the big German offensive, when they diverted the armies that had been freed up by the Russians going out of the war and transferred from the east to the west,

The Germans very nearly won, and that's months after Combré, you know.

And even after that, although by then the British and French and even Americans were all using tanks by mid-1918 on the Western Front, the idea that they were the sort of decisive instruments

in ending the First World War is overblown, I think.

The tank advocates fighting for money in the 1920s and 30s tried to argue that.

But the thing we learned from it is that the tank is fine and has its place, but it's got to be part of the picture, you know, the so-called combined arms, where you have the infantry, you have the field engineers maybe building a bridge for it or in some other way assisting its advance.

You have the artillery suppressing the people who might be trying to knock out the tank.

And you bring all these things together.

And then under the right circumstances, you know, there's an Australian major general quoted in the book who just said a few years ago when asked to review whether the Australian army still had a place for the tank, she said, a tank is like a dinner jacket.

You don't need it very often, but when you do, nothing else will do.

And that proves to be the lesson by the end of the First World War, I think.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you've set the scene rather well there.

I mean, yes, in the years after the war, but particularly those early years, grief-stricken nations scarred by the loss of hundreds of thousands of their soldiers.