Life in a Tank

In September 1916, the British Army unveiled a new weapon on the Somme: the tank. Three months later, Lieutenant Richard Haigh volunteered to climb inside one. This is his account of what followed. Haigh was no ordinary infantryman. He was among the first men to crew these lurching, unreliable iron beasts, and his memoir captures the peculiar horror and strange exhilaration of that experience. The training was brutal. The machines broke down constantly. The inside reeked of exhaust and fear. Yet something transformed those crews into something more than soldiers: pioneers of a warfare that had no rules and no guarantees. Haigh writes with the understated courage typical of his generation, never dwelling on heroism, simply telling what he saw and did. He describes the camaraderie that developed between officers and men cramped together in those claustrophobic hulls, the terrible accidents, the moments of black humor when a tank stalled in no-man's-land and the infantry pointed and laughed. This is not a grand narrative of the war. It is a ground-level portrait of a small group of men doing something no one had done before, in machines that might kill them as surely as any German shell.