One of them, after flattening a wide passage through the wire fields for the advance of the infantry, had clambered across the trench.

At our feet were the grooved marks of the descent, and we could follow them through the incredible rise on the further side; after which the protected monster--of much lighter build, however, than his predecessors on the Somme--seemed to have run north and south along the trench, silencing the deadly patter of the machine guns; while its fellow on the west side, according to its tracks at least, had also turned south, for the same purpose.
The Hindenburg line!--and the two tanks! The combination, indeed, suggests the whole story of that final campaign in which the British Army, as the leading unit in a combination of armies brilliantly led by a French Generalissimo whom all trusted, brought down the military power of Germany.

There were some six weeks of fighting after the capture of the Hindenburg line; but it was that capture--"the essential part" of the whole campaign, to use Marshal Haig's words--to which everything else was subordinate, which, in truth, decided the struggle.
And the tanks are the symbol at once of the general strategy and the new tactics, by which Marshal Foch and Sir Douglas Haig, working together as only great men can, brought about this result, bettered all that they had learned from Germany, and proved themselves the master minds of the war.

For the tanks mean _surprise_--_mobility_--the power to break off any action when it has done its part, and rapidly to transfer the attack somewhere else.

Behind them, indeed, stood all the immense resources of the British artillery--guns of all calibres, so numerous that in many a great attack they stood wheel to wheel in a continuous arc of fire.