Tanks: a regiment of monsters

British Mark 1 Tank

“Never since the dawn of time had there been such a perversion of knowledge to criminal purposes; never had science contributed such a deadly toll to the fanatic and criminal intentions of a war-crazed class.”

--Francis March, History of the World War, 1919 

On September 15, 1916, the British Army recorded the first use in battle of a newly developed weapon: the tank.  Originally known as a land battleship, the term tank was adopted to preserve secrecy during the development of the armored vehicles (factory workers had noted their resemblance to steel water tanks). 

Writing shortly after the war’s end in 1919, American historian Francis March explained, “Originally this was a caterpillar tractor invented in America and adopted in England.  At first these were of two varieties, the male, carrying heavy guns only, and the females, equipped with machine guns…. All the tanks were heavily armored and had as their motto the significant words “Treat ‘Em Rough” (217).

With the introduction of poison gas, gas masks, and heavy artillery shells that obliterated forests and churned the earth, the Western Front had already assumed the appearance of a nightmare. Tanks added another surreal beast to the landscape.  While serving with the French army at the Somme, Anglo-American nurse Mary Borden described the new “regiment of monsters.”

The Hill

From the top of the hill I looked down on the beautiful, the gorgeous, the super-human and monstrous landscape of the superb exulting war.

There were no trees anywhere, nor any grasses or green thickets, nor any birds singing, nor any whisper or flutter of any little busy creatures.

There was no shelter for field mice or rabbits, squirrels or men.

The earth was naked and on its naked body crawled things of iron.

It was evening. The long valley was bathed in blue shadow and through the shadow, as if swimming, I saw the iron armies moving.

And iron rivers poured through the wilderness that was peopled with a phantom iron host.

Lights gleamed down there, a thousand machine eyes winked.

The sun was setting, gilding the smooth crests of the surging hills. The red tents clustering on their naked yellow sides were like scarlet flowers burning in a shining desert of hills.

Against the sunset, along the sharp edge of a hill, a strange regiment was moving in single file, a regiment of monsters.

They moved slowly along on their stomachs,

Dragging themselves forward by their ears.

Their great encircling ears moved round and round like wheels.

They were big and very heavy and heavily armoured.

Obscene crabs, armoured toads, big as houses,

They moved slowly forward, crushing under their bellies whatever stood in their way.

A flock of aeroplanes was flying home, a flight of wild ducks with iron wings.

They passed over the monstrous regiment with a roar and disappeared.

I looked down, searching for a familiar thing, a leaf, a tuft of grass, a caterpillar; but the ground dropped away in darkness before my feet, that were planted on a heap of stones.

A path, the old deserted way of cattle, showed below beyond the gaping caverns of abandoned dug-outs, where men had once lived underground.  And along the path a German prisoner was stumbling, driven by a black man on a horse.

The black man wore a turban, and he drove the prisoner before him as one drives an animal to market.

These three—the prisoner, the black man and the horse—seemed to have wandered into the landscape by mistake. They were the only creatures of their kind anywhere.

Where had they come from and where were they going in that wilderness of iron with night falling?
The German stumbled on heavily beneath the nose of his captor’s horse. I could see the pallid disc of his face thrust forward, and the exhausted lurching of his clumsy body.

He did not look to the right or left, but watching him I saw him trip over a battered iron helmet and an old boot that lay in his way.

Two wooden crosses showed just ahead of him, sticking out of the rough ground.

The three passed in silence.

They passed like ghosts into the deepening shadow of the valley, where the panorama of invisible phantom armies moved, as if swimming.

And as I watched I heard the faint music of bagpipes, and thought that I heard the sound of invisible men marching.

The crests of the naked hills were still touched with gold.

Above the winking eyes of the prodigious war the fragile crescent of the moon floated serene in the perfect sky.

                        --Mary Borden

The scene Borden describes resembles one of the terrifying medieval visions painted by Hieronymus Bosch.  In Borden's poem, across the naked body of the earth crawl “things of iron.” The armored tanks are unnatural creatures that lurch forward like “obscene crabs” or “armoured toads, big as houses,” and they mercilessly crush “under their bellies” whatever stands in their path.

Hieronymous Bosch, Hell
from "The Garden of Earthly Delights

The machines appear more alive than the three living creatures, “the prisoner, the black man, and the horse,” who seem to have unwittingly stumbled into this unimaginable landscape of war. This solitary group passes “like ghosts” into the darkening twilight and joins the “invisible phantom armies,” the hosts of men who are marching forward to face death or who are returning from the front-line trenches numb and exhausted by the horrors they have witnessed.

Men are reduced to phantoms and natural life has disappeared: not a leaf, tuft of grass, or caterpillar remains on the battlefield, only heaps of stones and wooden crosses that mark the graves of the dead.

The industrialized war has taken on a mechanized life of its own, its terrors worse than anything science fiction could imagine.  It is a “superb, exulting war” in which airplanes soar like “wild ducks with iron wings,” and “a thousand machine eyes" wink as the tanks blankly rumble forward, emotionless and cruel. 

Mary Borden

Mary Borden’s poem “The Hill” appeared in her book of sketches and poems The Forbidden Zone.  In the preface to the book Borden wrote, “The sketches and poems were written between 1914 and 1918, during four years of hospital work with the French Army….I have dared to dedicate these pages to the Poilus who passed through our hands during the war, because I believe they would recognize the dimmed reality reflected in these pictures.  But the book is not meant for them.  They know, not only everything that is contained in it, but all the rest that can never be written.”

Song of the Mud

TW Culbertson's photo of the Western Front

While few have heard of Mary Borden -- a nurse, memoirist, and poet of the First World War --  the mud she writes about is one of the most iconic images of the war.  Born in Chicago, Borden graduated from Vassar and married a Scotsman.  When he joined the British army in 1914, she volunteered her services with the Red Cross and was working in a military hospital in Belgium by January of 1915, despite having three children (the youngest who had been born in November).  

In a series of haunting and richly descriptive short vignettes, she writes of her hospital work in Belgium and on the Somme (where the hospital was so close to the front lines that it was in bombarded by artillery fire).  

She attempted to publish her writing as a short memoir titled The Forbidden Zone in 1917, but British authorities censored the book and halted publication, concerned that it would damage morale.  The Forbidden Zone was finally published in 1929.  Borden explained that the book's fragmentary quality was her attempt to reflect the brokenness of the war experience.  The Forbidden Zone is one of my favorite memoirs of all time -- beautiful, haunting, and unforgettable. In the vignette “Belgium,” Borden writes, “Mud: and a thin rain coming down to make more mud.  Mud:  with scraps of iron lying in it and the straggling fragments of a nation, lolling, hanging about in the mud on the edge of disaster.”  

photo by TW Culbertson

Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory provides soldiers’ accounts of the mud:  Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother from his posting at the Somme in early 1917, “The waders are of course indispensable.  In 2 ½ miles of trench which I waded yesterday there was not one inch of dry ground.  There is a mean depth of two feet of water.” Another soldier wrote in his diary, “Water knee deep and up to the waist in places.  Rumors of being relieved by the Grand Fleet” (48).   Borden’s poem "Song of the Mud" communicates the sights, sounds, smells, and agonies of that morass. 

It is a wonderful poem for reading out loud. In the tradition of Walt Whitman and his poem “Song of Myself,” Borden’s “Song of the Mud” strings together phrases that repeat, getting stuck and unstuck as they vividly paint shifting scenes:  the sodden lanes, the sunken trenches, and the sludge of No Man’s Land, viewed from different angles and perspectives. 

The Song of the Mud

This is the song of the mud, 

The pale yellow glistening mud that covers the hills like satin; 

The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys; 

The frothing, squirting, spurting, liquid mud that gurgles along the road beds; 

The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under the hoofs of the horses; 

The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone. 

This is the song of the mud, the uniform of the poilu. 

His coat is of mud, his great dragging flapping coat, that is too big for him and too heavy; 

His coat that once was blue and now is grey and stiff with the mud that cakes to it. 

This is the mud that clothes him. His trousers and boots are of mud, 

And his skin is of mud; 

And there is mud in his beard. 

His head is crowned with a helmet of mud. 

He wears it well. 

He wears it as a king wears the ermine that bores him. 

He has set a new style in clothing; 

He has introduced the chic of mud. 

This is the song of the mud that wriggles its way into battle. 

The impertinent, the intrusive, the ubiquitous, the unwelcome, 

The slimy inveterate nuisance, 

That fills the trenches, 

That mixes in with the food of the soldiers, 

That spoils the working of motors and crawls into their secret parts, 

That spreads itself over the guns, 

TW Culbertson's photo,  ambulance drivers
(Paul Borda Kurtz in foreground)

That sucks the guns down and holds them fast in its slimy voluminous lips, 

That has no respect for destruction and muzzles the bursting shells; 

And slowly, softly, easily, 

Soaks up the fire, the noise; soaks up the energy and the courage; 

Soaks up the power of armies; 

Soaks up the battle. 

Just soaks it up and thus stops it. 

This is the hymn of mud –  the obscene, the filthy, the putrid, 

The vast liquid grave of our armies. It has drowned our men. 

Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead. 

Our men have gone into it, sinking slowly, and struggling and slowly disappearing. 

Our fine men, our brave, strong, young men; 

Our glowing red, shouting, brawny men. 

Slowly, inch by inch, they have gone down into it, 

Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence. 

Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them down, 

And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud. 

Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them! 

Under its smooth glistening surface it is hiding them blandly. 

There is not a trace of them. 

There is no mark where they went down.

 The mute enormous mouth of the mud has closed over them.

 This is the song of the mud,

 The beautiful glistening golden mud that covers the hills like satin; 

The mysterious gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys. 

Mud, the disguise of the war zone; 

Mud, the mantle of battles; 

Mud, the smooth fluid grave of our soldiers: 

This is the song of the mud.

There's a strange beauty in the mud: it is “glistening,” “gleaming,” and “silvery,” like satin or ermine.  Sometimes it is playful --“frothing” and “squirting” as it “wiggles,” and sometimes it is as homey and domestic as bread that is “kneaded” and “squeezed.”  

Yet this is the “disguise of the war zone,” for beneath the surface, the mud is a sinister devourer, with “slimy voluminous lips,” a “mute enormous mouth” and a “monstrous distended belly.”  This is the stuff of nightmares. 

There is a dark humor in the poem (the soldiers have “introduced the chic of the mud” as it clings to their hair, their clothing, their bodies), but the poem's somber message is much like Wilfred Owen’s in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Beauty and glory are the mythical appearances of the war, but just underneath the surface of these lies and disguises are suffering,  nightmares, and futile deaths.  

Mary Borden