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Anyone who has read “Goodbye to All That” or “Memoirs of an Infantry Officer” will know how lightness of touch and deftness of language in describing the horror of the Western Front can hint at a worse horror, something unimaginable, unspeakable. “The Long Weekend” has the same quality. But it has an added element which focusses that horror into the cramped confines of an ungainly steel lozenge: the secret weapon, the battlefield monster, the tank. Bion was one of the earliest tank officers. His account of tank warfare gives “The Long Weekend” value as an historical source which Graves's and Sassoon's more self-consciously literary works somehow miss.
Bion sought out the tanks because they were secret. The first he saw at Bovington was larger than life: “A metallic hammering came from inside; a soldier got out and the day came to life again”. The machines came to dominate those who served them. Where other junior officers were concerned with their men, tank officers had to be concerned with their machines. They would lay white tapes to guide these short-sighted monsters into battle; walk in front probing the ground for softness with an ash-plant; perform prodigies of heroism in trying to rescue them from the mud of no-man's-land. Tanks had names, and sex. Those with 6 pounder guns were Males; those with just machine guns, Females. The original prototype, Little Willie, fathered a line which began with Mother, a Mark I Male. Given his later career, Bion's refusal to tangle with this curiously confused sexual symbolism is a mark of his exemplary control. He himself served exclusively in Male tanks.
Like every tank officer, Bion had to risk men to save his machine. When he reached the front in 1917 his first action was an attack on a strong point on the Passchendaele battle front. The tank ditched in the mud. After fending off the questions of the intelligence officer, Clough Williams-Ellis (who later built the fantasy village of Portmeirion), about the point at which th