Pushkin

As the night draws in and the fire blazes on the hearth, we warm the children by telling them stories.

The Hobbit teaches them not to leave the path, but my stories are for the education of the grownups.

And my stories are all true. I'm Tim Halford, gather close and listen to my cautionary tales.

The Hobbit teaches them not to leave the path, but my stories are for the education of the grownups.

The Hobbit teaches them not to leave the path, but my stories are for the education of the grownups.

August, 1916, the Western Front in the First World War.

The opposing armies had dug into entrenched positions, stretching 500 miles across France and Belgium from the mountains to the sea.

Barbed wire and machine guns meant that it was all but impossible for either side to advance.

The noble cavalry, long the most celebrated force in the army, were utterly useless. It was a murderous stalemate.

But a few miles behind the Allied lines, hundreds of people, both civilians and British and French army officers, had brought picnics and were waiting patiently for a demonstration of a remarkable invention.

It was a pleasantly warm day and a quiet spot if you tuned out the artillery of the Somme battlefield thundering away beyond the horizon.

Then another noise began to cut across that distant rumbling, the chug of a powerful engine, the relentless metallic clattering of caterpillar tracks carrying 28 tons of cannon and armour plating at a walking pace.

Everyone was talking in chatting when slowly came into sight the first tank I ever saw, not a monster, but a very graceful machine with beautiful lines, lozinshaped but with two clumsy looking wheels behind it.

That's Major JFC Fuller. He's the central figure in our story. He's 37, a small man with a neatly trimmed moustache.

His hairline is retreating over his crown and beginning to march down the back of his head. He could pass for a buckler and a costume drama.

But beneath the surface of JFC Fuller is an inner radicalism.

Not long ago he'd been friends with the notorious occultist Alistair Crowley. Crowley called himself a wizard.

One newspaper called him the wickedest man in the world.

Gavorting with self-proclaimed warlocks is not the typical social pastime of a British army officer. But as we'll see, that isn't even the strangest thing about the life and the fate of JFC Fuller.

Fuller sees instantly that this new machine, the tank, is the solution to the basic tactical problem of the war.

They've had to cross mad and trenches and barbed wire against a storm of bullets.

...