picture 57048

Mark IV Female, equipped with Lewis machine-guns, Ypres, July 1917. Trench crossing capabilities were relatively good due to the very large rhomboid tracks, but the power-to-weight ratio was so feeble that big slopes and deep craters proved impassable, and various solutions were tested. Among them a pair of very large arms (attached to the front), each fitted with a roller and a long “tadpole tail" at the rear, but both solutions proved costly and unpractical. A simpler idea proved successful: a pair of parallel rails, running over the roof, sustaining a very large fascine or an unditching beam. The fascine were also used to assault the antitank trenches of the Hindenburg line.