Mistress “Razzle Dazzle”
A Rampageous, Self-Willed Old Thing Fondly Remembered by Her Non-Commander
Captain David Fallon is a young Irishman, but an old soldier. Before 1914 he had fought against the hillmen in India, and had won the Indian Field Medal. At the opening of the war he was physical instructor and bayonet drill master at the Royal Military College. So expert a teacher was he that the authorities decided to keep him at his post training new officers. Dave Fallon couldn’t “see it” that way. He remonstrated strenuously. There were other men—older men—professional soldiers, he insisted, just as capable of training men as he was. Anyway he couldn’t stay out of the “big fight.” He pointed to his long service record, his Frontier Medal. He would be more valuable at the front. The authorities finally gave in.
Fallon had no wild dreams of glory and distinction. “It is your amateur soldier,” he says, “who is most filled with such aspirations. Not that he hasn’t a right to entertain them, and try to act on them, for they have led many new-made soldiers into great and brave accomplishments. I don’t mean that such dreams are bad for a man. They are distinctly good. I only mean that with regulars soldiering is a cold, hard business and one isn’t given to enhancing it with romantic imaginings.”
Little did Fallon think when he was urging himself on the military authorities for active duty that when the war was over there would be few soldiers with adventures more thrilling and perilous than fell to his lot.
He went through the entire terrible campaign at Gallipoli. He was in numerous fierce trench battles. He served as an aerial observer, and fought enemy planes. On the road to Thiepval he had a shoulder smashed by shrapnel, but he remained in command of his men behind barricades made of the dead bodies around them in “No Man’s Land.” For twenty-two hours they kept the Germans off. Then reinforcements came. On scout duty he frequently penetrated German trenches and gun positions in the night. At last he was detected in the enemy trenches. A bomb duel ensued. He was frightfully injured but managed to escape.
These incidents and many others Captain Fallon relates in his book The Big Fight (W. J. Watt & Company). One of his most interesting chapters is devoted to his experience in command of a tank. It was an amazing adventure.
The Captain has fond memories of that good, old tank. “The dear girl was named ‘Razzle Dazzle,’” he says.
“She was very young, having been in service only three months, but rather portly. She weighed something over thirty tons. And in no way could you call the dear little woman pretty. She was a pallid gray and mud splashed when I got her and there was no grace in the bulging curves of her steel shape; or of her conical top; or her ponderous wheels.
“She showed every aspect of being a bad, scrappy, old dearie. The minute I saw her in her lovely ugliness I knew she would like trouble and lots of it. She carried a six hundred horsepower motor. And out of her gray steel hoods protruded eight guns.