“To begin with, the account turned out to be very interesting, but then on the ground, it turned out to be a lot more hazy because I couldn’t see a thing.” The amateur historian persevered nevertheless. “It’s as if I had been given a treasure map,” Gorczynski says. Intrigued, the hotel owner and Great War enthusiast took up the search. An elderly lady remembered a tank that might have been buried in the area.
But in the early 1990s, Philippe Gorczynski, a resident of the region, heard a rumour. The tank’s carcass would rest on the spot until the end of the war, but British engineers sweeping the battlefield in 1919 wound up burying her away underground in an enormous pit.įor decades, Deborah was out of sight and out of mind, forgotten beneath the surface. Hit by a shell, the British tank was neutralised. But in the village of Flesquières, where Deborah was located, German fighters were resisting with zeal.
The element of surprise worked and the Tank Corps broke through. At 6:20am, along a 10km-long front, 476 tanks set forth towards German frontlines. It was the first time the British made massive use of tanks, a technology then in its infancy. On November 20, 1917, this British Mark IV tank – a “Female” model, equipped exclusively with machine guns – took part in an unprecedented offensive. Deborah is one of the very last direct witnesses to the Battle of Cambrai.
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