Explanation: The tank, when it was first revealed on the battlefield by British forces in 1916, was a massive shock to the German troops it was deployed against, who had no real counter prepared for them. The tank, combining an ability to crawl over even the grotesquely cratered terrain and trenches of WW1 with armor impenetrable to small-arms, was essentially only stopped by breakdowns and concentrated aerial bombing or artillery fire. If you were an infantryman at the ground in 1916 seeing one of those ugly beasts crawling towards you, your chances of survival were slim!
The French would criticize the Brits for deploying some two dozen of these tanks in 1916, as the French wanted to unleash an offensive in 1917 of literal hundreds of tanks with the same surprise effect. The revelation of the tank's existence allowed the Germans to develop countermeasures by the time the French launched their own tank assaults.