Designation
The name of the tank was Schneider CA. The meaning of "CA" is uncertain. Later it was usually understood to mean Char d'Assaut (literally "chariot" and today the full French word for "tank"). For several reasons this interpretation is dubious. Firstly, the designation predates by some months the first known usage of char as "tank". Secondly, word order would be unusual: in French the normal order is Char d'Assaut Schneider. Thirdly, at the time the letter codes at the end were normally used to indicate consequent prototypes. We know the first army prototype based on a lengthened 75 hp Holt was called the Tracteur A, a second shortened Schneider prototype with tail the Tracteur B and that the type as produced was again different from that second prototype. It is plausible that the code means "third type" (C) in its first (A) production version; a further indication for this lies in the fact that it was not uncommon to use a reversed order: AC.
A gun-towing tractor (remorqueur), based on the CA chassis and produced in 1918, was designated Schneider CD, and a prototype porteur variant of it, intended to carry a heavy artillery piece, the CD3. This would seem to indicate that the CA suffix was merely a Schneider product code similar to those used by Renault.
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“In a period of a people’s life that bears the designation “transitional,” the task of a thinking individual, of a sincere citizen of his country, is to go forward, despite the dirt and difficulty of the path, to go forward without losing from view even for a moment those fundamental ideals on which the entire existence of the society to which he belongs is built.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)