The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made

2 Grenadiers

To serve in the Guards was to have a very specific experience of the war. They were socially élitist, officered by aristocrats or by those who aspired to be like aristocrats. They were also a combat élite. Robert Graves reported the view that the British army in France was divided into three equal parts: units that were always reliable, units that were usually reliable and unreliable units.1 The Guards were on his ‘always reliable’ list. They were introverted, especially so once an entire Guards division was created in 1915. A junior officer would rarely ever come into contact with a senior officer who was himself not a Guardsman. They had an unshakeable esprit de corps. They were envied by other units. James Stuart, Cranborne and Macmillan’s brother-in-law, who served with the Royal Scots, remembered that ‘the Guards were always regarded by the Regiments of the Line as spoilt darlings’.2

All this mattered. Although the experience of war was one of terrifying loneliness, to succeed one had to be part of a successful team. Seen from a distance, the industrialized slaughter of the Great War seemed to submerge the individual in the mass. Yet this was not the experience of the young officers. The mass was very distant: the platoon, the company, the battalion and especially the battalion officers were the points of reference that mattered. Combatants faced the terror of ‘men against fire’: caught in an artillery barrage or enfiladed by machine-guns, it did not matter whether a man was the best or worst soldier – survival was purely a matter of luck. Yet on other occasions success in close-quarters fighting rested on skill, strength and the will to prevail.

It mattered what one did and with whom. It also mattered when one joined the army. Those undergraduates who volunteered in 1914 reached the front in 1915. Although they were part of the process by which the army transformed itself from a small professional force into a ‘people’s army’, those in the Guards were inoculated against this experience. Many ‘hostilities only’ officers entered the Guards regiments, but ‘dilution’ was strictly limited: the Grenadier Guards had doubled in size from two to four battalions by 1915, but the process went no further for the rest of the war. The new Guards officers were, however, not insulated from the battles of 1915 and 1916. It was in these battles that the army grappled with the problem of how to fight a modern war. It was a bitter experience. Casualties were very high. Nearly 15 per cent of those officers who fought in the battles of 1915 died, nearly one quarter were wounded. Well over one quarter of those who had joined up from Oxford and Cambridge at the start of the war died.3 This cohort’s career as regimental infantry officers was effectively over by the end of the battle of the Somme in 1916.

The horrors of the Western Front were not, as it happened, at the forefront of the minds of four patriotic undergraduates in the first months of the war. Their anxieties were more about their social position in the struggle. Cranborne and Lyttelton had, as usual, a head start because of their connections. Cranborne’s father had a proprietary interest in the 4th Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment, which he himself had taken to South Africa to fight in the Boer War. Salisbury had promised Alfred Lyttelton on his deathbed that he would watch out for Oliver’s interests. He promised to fix commissions for his son and his ward as soon as possible. Little over a week after the outbreak of the war, Lyttelton and Cranborne handed in their applications for a commission.4 Cranborne invited Lyttelton and another friend, Arthur Penn, to Hatfield to await their call-up.5 They whiled away their time with shotguns. The juxtaposition of a shooting party as the preliminary to a war later caused them some grim amusement. Penn, invalided home, having been shot in both legs, wrote up his own game book as, ‘BEAT – Cour de l’Avoué: BAG – Self’.6

Despite Lord Salisbury’s patronage, the trio remained fearful that they would become trapped in the wrong part of the military machine. ‘We are having trouble about our commissions,’ Lyttelton wrote anxiously. ‘The War Office, gazetted six officers, all complete outsiders, yesterday to the Regiment and none of us. The Regiment is furious because they loathe having outsiders naturally, we are angry because it seems possible that we may be gazetted to K[itchener]’s army.’ Salisbury made a personal visit to the War Office and ‘raised hell’.7 The wait was made even more maddening for Lyttelton and Penn by Cranborne’s new-found enthusiasm for playing the mouth organ.8

Salisbury was able to secure commissions for his son and his son’s friends. They joined their regiment at Harwich. It seems the trio had originally intended to stay with the Bedfordshires: Salisbury had hoped that the battalion would be sent overseas as a garrison or to France as a second-echelon formation. This plan was abandoned as soon as it became clear that reserve formations like the Bedfordshire militia would be cannibalized to provide manpower for fighting formations. Cranborne and Lyttelton had ambivalent feelings about not being posted to a line infantry battalion. ‘I am sorry because I must fight,’ Lyttelton wrote, ‘and I am glad…because I should rather dislike going into a regiment – probably a bad one – in which I know no one.’9 On 12 November 1914 their chances of going to France as part of a battalion disappeared: ‘it was the most tragic sight,’ in Lyttelton’s view, ‘seeing three hundred of our best men leaving for the front…without a single officer of their own’.10 Rumours flew around the camp that the battalion would become little more than a training establishment. Lyttelton and Cranborne felt that any obligation they had had to stay with their regiment had been removed. Lord Salisbury had always kept up close links with the Guards, recruiting time-expired NCOs to provide the backbone of his own regiment. With this kind of backing it was relatively easy to effect a transfer. In December 1914 they were commissioned into the Grenadier Guards.

Although they were a little slower off the mark, Crookshank and Macmillan had similar experiences. Crookshank initially obtained a commission with the Hampshire Regiment.11 Then a ‘course of instruction at Chelsea’ gave him ‘furiously to think, and made me decide for a transfer into the Grenadier Guards, in spite of arguments on the part of the 12 Hants and offer of a captaincy’.12 While Lyttelton and Cranborne were at Harwich, Macmillan was at Southend with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. He too saw that his battalion would be used as a training establishment. His later recollection tallies so closely with Lyttelton’s experience that it has the ring of truth. He hung on, but ‘after Christmas [1914] was over and my twenty-first birthday approaching, I began to lose heart’. As Lyttelton and Cranborne had turned to Lord Salisbury to use his influence, so Macmillan ‘naturally’ turned to his mother: ‘I was sent for and interviewed by…Sir Henry Streatfeild [the officer commanding the Grenadiers’ reserve battalion in London],’ Macmillan recalled. ‘It was all done by influence.’13 Sir Henry had become an old hand at dispensing these ‘favours’. It must have seemed that virtually every English family with social influence and a son of military age was beating a path to his door.14

There were, however, few more decisive ways in which to emerge from the protective carapace of family influence than to join a front-line combat unit on the Western Front. The superior connections of Lyttelton and Cranborne gave them the first crack of the whip. They crossed to France together on 21 February 1915 and joined the 2nd Battalion, Grenadier Guards, on duty as part of the 4th Guards Brigade in northern France. They were immediately thrown into the classic pattern of battalion life: alternations between the trenches and billets behind the front line. The trenches they found themselves in were also typical of a quiet but active sector. Each side was using snipers and grenade throwers to harass the other and artillery shelled the positions intermittently.15

Beyond the physical dangers of trench warfare the most striking feature of their new world was the regimental ‘characters’. These were the regular officers who had joined the Guards in the late 1890s. Their years of peacetime soldiering had inculcated them with the proper Grenadier ‘attitude’. Promotion in peace had been glacially slow. At the time when the new arrivals encountered them they were still only captains or majors, the war being their chance for advancement. By the end of it those that survived were generals. They were attractive monsters, the ideals to which a new boy must aspire.

The second-in-command of the 2nd Battalion was ‘Ma’ Jeffreys, named for a popular madam of his subaltern days. A huge corvine presence, Jeffreys was known for his utter dedication to doing things the Grenadier way. He was a reactionary who regretted that the parvenu Irish and Welsh Guards were allowed to be members of the Brigade of Guards. It should be Star, Thistle and Grenade only in his view.16 E. R. M. Fryer, another Old Etonian, described by Lyttelton as the ‘imperturbable Fryer’, who joined the 2nd Battalion in May 1915, regretted that ‘Guardsmen aren’t made in a day and I was one of a very small number who joined the Regiment in France direct from another regiment without passing through the very necessary moulding process at Chelsea barracks’. He found himself being given special, and not particularly enjoyable, lessons by Jeffreys on how to be a Grenadier.’17 Jeffreys was considered to be ‘one of the greatest regimental soldiers’.18

Many years after the fact, Lyttelton admired Jeffreys as an example of insouciant courage. A runner was missing and Jeffreys, accompanied by his orderly ‘in full view of the enemy and in broad daylight, strode out to find him, and did find him. By some chance, or probably because the enemy had started to cook their breakfasts, he was not shot at. Such actions are not readily forgotten by officers or men, and the very same second-in-command, who had without any question risked his life…would have of course damned a young officer into heaps for halting his platoon on the wrong foot on the parade ground.’19 While he was serving with him, however, he admired him as a courageous realist: ‘He is exceedingly careful of his own safety,’ he noted in June 1915, ‘where precautions are possible, but where they are not courageous. Any risk where necessary, none where not.’ When his commanding officer was killed at Festubert, he showed no emotion: ‘after seven months in the closest intimacy with a man whom he liked, you might have thought that that man’s death by a bullet which passed through his own coat would have shaken him. Not at all.’20

‘Boy’ Brooke, who was brigade-major of the 4th Guards Brigade and later CO of the 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards, never spoke before luncheon. He treated his subordinates to ‘intimidating silences, when the most that could be expected was a curt order delivered between clenched teeth, derived from a slow acting digestion, which clothed the world in a bilious haze until the first glass of port brought a ray of sunshine’. After luncheon he was ‘charming, helpful and humorous’.21 Boy could take a dislike to a junior officer. One such, who was ‘rather over-refined and a fearful snob’, ‘should not’, he believed, ‘have found his way into the regiment’. Arriving at the end of a five-hour march, Brooke could not find his billeting party. Eventually the officer ‘emerged from an estaminet, and gave some impression of wiping drops of beer from his moustache. He came up and saluted, and not a Grenadier salute at that. His jacket was flecked with white at the back’ from sitting against the wall of the pub, ‘“Ay regret to inform you, Sir, that the accommodation in this village is quite inadequate”.’ To which Brooke replied, ‘“Is that any reason you should be covered with bird-shit?”’ and had him transferred.22

Lord Henry ‘Copper’ (he was red-haired and blue-eyed) Seymour and ‘Crawley’ de Crespigny, a family friend of the Cecils, were 2nd Battalion company commanders in 1915. Lord Henry had had to take leave of absence from the regiment because of his gambling debts. As a result he had been wounded early in the war while leading ‘native levies’ in Africa. He evaded a medical board and found his way to France. His wounds had not healed and needed to be dressed regularly by his subalterns. He was a notorious disciplinarian.

De Crespigny was also a fierce disciplinarian on duty but notoriously lax off duty with those he liked. He had been a well-known gentleman jockey, feared for having horse-whipped a punter who suggested he had thrown a race. Since his best friend was Lord Henry, he was known to treat officers with gambling debts lightly while damning anyone who reported any of them as a bounder. He suffered greatly with his stomach as a result of the alcoholic excess of his early years.23 ‘Hunting, steeplechasing, gambling and fighting were “Crawley’s” chief if not only interests’, remembered Harold Macmillan. Macmillan ‘never saw him read a book, or even refer to one. To all intents and purposes, he was illiterate.’ Even when ordered to desist, because they made him too visible, ‘Crawley’ always wore gold spurs.24

Whatever private thoughts Lyttelton and Cranborne had about their new life, they kept up a joking façade for their families back in England: ‘The worst of it is that the hotel is very bad,’ Lyttelton reported to Cranborne’s mother, ‘if (as Bobbety and I have hoped) we come to explore the fields of battle after the war with our respective families en masse we shall have to look elsewhere for lodging. By Jove how we shall “old soldier” you.’25 A ten-day stay in Béthune, punctuated by light-hearted ‘regimentals’, boxing matches and concert parties, was merely a prelude to more serious business.

On 10 March 1915 the 4th Guards Brigade marched north to take part in an attack around Neuve Chapelle. The attack proved to be a bloody disaster. Luckily for the new officers they did not take part. Twice the battalion prepared to go over the top but twice was ordered to stand down. Within their first three weeks at the front, Cranborne and Lyttelton experienced manning the front line, the off-duty regimental routine and the nightmarish possibilities of the offensive. The horrors of war were all too apparent. The battalion returned to trenches near Givenchy that were neither deep enough nor bulletproof. The experience was nerve-jangling. German artillery and mortar fire was effective against these trenches. On one occasion such fire was induced for frivolous reasons: the Prince of Wales visited the battalion and ‘tried his hand at sniping, and…there was an immediate retaliation’. The threat of mines was constant: ‘everyone was always listening for any sound’. In May the first reports of German gas attacks further north at Ypres arrived and there were desperate attempts to rig up makeshift respirators. The visible landscape was grim. ‘The village was a complete ruin, the farms were burnt, the remains of wagons and farm implements were scattered on each side of the road. This part of the country had been taken and re-taken several times, and many hundreds of British, Indian, French and German troops were buried here.’26

Givenchy was also their first sight of ‘war crimes’ or ‘Hun beastliness’. Anyone wounded in trench raids was hard to recover. The Germans fired at the stretcher bearers who tried to reach them. Cases occurred ‘of men being left out wounded and without food or drink four or five days, conscious all the time that if they moved the Germans would shoot or throw bombs at them. At night the German raiding parties would be sent out to bayonet any of the wounded still living.’ It is unclear whether the ‘beastliness’ was solely on the German side. Certainly by 1916 there were clear instances of the British refusing to take prisoners on the grounds that ‘a live Boche is no use to us or to the world in general’.27 Indeed, a memoir written by a private in the Scots Guards about his experiences later in the war was at the centre of German counter-charges in the 1920s about British ‘war crimes’. The private, Stephen Graham, reported that the ‘opinion cultivated in the army regarding the Germans was that they were a sort of vermin like plague-rats and had to be exterminated’. He provided an anecdote set near Festubert, where both Lyttelton and Cranborne fought: ‘the idea of taking prisoners had become very unpopular. A good soldier was one who would not take a prisoner.’28 Even leaving aside ‘war crimes’, the fighting was desperate and personal. Armar Corry, an Eton contemporary of Lyttleton and Cranborne, led a wire-cutting party that ran into a German patrol. Corry shot one of the Germans, as did his sergeant. His private threw a grenade. The German officer leading the patrol drew his pistol and shot Corry’s sergeant, corporal and private. With his entire party dead, Corry fled for his life.29

Whatever the extent of the brutalization Lyttelton and Cranborne were undergoing, they were certainly becoming cynical about their senior commanders. In March a printed order of the day arrived over the name of Sir Douglas Haig, who was immediately pronounced an ‘infernal bounder’. There was ‘much angry comment’ from the junior officers about Haig’s ‘bombastic nonsense’. Looking out from his trench, Lyttelton commented: ‘the attacks on Givenchy had failed…I know the position from which these attempts were launched and a more criminal piece of generalship you cannot imagine.’30 Five days after the launch of the Festubert offensive in May, Lyttelton wrote: ‘There is some depression among the officers at the great offensive…We are rather asking ourselves: if we can’t advance after that cannonade how are we to get through?’31

Their anger at and fear of the incompetence of the army commander was mitigated, however, by a continued belief in the superiority of the Guards. The Indian troops and the Camerons alongside whom they fought may have ‘showed the utmost gallantry in the attack, but their ways are not ours at other times. When it comes to bayonet work they are as courageous as we are, but they haven’t got the method, the care or the discipline to make good their gains, or show the same steadiness as the Brigade.’32 Lyttelton and Cranborne were also buoyed up by each other’s company. ‘I had a very amusing talk with Bobbety yesterday,’ Oliver wrote in April, ‘we nearly always have a good crack now and great fun it is. The more I see of him the more I like him.’ The two young men found themselves convulsed by laughter at the thought that the pictures on the date boxes they received in their food parcels looked exactly like the paintings of an ‘artistic’ acquaintance of theirs, Lady Wenlock.33

Although the Guards Brigade had seen plenty of action since Lyttelton and Cranborne joined their unit in February, it had been used as a support formation rather than an assault unit. The 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards was finally committed to lead an attack on 17 May 1915, eight days after the beginning of the battle of Festubert. Lyttelton and Cranborne had the chance of a brief conversation before the battle began. They were, Lyttelton wrote, ‘pretty cheerful as it was clear that we were in the course of wiping the eye of the rest of the army and justifying the German name of “the Iron Division”’.34 They began moving up at 3.30 in the morning in extremely difficult conditions. The Germans were shelling all the roads leading towards the trenches so the battalion had to move at snail’s pace in dispersed ‘artillery formation’ over open ground. Confusion reigned. ‘When it reached the supports of the front line, it was by no means easy to ascertain precisely what line the Battalion was expected to occupy. Units had become mixed as the…result of the previous attack, and it was impossible to say for certain what battalion occupied a trench, or to locate the exact front.’

It was not until late afternoon that the battalion started to move towards the actual front line. The route was clogged in mud and it was dark before they reached the front trenches. ‘The men had stumbled over obstacles of every sort, wrecked trenches and shell holes, and had finally wriggled themselves into the front line.’ The German trenches captured on the previous day which they passed over ‘were a mass of dead men, both German and British, with heads, legs and other gruesome objects lying about amid bits of wire obstacles and remains of accoutrements’.35 ‘It was a night,’ Lyttelton recalled a week later, ‘I shall never forget.’ The encounter with such carnage sickened him but ‘only turned me up for about ten minutes. After that,’ he admitted, ‘you cease to feel that you are dealing with what were once men…We were trying to drag a body out – it had no head – and I found by flashing a light that one of my fellows was standing on its legs. So I said, “Get off. How can we get it out if you stand on it, show some sense.” Then I flashed my light behind me and I found I had both feet on a German’s chest who had [been] nearly trodden right in.’36