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

In his letters home Churchill gave a vivid picture of the brutal war fought by the Grenadiers in the winter of 1915. ‘Ten grenadiers under a kid went across by night to the German Trench which they found largely deserted or waterlogged,’ he informed his wife, instructing her for obvious reasons to keep this account to herself.

They fell upon a picket of Germans, beat the brains out of two of them with clubs & dragged a third home triumphantly as a prisoner. The young officer by accident let off his pistol & shot one of his own Grenadiers dead: but the others kept this secret and pretended it was done by the enemy – do likewise. The scene in the little dugout when the prisoner was brought in surrounded by these terrific warriors, in jerkins and steel helmets with their bloody clubs in hand – looking pictures of ruthless war – was one to stay in the memory. C’est tres bon.81

So many regular Guards officers were killed at Loos that ‘even old-fashioned Guardsmen became convinced’ that the ‘patriots’ would have to be used to fill junior command positions: ‘from this time onwards’, noted the official history, ‘the battalions of the Guards Division were officered to a large extent by officers of the Special Reserve with very short training behind them’.82 Lyttelton was one of the first ‘beneficiaries’ of this policy.83 He had never really become comfortable as Cavan’s ADC. Cavan’s other ADC was his brother-in-law, Cuthbert Headlam, who was a good deal older than Lyttelton. Lyttelton was thus very much the youngest and most junior member of the divisional team.84 There was ‘nothing very much to do but fuss about horses and motor cars’. He was thus sanguine when it became clear that his position on the staff was untenable. When the adjutant of the 3rd Battalion went sick with varicose veins in the middle of the battle for Loos, Lyttelton was offered the chance to take his place. ‘It was,’ he admitted, ‘rather unpleasant leaving our comfortable chateau especially as I knew that we were for the trenches and probably for a push…it was certainly not cheering.’85 The offer was, however, too good an opportunity to miss, since he ‘should anyway [have] had to return to duty with the Grenadiers as their losses have been so severe as to amount almost to irreparable’. He consoled his mother with the thought that ‘an Adjutant is far safer than a company officer’.86

To become adjutant of a Guards battalion was quite a promotion. The adjutant was the senior captain in the battalion and in charge of its day-to-day organization. He acted as the staff officer to the commanding officer and was third-in-command in battle. The opportunities for promotion opened up both by casualties and the winnowing out of less forceful officers piqued the ambition of the army’s ‘thrusters’. Although this was really a game for regulars who could aspire to higher command positions, Lyttelton caught the bug. From late 1915 onwards his letters are as much about his ambitions and disappointments concerning further promotion as they are about the routine of trench warfare. He was turning into a first-class ‘thruster’.

The importance of being a ‘thruster’ was brought home to Lyttelton when he arrived at the 3rd Battalion. This was a world away from Jeffreys’s élite 2nd Battalion in which Lyttelton had been schooled. ‘I never realized till that day,’ he wrote after a month with his new unit, ‘how good the 2nd Battalion were.’87 Like the 4th Battalion, the 3rd had been badly mauled at Loos. Only six officers had survived the battle and Lyttelton did not find them an impressive group: ‘I knew some of them but was not writing home about them.’ ‘They were all in a state of “Isn’t it awful” and doing very little to make it less so.’88 As one of those officers later confirmed, ‘I think we felt a bit dazed and were glad enough when we were relieved [in the front line].’ The situation was no better among the other ranks. The battalion had been severely weakened in the summer of 1915 when it had been ‘skinned’ of some of its best NCOs to create the 4th Battalion. After Loos most of the remaining experienced NCOs and nearly 400 men were dead and had been replaced by new drafts.89

The worst problem by far, it so happened, was the commanding officer. Lieutenant-Colonel Noel ‘Porkie’ Corry was the senior battalion commander in the brigade. He had specifically requested Lyttelton’s assignment to his battalion. Corry’s son, Armar, had not only been at Eton with Lyttelton but had also served with him in the 2nd Battalion, where he gained the reputation of an audacious trench raider, finally falling victim to a severe face wound during the pre-Loos skirmishing of August 1915. He was to lose his life at the Somme in 1916. Corry père was another matter entirely. Behind the lines he cut quite a dash.90 The trenches, however, had broken his nerve. He was an incompetent, a coward and a drunkard.91 Even worse for Lyttelton, he was desperately trying to deny his inadequacies both to himself and to his superiors by blaming others for the shortcomings of his unit. The situation was excruciatingly dangerous. Like the 2nd Battalion, the 3rd was expected to undertake aggressive skirmishing. Such operations were potentially deadly enough when carried out by brilliant young ‘thrusters’ under the command of equally brilliant officers like Jeffreys; they were doubly so when run by incompetents. Just before Lyttelton arrived, the battalion had been surprised by a German attack as they ham-fistedly tried to change over forward companies. ‘The Germans had got possession of the whole battalion’s front’ and had to be ejected by the Coldstream Guards.92

As the 3rd Battalion moved back into the trenches near Loos Lyttelton’s heart sank. The manoeuvre was carried out in a farcical manner. Porkie was ‘rather like a monkey on hot bricks and one could see he was no good’. He didn’t seem to know what his battalion was doing and blamed everybody else for the confusion. He fastened on to the problem of sandbags. ‘It was so simple,’ noted a frustrated Lyttelton, ‘send a party for sandbags with an officer and let them follow us up the trench. Meanwhile let us go on. But he would have it that the whole battalion should go off and get the sandbags…come back and go on.’ Lyttelton was forced to stand in a trench arguing with his commanding officer. His arguments prevailed but they wasted precious time, moving neither forwards nor backwards, until the Germans started to shell their communications trench. As Lyttelton noted viciously: ‘this bit of shelling put the wind up Porkie’ and all talk of sandbags was abandoned in the rush to a safer position.93

Things became even worse when the battalion was given the chance to ‘recover its name’ by carrying out a bombing attack on ‘Little Willie’, on one of the flanks of the formidable German strongpoint known as the Hohenzollern Redoubt. Before the attack could go in, the battalion was ordered to dig a trench over to the Coldstreams to ensure that grenades could be moved up quickly and safely enough to keep the attack going. Lyttelton soon realized that Corry was in no hurry to push on with work on the trench since once it was completed the battalion would have to go ‘over the top’ on its raid. Lyttelton decided that ‘if anything was to be done I should have to command the Battalion’. Although he was ‘enjoying myself beyond measure’ at the taste of command, he could not persuade his fellow officers to speed up the sapping by taking the risk of climbing out of the trench and digging over ground at night. ‘This was awful,’ he realized, ‘because Porkie has got a poorish reputation for ability and is supposed to be likely to cart you.’ He had taken responsibility and now risked being made a scapegoat for failure. Since the trench was not finished in time the Coldstreams had to step in once more and carry out the operation for the Grenadiers. Lyttelton ‘could have cried with chagrin and disappointment’. He had never been ‘so bitterly despondent as I was that morning’. It was more ‘loss of name to the battalion’.94 The post-mortem was equally depressing. The captain who had been digging the trench had in fact ‘carted’ Corry to John Ponsonby, the commander of the 2nd Guards Brigade, before Corry could blame anyone else. Corry ‘looked grey and hopelessly rattled and walked up and down swearing, accusing, excusing, asking me questions no-one could answer like a child. “Do you think the Brigadier thinks”…“It’s all the fault of the Coldstreams, they didn’t help”.’ Then the word came down the line that the brigadier was not particularly worried by the trench-digging fiasco, ‘which restored Porkie’s morale at once’.95 At the next opportunity he got ‘very tight, and began to talk the most awful rot’.96

The wake-up call of the failed bombing operation did nothing to make Corry change his ways. He always seemed to find routes to avoid action. All he did was waste time by looking through a periscope, claiming ‘he can see Germans everywhere’. His boasting was incessant: ‘if he goes up alone, which is rare’, Lyttelton complained, ‘he always comes back having had the narrowest shave and having behaved with the utmost coolness’. The drinking continued to get worse, often leaving him incapable by the afternoon. He claimed credit for work done by his subordinate officers. To add insult to injury, Lyttelton noticed with the eye of an experienced gambler, he even cheated at poker.97

The commanding officer and adjutant of an infantry battalion perforce had an intimate relationship. Pressed daily into close contact with Corry, Lyttelton came to loathe him. While enjoying the increased responsibility thrust on his shoulders, he was placed in a dilemma. ‘I wish to heaven he would be sent home but all the time I have to work to keep him on the job and not let him flout.’ He began to despair that his superiors had not noticed Corry’s incompetence clearly enough to relieve him of his command. By December he had made up his mind that he would ‘cart’ Corry as soon as he made a mistake that was clear and important enough to be laid at his door.98 He rightly suspected that Corry was not the only one being blamed for the battalion’s plight. Many of the other junior officers in the battalion thought he himself was ‘too casual and conceited’.99 He was, they charged, a ‘bully and a toady’.100 What he thought of as a difficult balancing act they saw as sucking up. A badly run unit was corrosive of relationships on all levels.

Fortunately for Lyttelton’s reputation, the standards of the Brigade of Guards had not in fact slipped as much as he was coming to believe. Even without his dropping his commanding officer in the soup, senior officers had noticed that Corry was not up to the job. He was an old comrade of many of them, but he had to go. At the turn of the year, as Lyttelton was settling in to bear the same yoke he had carried through the autumn and winter of 1915, suddenly Corry was gone and Lyttelton found himself in temporary command of the battalion. Within days Ma Jeffreys arrived in a black temper. He had been confidently expecting promotion and command of a Guards brigade.101 ‘I hate,’ he confided to his diary, ‘going to yet another temporary job, but I am told that it is in the best interests of the Regiment and I am expected to “pull the battalion through”.’102 A brisk tour of inspection suggested that the situation was not as black as had been thought. Corry really had been the main problem. After parading each company and talking to every officer, Jeffreys came to the conclusion that ‘there is nothing much wrong except inexperience and that they are a bit “down on their luck”’. He was particularly complimentary about Lyttelton. His former subaltern had, he noted, ‘the qualities to make a good’ adjutant. In particular he had ensured that ‘the system of the Regiment is being carried out and all want to do their best’.103 The warmth was reciprocated. ‘Ma was wonderful,’ wrote a relieved and delighted Lyttelton. ‘As soon as he found there was nothing very wrong he cheered up enormously.’104 In fact Jeffreys found that after his initial pep-up the battalion did not need the special attention of a senior officer and he turned the unit over to Boy Brooke. After some difficult months, Lyttelton now found himself once more in an élite formation.

Lyttelton was becoming a valuable asset to the army. All too few of those volunteer officers who had gained experience in 1915 were still at their posts at the beginning of 1916. As the 1916 campaigning season approached, the army therefore started to comb through its sick lists to identify officers fit enough to be sent back to France. Cranborne, Crookshank and Macmillan were each examined by medical boards, though with somewhat different results. While Macmillan, with his hand wound, and Crookshank, with his leg wound, were declared fit for service on the Western Front, Cranborne was passed as fit only for light duties.105 His services as an ADC had already been requested by the commander of the reserve centre in Southern Command.106 Although he was refused this dignity by a tetchy personnel officer in the War Office, he was allowed to join the general as an unpaid orderly.107 Thus Cranborne departed for Swanage while Macmillan and Crookshank headed back to the 2nd Battalion in the Ypres salient.

Crookshank was delayed at Le Havre. Like Macmillan the year before, he was caught up in the growing technological sophistication of the British Army. Whereas Macmillan was a bombing officer, Crookshank now became a Lewis gun officer. The Lewis gun was a relatively portable machine-gun designed by an American for the Belgians and brought from there to Birmingham in 1914. By the start of 1916 large numbers were being issued to infantry companies.108 The Lewis gun went some way to compensating for the decline in musketry standards which affected the whole army as long-service professionals were replaced by volunteers and finally by conscripts.109 Crookshank was even so less than delighted with his new role. After his Lewis gun course he ‘knew as little at the end as at the beginning’.110 He found it hard to drop into the role of the ‘old soldier’. He was ‘getting rather bored with some of our more stupid brother officers’.111 Giving a series of lectures on the trench attack to new arrivals, he felt a complete fraud, ‘knowing nothing about it’.112 He even managed to miss duties with badly blistered feet caused by wearing natty but insubstantial pure silk socks.113

Macmillan would have been glad to stay on the coast with Crookshank. He looked forward to their new posting with dread.114 Indeed, Macmillan’s rebaptism of fire was brutal. Under the command of Crawley de Crespigny, Macmillan’s new battalion was still taking a robust view of its aggressive role in the trenches. On Good Friday 1916 he found himself in charge of a platoon, in an exposed trench near Ypres, completely cut off from other British forces. He could reach neither the unit on his left nor right. The communications trench to his rear was too dangerous to use in daylight, so he could not even contact the rest of his company. His only solace was reading the Passion in Luke’s Gospel. He was cold, lonely and frightened and ‘already calculating the days till my first leave’.115

By early 1916 Lyttelton had sloughed off any hint of boyishness. He was an experienced soldier who had had responsibility beyond his years thrust upon him. His letters home were detailed, hard-edged and often cynically funny. Macmillan, on the other hand, retained a certain pompous innocence: he didn’t ‘know why I write such solemn stuff’ but write it he did. The army possessed that ‘indomitable and patient determination, which has saved England over and over again’. It was ‘prepared to fight for another 50 years if necessary until the final object is attained’. The war was not just a war, it was ‘a Crusade’: ‘I never see a man killed but think of him as a martyr.’116 He found the words of the French high command at Verdun – resist to the last man, no retreat, sacrifice is the key to victory – so stirring that he copied them into his field pocketbook. Whereas Lyttelton had felt the prick of ambition, Macmillan had to deflect his mother’s demands that he should get on. His ambition was to survive and ‘get command of a company some day’, though he disparaged his mother’s wish that he should get out of the front line to ‘join the much abused staff’.117

Macmillan and Crookshank were finally united in mid June near Ypres. Crookshank had slowly made his way to the battalion in an ‘odd kind of procession’, braving the danger of inadequate messing facilities, ‘perfectly abominable…a disgrace to the Brigade’.118 Each was delighted to see the other. If they had to be in this awful place, it was at least some solace to tackle the task ahead with your closest friend. They immediately became tent-mates.119 Crookshank was assigned to his old platoon: ‘rather like going to school after the holidays seeing so many of the old faces after the long absence’.120 Crookshank believed he had done rather well in the battalion the previous year and was much less self-deprecating than Macmillan about his chances of promotion. He was thus ‘very annoyed and disappointed’ when both of them were transferred into 3 Company under the command of another subaltern, Nils Beaumont-Nesbitt.121 In early July they went into the ‘Irish Farm’, ‘one of the worst positions [the battalion] had been in’. It offered 1,300 yards of ‘trenches’ that were ‘mainly shell holes full of water with no connecting saps, constant casualties and back-breaking work.’122 Raymond Asquith described it as ‘the most accursed, unholy and abominable place I have ever seen, the ugliest, filthiest most fetid and most desolate – craters swimming in blood, dirt, rotting and swelling bodies and rats like shadows…limbs…resting in the hedges’. The aspect that disturbed him most was ‘the supernaturally shocking scent of death and corruption [so] that the place simply stank of sin and all Floris could not have made it sweet’.123

Crookshank escaped the worst by being sent on a Lewis gun course at Étaples, ‘mechanism cleaning and stripping (I did but very slowly)’, although he encountered another mess that was the ‘absolute limit – had some words with the CO on the subject of servants, went to dine at the Continental’.124 Crookshank was a fusspot. He liked things just so. His doting mother made sure that he was never short of funds to make himself comfortable. As a result his girth was beginning to swell. He was lucky to have in such close attendance Macmillan, who always appreciated the waspish humour with which he leavened his perpetual moaning. Although Crookshank’s undoubted bravery won him friends, he could be an irritating companion in those trying circumstances.

Macmillan himself, on the other hand, having had little opportunity to shine during his last spell at the front, ‘made his name’ from the battalion’s unpromising position. On 19 July he led two men on a scouting patrol in no man’s land. They managed to get quite near the German line, but then ran into some German soldiers digging a sap. A German threw a grenade, the explosion from which wounded Macmillan in the face. One of his men was also wounded and they struggled back to the British lines.125 Macmillan’s wound was serious enough for him to have left the battalion, but he refused to do so out of a mixture of bravado and opportunism piqued by Crookshank’s more militant attitude to promotion. ‘My first duty is to the Regiment which I have the honour to serve,’ he decided, ‘and not only are we very short of officers of any experience just now…but I was told confidentially by the Adjutant the other day that the commanding officer would probably give me command of the next company vacant, when I had had a little more experience of trench work.’ Macmillan was mentioned in dispatches for his bravery, but more immediately he basked in the good opinion of de Crespigny, who ‘was pleased with me for staying’.126

They all nevertheless knew that these skirmishes in Flanders were a mere sideshow, overshadowed by ‘der Tag – the first day of the great Fourth Army and French push’ on the Somme, leagues away to the south.127 As far as they could tell, ‘the Somme seems to be progressing favourably, if slowly and methodically’. They were all too aware that ‘the casualties have been very heavy’.128 In fact the first and indeed subsequent days of the Somme offensive were a bloody disaster. As the Guards Division was sent marching south, GHQ acknowledged that the loss of men was unsustainable. The Fourth Army would revert to a ‘wearing out’ battle until the ‘last reserves’, of which the Guards were part, could be thrown into a renewed ‘decisive’ attack in mid September.129 News of these disasters soon filtered down to the junior officers and undermined their initial optimism.130 One subaltern in their company was court-martialled for sending an ‘indiscreet’ letter, opened by the censors, criticizing the staff. It was rumoured that this letter was the reason why King George had not inspected the battalion when he visited the Guards at the beginning of August. It was noted that the Prince of Wales, so obvious a presence the previous year, was no longer anywhere to be seen near the battalion.131

On the road Crookshank and Macmillan ‘were having very amusing conversations’. The northern part of the Somme battlefield was even ‘quite a nice change after Ypres’. There was a ‘wonderful view all round especially of the Thiepval plateau’, which they observed for hours. The trenches were very good. Crookshank and Macmillan were even allocated their own dugout, although it proved to be less than a blessing, located at ‘the end of a communications trench junction and well shelled’. They abandoned it after only one night.132 Indeed, it was at night that they had time to mull over the grimness of their situation. Sitting in their shared tent, they were ‘frightfully depressed’ by the fact that their ‘most intimate circle [had been] killed in the push, it’s enough to make anybody feel very sad’. Crookshank was particularly upset by the death of his ‘great friend’ at Magdalen, Pat Harding. Harding, a ‘great Oxford friend’ of Macmillan as well, had already risen to rank of major in a Scottish regiment before he was killed. Not only was the war cruel, it was insidious. Arthur Mackworth, for instance, a young classics tutor who had taught Crookshank at Magdalen, and who escaped the front after being transferred from the Rifle Brigade to the War Office Intelligence Department because of a heart condition, was so tormented by insomnia that he shot himself dead.

They had little time to dwell on these tragedies: they were soon in the midst of a major training programme that continued throughout August and into September to prepare the Fourth Army for its second great push on the Somme. Something of the kind had been tried before Loos, but this was on a much bigger scale. The Fourth Army tried to learn the lessons of the first phase of the offensive and inculcate its troops with the best ways of carrying out trench attacks and of using their equipment.133 One change of doctrine in the summer of 1916 affected Macmillan. Initial operations on the Somme led to a reversal of Haig’s post-Loos enthusiasm for the grenade and a return to the doctrine that ‘the rifle and the bayonet is the main infantry weapon’. Supposedly, ‘when attacking troops are reduced to bombing down a trench, the attack is as good as over’.134 The Guards nevertheless still put considerable emphasis on grenade training, and as their attack at Ginchy was to show, front-line troops would remain deeply attached to their grenades whatever the official prognostications. Macmillan, however, was not called on to resume the role of bombing officer, which he had managed to abandon just before the beginning of the march south. Crookshank’s Lewis guns remained in vogue. Ma Jeffreys descended on a tour of inspection and told him in no uncertain terms that the machine-guns would play an important role and he would be leading the gun team.135

At the beginning of September the whole tempo of preparations stepped up.136 Crookshank’s impression, after he and Macmillan had walked the ground together, was that the Loos battle they had taken part in during the previous September ‘didn’t start to be compared with this’.137 They were in ‘a glorified camp and depot for every kind of stores’, he recorded in an unsent letter. ‘One can hardly see a square yard of grass, it is absolutely thick and swarming with men, tents and horses…as for the guns they are past counting battery after battery of big ones…with mountains of ammunition and a light railway to supply it. It certainly was a revelation,’ he concluded, ‘and shows that we really have begun fighting now.’138