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

(#litres_trial_promo) He was even less impressed with the command of VI Corps, to which the division was assigned once the German attack began. The commanding officer of the 31st Division bitterly accused the corps staff of running away – they ‘upped it and left us in the soup’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Lyttelton agreed that the commander of VI Corps, Sir Aylmer Haldane, had abandoned his post. Lyttelton accompanied his boss Ardee to see Haldane on 22 March. ‘We were,’ he recalled, ‘neither of us particularly reassured by the atmosphere at Corps HQ, which was busy packing up, and we had the uncomfortable feeling that something near a rout had taken place, and that the General no longer had any control over the battle…the spectacle of a general clearing out in some disorder is never very encouraging.’

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These fears were borne out when the brigade moved into the line. The 40th Division on the left of the 31st Division began to cave in. Rumours buzzed along the line that the Germans had broken through. When the brigade pushed forward a battalion to try and find out what was happening, they discovered that troops of the 40th Division were paralysed with fear and refused to help them. The line infantry had become a ‘rabble’. Lyttelton arrested an officer who tried to flee through the Guards.

(#litres_trial_promo) To make matters worse, the Guards were shelled by British artillery and no one could be found to tell them to stop.

(#litres_trial_promo) On 24 March the brigade moved back to try and form a new defensive line, but along with their surrounding formations they had to retreat again on each of the next two days.

Lyttelton had already lost all confidence in the chain of command when he found himself a player in the so-called Hébuterne incident of 26 March 1918. When Ardee was gassed Lyttelton rode over to the Guards Division and tried to place the brigade back under its command. He was reassured to find the divisional staff officer, Ned Grigg, who had joined the second battalion with him as a subaltern in 1915, playing badminton. He greeted the re-establishment of communications with 31st Division and the resumption of the proper chain of command with deep regret. This regret was deepened even further when the brigade received a message from the division that the Germans had broken through to the south of their position.

(#litres_trial_promo) Then communications went dead. Lyttelton and many others feared the worst – a complete collapse of the British line. Other units of the division abandoned their positions and tried to retreat. The next day the Guards Brigade found itself defending the whole divisional front against a German attack. Not only had the original signal been false, but it also turned out that the loss of communications was caused by the incompetence of a staff officer who had felled a tree on to the telephone lines while trying to build a defensive position.

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When Lyttelton’s brigade was withdrawn from the line on 31 March it had lost 14 officers and 372 men. ‘We had,’ Lyttelton wrote, ‘emerged from the battle with little confidence in the command and still less the staff of our new Division.’ As usual, however, the Guards were proud of their own performance. They were soon in ‘good trim’ under a new commanding officer, Brigadier Butler. ‘That’s that,’ was Lyttelton’s feeling.

(#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately the Germans had merely shifted the attack further north. On 9 April they carefully picked a weak point in the line held by Portuguese troops and drove straight through them deep into the British line.

Instead of being able to lick its wounds, the Guards Brigade was thrown back into the fighting in a desperate defence. In the words of Rudyard Kipling, the Guards were sent to ‘discover and fill the nearest or widest gap…to get in touch with the Divisions on their left and right, whose present whereabouts were rather doubtful’. Lyttelton thus found himself back where he had begun his military career near Festubert. As brigade major, he was supposed to be at the hub of information coming into brigade headquarters and orders being issued from it. But he had little information and that which he did receive was nearly always wrong. On 12 April the brigade was ordered to advance in search of friendly troops. As soon as they moved off they were caught in a vicious crossfire from enemy troops waiting for them with rifles, machine-guns, mortars and field guns operating at close range. At 4.30 p.m. the Germans attacked in force. Desperately, the Guards fought them off. Butler and Lyttelton signalled the division that they could not hold another attack on such a wide front. They believed they had been informed that another division would send troops to take over part of their line. But no troops arrived.

When the Germans came on again at 6.30 the next morning it was war to the knife – German troops masqueraded as Grenadiers so as to get close to the British lines before opening fire. Lyttelton later called this a ‘soldier’s battle,’ but the reality was much grimmer.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Guards were isolated and being wiped out piecemeal. Companies were cut off from each other in their own pockets and fighting the best they could. At 3.30 p.m. the commander of the Grenadier company on the far left flank managed to get a message through that he was surrounded. Brigade HQ ordered the Irish Guards to send a company to try and rescue him: only one NCO and six men survived the ensuing massacre. The Grenadiers fought and died where they stood. Lyttelton later said that when their leader, Captain Pryce, who was awarded a posthumous VC, had less than ten men left he charged the enemy. By the time the Guards were rescued by Australian troops late in the afternoon, the brigade had been shattered. In two days of fighting it had lost 39 officers and 1,244 men. The butcher’s bill was worse than the Somme.

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It was perhaps ironic that, having survived this maelstrom intact, Lyttelton was gassed a few days later while sitting at his table writing. A shell-burst spattered him with liquid mustard gas. His scrotum, penis and thighs were severely burned, his lungs were damaged and he was blinded.

(#litres_trial_promo) Like Macmillan and Crookshank before him, he returned to his mother and a private hospital.

(#litres_trial_promo) He made, however, a near-miraculous recovery.

(#litres_trial_promo) There was no long-term damage and he was even able to return to the Guards Division in time for the final advance and the occupation of Germany.

As Lyttelton was shipped home to England, Cranborne was finally making his way back to France. He went out as ADC to an old comrade-in-arms of his father, General Sir Walter Congreve, who had won a VC in the Boer War.

(#litres_trial_promo) General Congreve had unfortunately not shown up too well in the March débâcle. He was described as ‘absolutely down and out and incapable of any clear thinking’. His chief of staff, another VC, with whom Cranborne was supposed to work, was, in the words of an old friend, ‘a monstrous appointment’ who had ‘failed to pass into the Army through any orthodox channel…with a minimum of intellect…cool and collected, but had not the slightest idea of what was going on’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Since they were likely to be dégommé, limogé, stellenbosched – the army had any number of loan words for sacked – Cranborne moved rapidly on, ending up as ADC to the GOC XXII Corps, Alix Godley.

(#litres_trial_promo) There had been plenty of other options. Lord Derby was willing to take him to Paris; Douglas Haig wanted him at GHQ.

(#litres_trial_promo) He discovered, as he told Macmillan, that the war could even be ‘pleasant’.

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Cranborne’s war ended in October 1918 when a bout of sickness forced him to give up his staff job and return to London.

(#litres_trial_promo) Crookshank’s war ended in June 1918, his Balkan mission completed, standing on Victoria station in the rain.

(#litres_trial_promo) At the time of the Armistice Macmillan was still in hospital. Only Lyttelton saw it through to the bitter end. He finished the war in France as Boy Brooke’s brigade major in the 2nd Guards Brigade.

(#litres_trial_promo) Each of the quartet had experienced ‘the pity of war distilled’. The war had not, however, changed either their personalities or their world view. In each the effect of being a combatant was rather to magnify existing personality traits.

The war touched Cranborne least. He saw the least service, he made a conventional marriage, he fathered a son during the war. Two factors were now to play a major role in his future. The first was the family project. This was unaltered by the war. His grandfather had intended to found a dynasty that would add political power to its wealth and social status. His father, though by temperament ill-equipped to further this project, had nevertheless tried his best to do so. His uncles and his mother were even keener that it should continue. Neither before nor after the war did Cranborne show any sign of kicking against the traces. He embraced his destiny as an ineluctable duty, though in this he suffered a severe impediment. He had inherited his father’s weak constitution. The war exacerbated his medical problems. His health first broke down in 1915 after a few weeks’ service on the Western Front. He then spent most of the war on sick leave or light duties. He even had to return home from his staff duties in 1918 because of a renewed bout of illness. Yet these chronic illnesses would have affected him whether or not he had fought. Crookshank and Macmillan had serious health problems for the rest of their lives as a direct result of their war wounds. Cranborne’s most debilitating post-war illness was the polio that struck him some years after the end of the war in the 1920s.

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Despite the handicap of a lack of any sporting prowess, Crookshank had turned himself into a highly professional infantry officer. His rapid return to duty after his entombment in 1915 was regarded by his acquaintances as particularly heroic. Nevertheless he had been humiliated by his loss of manhood. Although his physical wounds had healed surprisingly smoothly, he would never be entirely whole. He had always been a serious young man, working hard at Summer Fields, Eton, Oxford, in the Masons and in the Grenadiers. His early diaries reveal a habit of tart comment on the shortcomings of others. At home he was used to things being organized just as he liked them. Trifles such as badly cooked food or inattentive servants drew from him torrents of complaint. And far from lessening his own fine conceit of himself, his suffering increased it. He now found it even harder to admire the efforts of others. He became even more dismissive of anything that did not meet his own needs. His family had always treated him with adulation. Crookshank’s terrible wound thrust him back even further towards them. Deprived by the war of the normal reason, marriage, to leave home, he never did. At home he was never exposed to any hint of criticism. He always seemed to find it hard to understand why others did not afford him the same unstinting admiration as he received from his family. He returned from the war dissatisfied, embittered and convinced the world was unjustly determined to do him down.

Macmillan too was forced back into the bosom of his family. At Oxford he had been torn between smothering intimacies, whether of Sligger Urquhart or Ronnie Knox, and the wider society of the university. This wider world was beginning to win out by 1914 – he was becoming, albeit slowly, less of a cosseted ‘mummy’s boy’, less pompous, more worldly. His successes in the Union indicated a gift for public speaking and an ability to charm voters. His wounds, on the other hand, drastically retarded the emergence of his maturing personality. He once again became entirely dependent on his mother, immersed in his books and lacking the company of men and women his own age. As a result for the next quarter of a century he was regarded, by both friends and enemies, as impossibly pompous, self-obsessed and utterly lacking in charm. This reputation only began to change during the Second World War, six years after his mother’s death.

The contrast with Lyttelton is striking. He also had a mother to whom he remained exceptionally close. Four years of active service had, however, made Lyttelton entirely his own man. For the first time he had achieved something in a field that his father had not effortlessly dominated before him. His contact with the Guards ‘characters’ had convinced him that he too was a ‘character’. He was, for the rest of his life, self-confident and self-assured. If anything he was too convinced of his own opinion and too proud to conceal it from those he considered his inferiors – a disadvantage in a political system so full of egos that the ability to dissemble the extent of one’s own ego could be vital.

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The end of the war came as a shock to many young men. As Lyttelton told his mother, ‘with youth the war is tolerable even enjoyable’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Peace did not appear at all enticing. All the plans and hopes entertained in 1914 had had to be put to one side. Now, quite suddenly it seemed to them, they needed to take stock of their situation.

Macmillan, confined to a hospital bed in Belgrave Square, had the most time to think. His prospects seemed bleak. One operation had removed half the bullet lodged in his back but he needed another. He had little to do except read and look forward to visitors. With the most exciting event in his life being a trip to see Thomas Beecham conduct Mendelssohn, he envied Cranborne his sojourn in France. ‘France’ was, in his imagination, ‘wonderful’. England, in contrast, seemed suburban, bourgeois and corrupt. Macmillan responded enthusiastically to Cranborne’s tongue-in-cheek idea that ‘after the war, we really must start a League of Individuals’. ‘We will refuse to do things…and all go to Italy,’ Macmillan enthused, ‘and live in a villa in Fiesole, with Cypresses…and dear Italian wines with their ravishing names. How wonderful it would be! Let George and Beaverbrook and the rest of them reconstruct to their hearts’ content, as long as we are not obliged to live in their monstrous edifice.’

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Many men of a poetic temperament – one thinks of Robert Graves and his retreat to Majorca – put these principles into practice. Pragmatists like the Guardsmen did not let this reverie last for long. Before the war they had been committed to seeking conventional worldly success. Within weeks of the end of the war they were again embracing this goal. Even Macmillan found, once he was released from hospital, that maudlin thoughts of inaction or exile dissipated. ‘To a young man of twenty-four, scarred but not disfigured,’ he recalled, ‘with all the quick mental and moral recovery of which youth is capable, life at the end of 1918 seemed to offer an attractive, not to say exciting prospect.’

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The door that the war had opened to the military career unconsidered by any of them in 1914 was rapidly closed. The fact that none of them remained a soldier was not of their own choosing. As early as 1916 Lyttelton had applied for a permanent commission in the Grenadier Guards.

(#litres_trial_promo) Crookshank too explored the possibility at the end of the war. In 1918 they both applied to remain in the regiment. They were both men in good odour with dominant figures in the Guards. But the Guards traditionalists were determined to get back to normal, purge their ranks of ‘patriots’ and guarantee the careers of regular officers.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the time they reconsidered this policy, it was too late. Lyttelton and Crookshank were launched on other careers. Even Ma Jeffreys couldn’t get them back.

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The war also ended Lyttelton’s ambition to enter the law – his contacts, so good at the time his father died, had gone stale. Not that this altered the central fact that he had to do something that made plenty of money. Even if his father’s experience of politics had not soured him on Parliament, his father’s example had shown the necessity of securing financial security before considering other avenues. In the months after the Armistice he courted Lady Moira Osborne, the daughter of the Duke of Leeds. His Grace disapproved of his daughter’s suitor on grounds of his poverty. Their engagement was made possible by Didi Lyttelton making ‘a kind of financial hara-kiri’ to provide her son with a respectable establishment. Retreating to visit Cranborne, he considered his good fortune: ‘Perfect Hatfield though baddish morning with the thermometer at 90 degrees in the shade. Phew but happy.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Oliver and Moira Osborne were married a few months later at St Margaret’s, Westminster.

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For a young man in need of cash the City was the obvious place to be. Many of Lyttelton’s Etonian contemporaries had already gravitated towards it. At least his army career exempted him from the jibe of his friend Geoffrey Madan, ‘Attractive Etonians who go straight on to the Stock Exchange…the raw material of the great bores.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1919 Lyttelton joined the firm of Brown, Shipley & Co. ‘The change,’ he remembered wryly, ‘from being a guardsman and a brigade major, under whose eye every knee stiffened, to being a clerk in the postal department was marked.’