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

The Guards Division was deployed as part of Cavan’s XIV Corps on the south of the Somme front. Its mission was to move forward from the village of Ginchy, just to the south of Delville Wood, which still contained Germans, to the village of Lesboeufs to the north-east. On 11 September the detailed attack orders arrived.139 Crookshank held a Lewis gun parade ‘to tell off the different teams’. His own team consisted of a sergeant, four corporals and twenty-four men servicing four Lewis guns.140 On 12 September the 3rd Battalion moved up into the line, so that Lyttelton was posted only a few hundred yards to the right of Macmillan and Crookshank.141

It was Macmillan who went into action first. German machinegunners were positioned in an orchard on the northern edge of Ginchy. It was clear the moment the Guards started to advance they would be machine-gunned in the flank. On the night of 13 September de Crespigny ordered 4 Company, supported by two platoons of 3 Company, commanded by Macmillan, to clear the Germans out of the orchard.142 The attack took place in bright moonlight and in the face of heavy German fire; ‘it was very expensive, as they found better trenches and more Germans than expected’.

The next day, the 14th, ‘was terrible’. The 2nd Battalion’s trenches suffered a direct hit from a twenty-eight inch bomb. Many were buried alive and a company commander had to be relieved because of shell shock.143 ‘That day,’ wrote Lyttelton, ‘dawdled away.’ Towards evening the word came down that H-hour was 6.20 a.m. the next day. ‘Action,’ Lyttelton recorded. ‘Changed into thick clothes, filled everything with cigarettes. Put on webbing equipment. Drank a good whack of port. Looked to the revolver ammunition.’ They moved into position that night. It was bitterly cold. They looked ‘out into the moonlight beyond into the most extraordinary desolation you can imagine’. ‘The ground,’ Lyttelton wrote, ‘is like a rough sea, there is not a blade of grass, not a feature left on that diseased face. Just the rubble of two villages and the black smoke of shells to show that the enemy did not like losing them…the steely light of the dawn is just beginning to show at 5.30.’

This moonscape, devoid of landmarks, was to prove a terrible problem. Officers had their objectives clearly and neatly drawn in on the maps: first the Green Line, then the Brown Line, on to the Blue Line and finally crossing the Red Line to victory. Yet it was impossible to tell where these map lines fell on the real terrain. This sense of dislocation was made worse for the 3rd Battalion because of a tactical manoeuvre. Boy Brooke deployed his men too far to the right, intending that the Germans, expecting an attack in a straight line, would miss with their initial artillery strike. At 6 a.m. the British artillery opened up, the German guns replying within seconds. To the great satisfaction of Brooke and Lyttelton, the shells rained down on their former position, missing their new position completely. The disadvantage of the move, however, was that the 3rd Battalion had to make a dog-leg to the left once the attack had started. At 6.20 a.m. they went over the top.144

The advance was chaotic. Because the front was so narrow, both the 2nd Battalion and their next-door neighbours, the 3rd Battalion, were supposed to follow battalions of the Coldstream Guards into the attack. Within yards they had both lost all sense of direction. The three battalions of Coldstream Guards lurched off to the left. It was thus very difficult for the Grenadiers to fix their own position. They then discovered that the Germans had created an undetected forward skirmish line that, although it was completely outnumbered, ‘fought with the utmost bravery’. The 2nd Battalion found themselves caught in a ‘German barrage of huge shells bursting at the appalling rate of one a second, [they] were shooting up showers of mud in every direction and the noise was deafening. All this in addition to fierce rifle fire, which came from the right rear.’145 The German skirmishers succeeded in slowing down and breaking up the British formation before they were overwhelmed. Lyttelton and Brooke ‘flushed two or three Huns from a shell hole, who ran back. They did not get far.’ ‘I have,’ wrote Lyttelton after the battle, ‘only a blurred image of slaughter. I saw about ten Germans writhing like trout in a creel at the bottom of a shell hole and our fellows firing at them from the hip. One or two red bayonets.’

Macmillan was wounded in the knee as they tried to clear these lines. He kept going. Although the battalion passed through the barrage, it immediately ‘came under machine-gun fire from the left front and rifle fire from the right rear. Instead of finding itself…in rear of Coldstream, it was suddenly confronted by a trench full of enemy. This was the first objective, which the men naturally imagined had been taken by the Coldstream.’ They were deployed in artillery formation instead of in line, marching forward under the impression that two battalions of Coldstream Guards were in front of them. To approach the trench with any prospect of success, ‘it was necessary to deploy into line, and in doing this they lost very heavily’. During this manoeuvre Macmillan was shot in the left buttock.146 It was a severe wound: he rolled into a shell hole and dosed himself with morphine.

Crookshank was equally unlucky. His Lewis guns were doing good work.147 At about 7 a.m. he was just getting up to push forward once more when a high-explosive shell burst about eight yards in front of him. ‘I felt,’ he later remembered, ‘a great knock in the stomach and saw a stream of blood and gently subsided into a shell hole.’ He was in a perilous position: the shallow shell hole did not provide good cover. If any more shells landed near by he would be sure to be killed. He was saved by his orderly, who crawled to another shell hole and found a corporal, wounded in the head but fit enough to help. Between them the orderly and the corporal managed to carry Crookshank to a better hole, ‘where there were rather fewer shells dropping’. Like Macmillan Crookshank dosed himself with morphine and he and the corporal lay in their waterproof sheets. His orderly went back towards the British lines for help. They lay there for about an hour before the stretcher bearers arrived to evacuate them. Crookshank was conscious but mutilated: the shell had castrated him. Eventually he was taken back towards Ginchy. It was a nightmarish journey.148 Macmillan’s evacuation had been equally nightmarish. He crawled until he was rescued and had no medical attention for hours. Even when he was picked up by medical orderlies, heavy shelling forced him to abandon his stretcher and scuttle back towards safety.149 Although they had each escaped death by a fraction and reached field hospitals without being hit again, both were horribly wounded.

Although it was no longer of much interest to either Macmillan or Crookshank, the whole Guards Division was also in deep trouble. On its right the 6th Division had made no progress whatsoever. The tanks over which Churchill had rhapsodized to a sceptical Lyttelton a year before made no impression on their first day of battle. As a result the Guards’ right flank was exposed to a German strongpoint called ‘the Quadrilateral’ that poured fire into it. Their own formation was breaking up under a combination of German fire and the lack of any clear features in the terrain. There were no longer Grenadiers, Coldstreamers, Scots or Irish; they were mixed up together. Small units of men led by charismatic leaders were engaged increasingly in freelance actions. Lyttelton was one such freelancer. Spotting that a gap was opening up between the Coldstream Guards, who were veering to the left, and the Grenadiers, who were trying to shore up the right, he led about a hundred men forward to try and plug their front. His party of Grenadiers caught up with the Coldstreamers, but instead of repairing the front they were simply dragged along by the Scottish regiment, losing contact with their own battalion.

Then Lyttelton ‘heard behind me the unmistakable sound of a hunting horn’. It was the commanding officer of the Coldstream Guards, Colonel John Campbell whose use of the horn to urge on his men was remembered by most participants in the battle. By the time he came across Lyttelton, Campbell was in a frenzy. He was ‘yelling “Stop!” and using some pretty expressive language to give it “tone”’.

So we stopped, [Lyttelton reported], and I went back to talk to him. ‘This is great fun I must say,’ was all the report I could give. ‘Fun be damned,’ Campbell shouted. ‘We have taken everything in sight but, you blasted idiot, if you go on you will be in to your own barrage. Don’t you know this is the second objective? Dig! Where’s my map? Where’s my adjutant? Damn, he’s been killed…where are those pigeons? Oliver, give me your map.’ I expressed the opinion [Lyttelton recalled] that it was the first objective, owing to the contours.

Campbell laughed at this, pointing at Ginchy, ‘which did’, Lyttelton conceded, ‘certainly look the hell of a way off’. Lyttelton’s navigation was, in fact, superior. They had reached the first line of German trenches, the Green Line rather than the Brown. Wherever they were, it was clear that plenty of Germans were there too. Campbell ordered Lyttelton to take his Grenadiers and some Irish Guards and clear the trench using grenades. Lyttelton set off but had hardly begun when a mass of Germans, pursued by another group of Grenadiers, came running down the trench, holding up their hands in surrender.150

This jumble of small units was untrammelled by the usual chains of command. It was clear to the divisional commander, provided with the results of aerial intelligence, that the Guards could not go on. To do so would be to invite a devastating counter-attack on their exposed right flank. This was in no way clear to the young bloods in the middle of the line. After hours of confused and bloody fighting they had secured the German front line. They could finally see something. Ahead of them they could discern the village of Lesboeufs, which represented, in their minds’ eyes, a blue pencil line on their maps, the third objective. Lyttelton ran into Sir Ian Colquhoun, already leading his twenty Scots Guards forward. Colquhoun was a fearsome trench fighter, ‘credited with having killed a large number of Germans in personal combat’ and known as ‘Luss of the Bloody Club’. Colquhoun and Lyttelton decided to pool their tiny forces and advance towards Lesboeufs. Before doing so they managed to find three Irish Guards officers willing to join them, including Harold Alexander, the future field marshal.

They had no orders: an officer could, with perfect honour, wait in the trench for the brigades to re-form or he could make a personal decision to go on. The five officers advanced with about 115 men. After travelling for 800 yards or so without opposition they dropped into an unoccupied trench running along the bottom of a little gully. To the front their vision was obscured by a line of tall crops. They were alone. There was no sign of any other British troops advancing. The Germans were out there somewhere, but were not to be seen. All realized the precariousness of their position. If any German force appeared it could attack them in the flank or cut them off from the rest of the British army with ease. After a hurried conference they decided to send back about twenty men to look for the Brigade HQ and ask for support. The messengers were to ask each officer they met on the way to come and reinforce them. Meanwhile the remaining men settled down in the trench to wait. They posted a Lewis gun at each end to give themselves some chance should Germans appear from the left or the right. It was 1 p.m. They sat in the trench and waited: 2 p.m., 3 p.m., 4 p.m. passed with no sign of any other British troops joining them. Just after 5 p.m., they realized they were no longer alone – they could see a whole battalion of German infantry advancing towards them. To their distress it soon became clear that the Germans knew they were there. Methodically the German troops worked round to the right and left of their position. Neither side fired, but the men in the trench could see they would soon be surrounded. Nervously looking to their flanks and rear, they took their eyes off the front. At 6 p.m. 250 Germans burst out of the standing crops and into the trench. The British party were in a hopeless position. Their shelter was now a death trap, but instead of surrendering they tried to fight their way out. The very violence of their response bought them a few seconds. Lyttelton fired off the six shots in his revolver, but rifle-armed German soldiers surrounded him. In utter desperation he hurled the empty pistol at them. Thinking it was a grenade, they shied away and he scrambled out of the back of the trench and ran.

Lyttelton and the others should have been dead men. If the Germans had simply used their rifles to pick off the fleeing British it would have been a massacre. But, with adrenaline pumping, they continued their charge. Eight hundred yards was twice the distance a man can sprint. To run the distance over rough ground was lungbursting. Their salvation was the lack of artillery fire. Vision was not obscured, as it usually was, by smoke. As the remnant of Colquhoun and Lyttelton’s forlorn hope fled towards the British line, the Guards in the front trenches could see their plight: they opened up concerted fire on the pursuing Germans, who either died or fled. Even so over forty of the sally were either killed or wounded – although observers considered these casualties ‘astonishingly low’ given the circumstances.151

If it is possible to talk of a day changing men’s lives then 15 September 1916 was that day for Lyttelton, Macmillan and Crookshank. As night fell, Macmillan and Crookshank were cripples, Lyttelton was a hero.152 In retrospect, to dare such things and survive appeared to him the very acme of pleasure. ‘The 15th was the most wonderful day of my life,’ he wrote. ‘I drank every emotion to the dregs and was drunk. It was superbly exhilarating.’ ‘About 2 a.m.’ on 16 September ‘I was sent for by Brigade HQ to report on the situation. Unfortunately the orderly lost his way – very naturally, it being as black as your hat – and did not get there until about 4.30 or 5. I was given a whisky and soda and went to sleep on my feet. The brigadier kept me at his HQ until the relief so I do not know much more.’ He could bask in his ‘name’ – he was awarded the DSO for his conduct in the battle. It had been a ‘wonderful show’.153

These, however, were the sentiments of one who had miraculously emerged unscathed. Macmillan, by contrast, would never recover sufficiently to play an active role in the army. During his brief military career, he had been shot in the head, the face, the hand, the knee and in the back. He barely survived the last wound. His right arm and left leg never worked properly again. Over the same short period, Crookshank had been buried alive, shot in the leg and blown up. It was horrifyingly apparent that he would never father children; it took him a year to recuperate, and even then he had to wear a surgical truss for the rest of his life. As in 1915, therefore, Lyttelton alone was left at the front.

Lyttelton had experienced an intense emotional high at the Somme, though in reality the life of discomfort and danger was beginning to pall for all the officers in the division. When during the spring of 1917 Lyttelton revisited the trench he and his band had reached on 15 September, he was much less sanguine: ‘this country stinks of corruption’, he noted in disgust. ‘As far as the eye can reach is that brown and torn sea of desolation and every yard there is a grave, some marked with rifles, others with crosses, some with white skulls, some with beckoning hands. But everything is dead: the trees, the fields, the corn, the church, even the prayers of those that went there in their Sunday clothes with their sweaty pennies for the plate: it is all dead and God has forsaken it.’154

The 3rd Battalion was not used again at the Somme because it had lost over three quarters of its officers and had ceased to function as a serious fighting force. The survivors were sent back to Paris to enjoy the high life. The Parisian hoteliers were doing their bit for the war effort while maintaining the social exclusivity of their clientele. ‘At present I am wallowing in the luxury of this place,’ Lyttelton wrote from the Ritz. ‘Everything is done wonderfully well…all for 10 francs because we are officers in the Brigade.’ After the Ritz the life of the front-line infantry officer held few attractions.155 ‘I think I should quite like a change,’ Lyttelton, back at the front, told his mother, ‘when I wake up in the morning and see a vignette of the Somme battlefield communications through the bellying flaps of my tent and mud, mud, mud.’156 His former boss and current corps commander, Lord Cavan, agreed with him. At the beginning of November 1916 he ‘mutinied’ and refused to send his men into the attack once more. ‘No one who has not visited the trenches,’ Cavan said in a swipe against chateaux-bound staff officers, ‘can really know the state of exhaustion to which the men are reduced. The conditions are far worse than the first battle of Ypres, all my General officers and staff officers agree that they are the worse they have seen, owing to the enormous distance of the carry of all munitions – such as food, water and ammunition.’157 At the same time as the Somme offensive ground to a stop in the winter mud of northern France, Oliver Lyttelton was applying for a job as a staff captain.

For much of their lives Lyttelton, Crookshank, Macmillan and Cranborne had marched in close step. At Christmas 1916, however, they were operating on entirely different time-scales. Crookshank and Macmillan, lying in London hospital beds under the watchful eyes of their mothers, could barely think about more than one day at a time. For them survival was victory. Crookshank’s wound was horrible, but Macmillan’s was more life threatening. He had received inadequate initial treatment: the wound became infected and the bullet was still lodged in his body. Crookshank was declared fit for ‘very light duty’ six months after the Somme at a time when Macmillan’s recovery was still in doubt.158

Cranborne, on the other hand, was looking forward to the bright horizon. His wife had just given birth to a son, thus securing the Cecil succession for another generation.159 Acquaintances urged him to take up his rightful position in national life. ‘God knows,’ one star-struck admirer wrote, ‘there will be need of all straight men who have no axe to grind after this war is over…the country has need of you and your obligation to its service did not begin and will not end with the War.’160 He was starting to put out feelers about opportunities in the two civilian careers he was eventually to follow – the City and politics.161

Lyttelton was looking ahead a few months. He knew ‘the one job I really would like, which is staff captain of one of the three Guards brigades’ and was manoeuvring to achieve it.162 To get a good post outside the regiment, one had to attract the attention of a senior officer, either through connections or by personal conduct. When Lyttelton stumbled into the headquarters of 2nd Guards Brigade to report on the events of 15 September he was taken under the wing of Brigadier John Ponsonby, an officer who ‘broke most of the rules and refused to take life too seriously’.163 Although Ponsonby was a Coldstreamer he was another character like the Grenadiers Jeffreys, Brooke and de Crespigny. He had a very bad speech impediment that set for his staff a challenging task of translation, and he refused to wear any head protection, favouring a pith helmet instead. Ponsonby and Lyttelton were to become firm friends. Both had a taste for the high life in the Ritz and the casinos of Paris.164 Ponsonby certainly had no objection to Lyttelton parading his new mistress – ‘a French lady married to an American officer in the flying corps…[who] belonged to the substantial (and I don’t mean fat) type’ – in either venue.165

Lyttelton returned to Flanders in April 1917 to prepare for the battle of Passchendaele as a fully fledged brigade staff officer. His duties were mainly involved with the organization of logistics. The work was important but routine. His most exciting moment came when he had to take a mule train up to resupply the 3rd Battalion Grenadiers under heavy shell fire. His former comrades subjected him to much ribbing about a member of the ‘gilded staff’ being reduced to a humble muleteer.166 Once again the experience of the Guards differed from other parts of the army. Used as an assault force, the Guards Division achieved a brilliant tactical success in crossing the Yser canal and seizing most of its objectives east of Boesinghe at the beginning of the battle on 31 July 1917. Their attempts to learn from the Somme through intensive training on mock attacks thus paid off before Passchendaele degenerated into ‘an almost impassable quagmire’ and ‘pursued its dreary and exhausting course’ to eventual failure. Before the offensive, Lyttelton had dared to hope that the Germans were cracking – it was ‘not all we take in the way of ground or even of prisoners, but it is they allow them to be taken…if in two months the submarine campaign is no better for them, they will chuck it’.167 The vision of endless mud and seemingly endless war was a crushing disappointment even for those like Lyttelton who believed in the ‘battle of attrition’ – ‘the Hun when we have a few young Somme offensives going in the spring hasn’t an earthly’.168 Yet although Lyttelton’s hopes of victory were dashed, his interest in soldiering was sustained by his continued hopes for promotion.

As Lyttelton returned to England to further his ambitions with a staff course, Crookshank set out to the wars once more. He too had caught the eye of a Grenadier general, ‘Corky’ Corkran, who had been appointed as the British military liaison officer to the Serb army. In a private arrangement with the War Office Political Department Crookshank was appointed as Corkran’s ADC.169 Whereas Lyttelton strained at the bit for promotion, however, Crookshank no longer had any such thoughts. Crookshank’s preparatory meetings with the Political Department suggested that they did not view Corkran’s mission as entirely serious.170 Corkran himself viewed his trip to Greece as little more than a well-deserved jaunt. The Corkran party’s journey to Salonika was a golden opportunity for tourism. They travelled via Paris, Rome and Taranto. Once in Greece there was plenty of time to indulge in classical sightseeing at Delphi and the Vale of Tempe. They arrived in Salonika ten days after they left London. A week later they addressed the main point of their mission – to visit and report on the state of Serb forces. In mid October they set out in a Vauxhall staff car along the Via Ignatia from Greece into Macedonia. At the headquarters of the Serb army they conducted a brief tour of the lines and were able to view the Austrian army at a distance through binoculars. The staff car then whisked them back to the comfort of Salonika. The whole tour of inspection had taken three days.171

With Corkran’s primary mission completed, Crookshank turned to his own primary mission of finding them somewhere elegant and comfortable to live in Salonika. In a city overflowing with troops doing little fighting, accommodation was at a premium. House hunting was considerably more challenging than military liaison – it took three weeks to get them installed in a house.172 Their main task in Salonika was to try and estimate the actual number of troops the Serbs had under arms – a question to which it proved impossible to get a straight answer. In reality the bulk of Crookshank’s time was taken up with eating, drinking and sightseeing. The general was happily engaged in shooting geese and learning French from a pretty Greek lady.

To Crookshank’s delight, Salonika was full of the flotsam and jetsam of war. He took tea with Flora Sandys, the cross-dressing Englishwoman whose service with the Serbian army had made her a minor celebrity in Britain.173 He found Sandys rather dull. More to his taste was the Reverend R. G. D. Laffan, who had left Eton the year Crookshank arrived and was ‘funnily enough’ the chaplain to the Serb First Army and seemed ‘a complete favourite naturally’. At dinner Crookshank and Laffan ‘had a tremendous talk partly Eton shop and partly on religion and High Church both being rather unusual subjects up here I think’.174 On the other hand, with his Guards trained eye, Crookshank did not think much of the British forces in Salonika and the pretensions they gave themselves. ‘The main marble step entrance of the new GHQ,’ he noted, for example, ‘is reserved entirely for Brigadiers and Generals and upwards: this is a typical order of the British Salonika forces.’