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

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