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

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

      The advance had been so difficult that the commanding officer, Wilfred Smith, decided that he could not launch his attack on the position known as ‘La Quinque Rue’ as he had been ordered. He decided instead to wait until dawn. Ma Jeffreys was put in charge of the front line, commanding 2 and 3 Companies. Cranborne was commanding a platoon in 2 Company with Percy Clive, a Conservative MP serving as a ‘hostilities only’ officer, as his company commander. Held in reserve were 1 and 4 Companies. Lyttelton was thus further back with his platoon in 4 Company, commanded by ‘Crawley’ de Crespigny.

      The 18th of May dawned misty and wet. Visibility was so bad that the attack was postponed once more. They lay in their waterlogged scrapes all day. Suddenly at 3.45 in the afternoon a peremptory order arrived to attack at 4.30 p.m. Jeffreys had to make hurried preparations. He decided to launch the assault using 3 Company, with one platoon of 2 Company under Cranborne in support. Haste proved fatal. The attacking force was decimated. A short artillery bombardment failed to knock out the German machine-guns. As a result ‘the men never had any real chance of reaching the German trenches…the first platoon was mown down before it had covered a hundred yards, the second melted before it reached even as far, and the third shared the same fate’. Armar Corry was the only officer in the company to survive.³⁷

      Cranborne,