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

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.’