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

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      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.’

      Lyttelton, in contrast, was spending another miserable winter on the Western Front. He also was beginning to take a somewhat jaundiced view of the higher directors of the war in the ‘seats of the mighty at Versailles’. ‘Walter Dalkeith,’ his Eton and Grenadier contemporary, he complained, ‘is in a Louis Quatorze house with five bathrooms and unlimited motor cars. I think if I finish five years continuously out here I must get a job as a [staff officer] there!’¹⁷⁵ In fact his eyes were still firmly fixed on achieving the brigade majorship of a Guards brigade. When he finally achieved his ambition at the beginning of 1918, it was something of a mixed blessing. To make their manpower go further, the army had begun to reduce the number of battalions in each brigade. As a general rule infantry battalions were broken up and used as reinforcements for the remaining battalions of the regiments to which they belonged.¹⁷⁶ The three ‘spare’ Guards battalions, on the other hand, were put together to form a new 4th Guards Brigade under the command of Lord Ardee, a very inexperienced officer, with Lyttelton as his brigade major. But instead of staying with the Guards Division the new brigade ‘departed very sorrowfully to a line division’,