The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made. Simon Ball
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Название: The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made
Автор: Simon Ball
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007332359
isbn:
If the celebrity accorded their fathers differed, so too did the private circumstances of Crookshank and Lyttelton. The removal of Crookshank Pasha made no material difference to his family since it was from his wife that his wealth stemmed. There was now created the ménage that would sustain Crookshank for most of the rest of his life. His sister and his mother ministered to his every need, cared for him physically and sustained him emotionally until their deaths in 1948 and 1954 respectively. The Crookshanks’ initial London base was in Queen Anne’s Mansions, a fourteen-storey apartment block that had just been built, ‘without any external decoration…for real ugliness unsurpassed by any other great building in all London’. In 1937 they moved to 51 Pont Street. Visiting them there just after the outbreak of the Second World War, the politician Cuthbert Headlam found ‘the Crookshanks mère fils et fille exactly the same as ever – the women garrulous, Harry as self centred’.70 ‘As you entered through the heavily leaded glass door,’ Harold Macmillan’s brother-in-law remembered, ‘the catacomb like gloom was relieved only by one small weak electric bulb, like the light on the tabernacle “dimly burning”.’ The house was a shrine to the Crookshanks’ life in the 1890s: ‘Eastern objets d’art and uncomfortable Victorian furniture.’71
For Lyttelton the death of his father changed a great deal in his life. Alfred Lyttelton had been a rich man, but his wealth derived mainly from the income he earned not capital he had accumulated. On his deathbed Alfred Lyttelton had commended Oliver to the care of his friend Arthur Balfour. This was a choice based on sentiment or ignorance given Balfour’s spectacular mismanagement of the fortune that he had inherited. It was quite clear that Oliver would have to make his own way in the world. The most obvious way forward was to follow his father into the law: by 1914 he was eating dinners at the Inns of Court and clerking for judges on the circuit.72
Although by the summer of 1914 the future was beginning to be limned, – Lyttleton would be a lawyer, Cranborne would be a lord, Macmillan would be a gentleman publisher – the four were still little more than interested observers of the scene. Their hopes and interests reflected very accurately their position in society. They did not lack talent but none of them was outstanding. If the example of others, grandfathers, fathers and brothers, brought this home to them they nevertheless had a high opinion of themselves. They had a fund of impressions and sometimes inchoate opinions. They were, in a word, undergraduates, and typical of the breed. As Lyttelton himself later put it: ‘At the University I merely became social and an educated flâneur. It was the camp and the Army that turned me into a case-hardened man.’73 The fact that one in four of those who were at Oxford and Cambridge at the same time as this quartet were to be killed in the Great War should not lead us to over-dramatize their pre-war experience. They had not ‘grown up in a society which was half in love with death’. They would have been surprised to have been told that ‘they were afflicted with the romantic fatalism that characterized that apocalyptic age’.74 The picture of a golden but doomed generation is an ex post facto invention.
To serve in the Guards was to have a very specific experience of the war. They were socially élitist, officered by aristocrats or by those who aspired to be like aristocrats. They were also a combat élite. Robert Graves reported the view that the British army in France was divided into three equal parts: units that were always reliable, units that were usually reliable and unreliable units.1 The Guards were on his ‘always reliable’ list. They were introverted, especially so once an entire Guards division was created in 1915. A junior officer would rarely ever come into contact with a senior officer who was himself not a Guardsman. They had an unshakeable esprit de corps. They were envied by other units. James Stuart, Cranborne and Macmillan’s brother-in-law, who served with the Royal Scots, remembered that ‘the Guards were always regarded by the Regiments of the Line as spoilt darlings’.2
All this mattered. Although the experience of war was one of terrifying loneliness, to succeed one had to be part of a successful team. Seen from a distance, the industrialized slaughter of the Great War seemed to submerge the individual in the mass. Yet this was not the experience of the young officers. The mass was very distant: the platoon, the company, the battalion and especially the battalion officers were the points of reference that mattered. Combatants faced the terror of ‘men against fire’: caught in an artillery barrage or enfiladed by machine-guns, it did not matter whether a man was the best or worst soldier – survival was purely a matter of luck. Yet on other occasions success in close-quarters fighting rested on skill, strength and the will to prevail.
It mattered what one did and with whom. It also mattered when one joined the army. Those undergraduates who volunteered in 1914 reached the front in 1915. Although they were part of the process by which the army transformed itself from a small professional force into a ‘people’s army’, those in the Guards were inoculated against this experience. Many ‘hostilities only’ officers entered the Guards regiments, but ‘dilution’ was strictly limited: the Grenadier Guards had doubled in size from two to four battalions by 1915, but the process went no further for the rest of the war. The new Guards officers were, however, not insulated from the battles of 1915 and 1916. It was in these battles that the army grappled with the problem of how to fight a modern war. It was a bitter experience. Casualties were very high. Nearly 15 per cent of those officers who fought in the battles of 1915 died, nearly one quarter were wounded. Well over one quarter of those who had joined up from Oxford and Cambridge at the start of the war died.3 This cohort’s career as regimental infantry officers was effectively over by the end of the battle of the Somme in 1916.
The horrors of the Western Front were not, as it happened, at the forefront of the minds of four patriotic undergraduates in the first months of the war. Their anxieties were more about their social position in the struggle. Cranborne and Lyttelton had, as usual, a head start because of their connections. Cranborne’s father had a proprietary interest in the 4th Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment, which he himself had taken to South Africa to fight in the Boer War. Salisbury had promised Alfred Lyttelton on his deathbed that he would watch out for Oliver’s interests. He promised to fix commissions for his son and his ward as soon as possible. Little over a week after the outbreak of the war, Lyttelton and Cranborne handed in their applications for a commission.4 Cranborne invited Lyttelton and another friend, Arthur Penn, to Hatfield to await their call-up.5 They whiled away their time with shotguns. The juxtaposition of a shooting party as the preliminary to a war later caused them some grim amusement. Penn, invalided home, having been shot in both legs, wrote up his own game book as, ‘BEAT – Cour de l’Avoué: BAG – Self’.6
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