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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, however, cheated death. He did not lead his platoon forward into this maelstrom. Indeed, he was rendered unfit to do anything by the noise of the battle. Accounts differ about what rendered him hors de combat. The regimental history records that he was ‘completely deafened by the shells which burst incessantly round his platoon during the attack’.³⁸ His own medical report, based on a doctor’s examination on 26 May, states: ‘Near Festubert on 18 May 1915, he became deaf from the noise of rifle fire close to his left ear. He also had “ringing” noises in that ear.’³⁹ Near the stunned Cranborne a fierce argument raged between the remaining officers of the battalion. Percy Clive, Cranborne’s company commander, had realized that the attack was a senseless massacre. When Ma Jeffreys ordered him to lead 2 Company forward once more, Clive refused to obey on the grounds that to advance was plainly suicidal. As a result the battalion stayed put. As the casualties, including Cranborne, were evacuated, the brigade major, ‘Fat Boy’ Gort, came up to investigate. Gort, ‘the bravest of the brave’, who finished the war bedecked with medals including the Victoria Cross, agreed with Clive. Lord Cavan, the Grenadier commander of the 4th Guards Brigade, ordered the battalion to dig in where it lay – they had advanced about 300 yards and come up short of their objective by about 200 yards.⁴⁰

      That night Lyttelton moved up with 4 Company to relieve the shattered remnants of 3 Company: ‘it was pitch dark, raining and cold’. He and another officer went out to try and recover some of the wounded. ‘It was a bad job. Some of these fellows had crawled into shell-holes about twenty feet deep and getting them out was a critical business.’ ‘The whole place,’ wrote Lyttelton as he tried to piece together his experiences afterwards, ‘was a sea of mud, and the scene still remains incoherent in my memory, plunging about for overworked stretcher bearers, falling into shell-holes, losing our way, wet and tired, we felt all the time rather impotent.’⁴¹ Opinion among the surviving battalion officers was that the whole affair had been mismanaged. The generals had bungled in ordering them to attack on the afternoon of the 18th with so little warning.⁴²

      The battle of Festubert convinced the relatives who had been instrumental in getting men into the Guards that service with a combat infantry battalion on the Western Front was not necessarily a good idea. When Cranborne was shipped home, it was discovered that his injuries were not serious and that he would soon be able to rejoin his regiment. ‘The ear,’ his medical board was told, ‘has been examined by a specialist and has been diagnosed as a course of labyrinthine deafness; prognosis good.’⁴³ He was granted three weeks’ leave. While he was on leave the Cecils’ family doctor diagnosed him with appendicitis. His friends regarded this as an amazing stroke of luck,⁴⁴ as was clear from the letters of commiseration he received. It must be sore having a bad ear and a bad gut: ‘But,’ one friend serving with a line infantry regiment in France, added, ‘I wonder if you are sorry. For goodness’ sake don’t come out here again.’⁴⁵ Lyttelton cheerfully chipped in, ‘There is a great deal of satisfaction in hearing from someone whom you have just seen in Flanders, at Park Lane.’⁴⁶ Another friend, also recuperating from wounds, wrote, ‘I think we are both well out of it for a bit, Bobbety, don’t you agree with me. It was the most unpleasant two months I’ve ever spent and I don’t think you cared for it much – did you?’⁴⁷

      Cranborne attended regular medical boards. On each occasion his leave was extended. There seemed to be enough time to attend to his own affairs. He proposed marriage to Betty Cavendish, the daughter of Lord Richard Cavendish, the younger brother of the Duke of Devonshire. It was an entirely suitable match between two of the great aristocratic families of England, though Bobbety’s father wryly noted that his son’s choice had let him in for some difficult dowry negotiations: Dick Cavendish was notorious for pleading poverty.⁴⁸ Lord Richard, however, did his new son-in-law a good turn by intervening with the War Office to have his leave of absence extended to the end of the year.⁴⁹

      Families were caught between a desire to see their sons removed from danger and their sons’ desire not to be seen pulling strings to escape the front line. Another junior officer in the Grenadier Guards, Raymond Asquith, son of the prime minister, angrily told his wife that: ‘The PM in disregard of a perfectly explicit order from me to take no steps in that direction without my express permission has tipped the wink to Haig…no one will believe that this [staff] job has been arranged without my knowledge…So in mere self-defence I shall have to try to get back to the Regiment when the fighting season starts.’⁵⁰ He was right to suspect that people were keeping a spiteful eye on these things. When Asquith himself was killed, one of his father’s Cabinet colleagues wrote to a newspaper editor, ‘As for Lloyd George himself, he risks very little. His sons are well sheltered.’⁵¹

      Someone was looking out for Oliver Lyttelton. Soon after meeting his mother in Brussels, he was offered a post as ADC to Lord Cavan. Cavan needed an ADC because he was to give up the 4th Guards Brigade and take command of a line division. ‘I feel very weepy reading of your meeting with Oliver and the news of Cavan’s offer,’ wrote Lyttelton’s СКАЧАТЬ