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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ obstacles in the way or, which is just as important, [he] feel[s] that he oughtn’t to take it.’ If strings had been pulled, that was no cause for shame. ‘After all the boy has had his grilling in the trenches, gone out…and done the brave thing and if some general does choose to pick him out one can only be thankful…Of course there are plenty of risks still but it must be much safer than a platoon leader.’⁵² His friends agreed that his removal from the front line was a matter for celebration.⁵³

      In fact intervention by figures considerably more eminent even than the Lyttelton clan was to change the pattern of the war for both Lyttelton and Macmillan. As Lyttelton took up his post, Lord Cavan was preparing himself to meet King George at Windsor. Cavan had gone home to visit his wife, who was sick with diphtheria. Calling in at Chelsea barracks, he was shocked when Streatfeild told him that not only would a fourth battalion of Grenadiers be formed, but that it would be sent to France as part of a Guards division. Two days later His Majesty graciously informed Cavan that he would command the new formation. As far as Cavan could tell, the idea had been put to the king by Lord Kitchener. It seemed that his lordship was keen to curry favour by giving the Prince of Wales, who was attached to the Grenadiers, a bigger stage on which to perform. Cavan did not believe that the division had any military logic. He was horrified to discover that the four battalions of Grenadiers were to be formed into a single Grenadier brigade within the division. This, no doubt, seemed a glorious idea in Windsor and Whitehall, but it struck the Grenadier Cavan as disastrous. As he explained to Kitchener, ‘if they went into action we might lose at one blow more officers than we could replace all belonging to one Regiment’. Although Cavan could do little about the fait accompli of a Guards division, he at least averted the potential destruction of the Grenadier Guards by insisting that all brigades contain a mixture of battalions from each Guards regiment.⁵⁴

      Because of the creation of the Guards Division Lyttelton did not leave the Guards for a line division: he became a junior staff officer in the Guards Division. As Lyttelton left the 2nd Battalion, Crookshank joined it, having missed Festubert cooling his heels in a base camp near Le Havre. They were eventually able to meet up for tea and bridge when Lyttelton came back to visit his old unit.⁵⁵ Macmillan was also affected by the reorganization. Gazetted into the Grenadiers in March, he was assigned to the new 4th Battalion in July 1915. It was almost as if the old Eton pattern remained in place. The two Oppidans had used their influence to be first in and first out. Now the scholars had arrived. If Festubert was the baptism of fire for Cranborne and Lyttelton, Loos was to be Crookshank and Macmillan’s battle.

      The first to arrive, Crookshank, had a hot welcome. Three days after he reached the 2nd Battalion they were sent into a set of notorious trenches known as the ‘Valley of Death’. Ten days later they moved to better trenches only to face the threat of a new, and lethally effective, German trench mortar – the Minenwerfer. Even when they retired to billets in Béthune, their luck did not improve. The Germans shelled the town, rendering their rest period ‘a farce’.⁵⁶ It was in the trenches near Givenchy, however, that Crookshank made his name in the regiment. The battle of Festubert had proved to the satisfaction of both British and Germans that charging enemy machine-gun emplacements was suicidal. The obvious alternative was to approach the enemy underground. Both sides had initiated a large number of tunnelling operations to set mines. The Germans in the Givenchy sector were particularly keen on these operations and had seized the upper hand: they made the Guards’ life both dangerous and miserable through a combination of mines and mortar bombs lobbed into the craters they created. ‘The casualties from mining and bombing in addition to those from rifle fire and shells were very heavy,’ noted the regimental history.

      Digging deeper trenches and counter-mines became an unpleasant necessity for the Guards. Percy Clive and Crookshank were leading a digging party into an orchard near the trenches when they were caught in a German mine explosion. By the greatest good fortune they were just short of the mine when it went off. The whole ground moved up in one great convulsion, and when it settled down several men were completely buried. Clive was shot straight up in the air by the blast and came down so doubled up that he nearly knocked his teeth out with his knees. Crookshank, on the other hand, was buried by the earth thrown up in the explosion. It was a perilous situation. He was trapped in an earthen tomb, quite unable to move. No one on the surface could see where he was. If no one came to his rescue he would suffocate. If Clive had rescued Cranborne’s platoon from certain death by disobeying Jeffreys’s order to advance, his quick thinking saved Crookshank also. Although cut, bruised and groggy himself, he had enough presence of mind to work out where Crookshank had been standing just before the mine went off. Clive directed his men to dig hard.⁵⁷ A brother officer estimated that Crookshank had been buried for twenty minutes before the rescue party dug him out. He was in a state of shock but otherwise unhurt. He ‘won his name’ by his insouciant reaction to his experience. By evening he had returned to duty with the company. ‘He didn’t seem to worry at all at his misfortune,’ in the recollection of an officer in 3 Company, ‘and carried on duty as soon as he had been disinterred, minus, however, his cap, and the one he borrowed from a private soldier didn’t fit, and this was his only trouble!’⁵⁸ Crookshank’s own account of the incident was suitably laconic: ‘I was…buried for a long time, but rescued in the end.’⁵⁹

      Of any of the quartet Macmillan adapted least well to army life. In his memoirs he famously drew the distinctions between ‘gownsmen’ and ‘swordsmen’, characterizing himself as one of the former who had by force of circumstances become one of the latter.⁶⁰ Lyttelton and Crookshank threw themselves into the role of regimental officer with enthusiasm, whereas Macmillan tried to re-create an intimate bookish coterie in the trenches. ‘My library is indeed very wide and Liberal,’ he noted with satisfaction, already thinking of posterity. ‘I shall try to send back some which I have read and should like to preserve. I have written inside “France Sept. 1915.”’ ‘I have a friend who was said to have read the Iliad “to make him fierce”,’ he told his mother. ‘I confess that I prefer to do so to keep myself civilized. For the more I live in these warlike surroundings, the more thankful I am for all the traditions of the classic culture compared to which these which journalists would have us call “the realities of life” are little but extravagant visions of a fleeting nightmare, lacking true value or permanency.’⁶¹ Macmillan and his friend Bimbo Tennant were delighted, for instance, when they rode over for dinner with a friend at the 1st Battalion to find most of the officers, ‘snorting Generals and Majors’, absent. ‘We had,’ Tennant told his mother, ‘a delightful evening à trois and had one good laugh after another, being all blessed with the same sense of humour, and unhampered by any shadow of militarism.’⁶² Lyttelton’s letters too were full of pleas for books, but he wanted ‘shockers’ rather than Homer or Theocritus. He even enjoyed Greenmantle by his mother’s friend John Buchan, despite the fact that ‘he hasn’t been within a hundred yards of the truth yet’.⁶³

      It was with heartfelt relief that the Guards left Givenchy and marched south. Now that the Guards Division had assembled, Lyttelton, Crookshank and Macmillan were all present. Lyttelton was mounted at Cavan’s side, Crookshank was marching with the 2nd Battalion, Macmillan with the newly arrived 4th Battalion. They all met up at the end of August. To mark the combination of all four Grenadier battalions in one Guards formation, the regiment held a formal dinner to celebrate the occasion. It was, as Macmillan reported, ‘a most unique dinner party. All the officers of the Regiment who are in France – (that) is in the СКАЧАТЬ