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

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СКАЧАТЬ Even the newest and most temporary Grenadier officer was made to feel part of an exclusive club as well as a great and glorious enterprise. ‘I saw many old friends,’ wrote Harold’s fellow 4th Battalion new boy, Bimbo Tennant, ‘and was very happy.’⁶⁵ Just as important as the élan of the Guards Division was a sense of a more scientific approach to the new warfare. The battalions carried out practice attacks on mock-ups of trenches under the watchful eyes of Jeffreys and Seymour. The army had realized that rifle and bayonet were not necessarily the most effective tools for trench warfare. Weapons that could give infantry more ‘bang for their shilling’, such as grenades, machine-guns and mortars, were coming into vogue. Macmillan was nominated as a bombing officer and spent his time training troops in his battalion in grenade techniques.⁶⁶

      The esprit de corps of the young officers did little to avert disaster at their next engagement, the battle of Loos. It is doubtful whether the Guards Division’s attack at Loos ever had a chance: ‘it had to start from old German trenches, the range of which the German artillery knew to an inch, while the effect of our own original bombardment had died away’.⁶⁷ Crookshank and the 2nd Battalion arrived on the battlefield on 26 September 1915. During the 27th they slowly worked their way into the old German trenches, Crookshank in the rearguard. Despite their proximity to the battle, however, the order never came to attack.⁶⁸ The 4th Battalion, however, bore the brunt of it. It was Macmillan who was to experience the full force of the battle.

      Owing to incompetent staff work, the 4th Battalion had spent the 26th uncomfortably sitting on a muddy road while a cavalry corps passed by.⁶⁹ Next day the battalion officers were gathered together by their commanding officer, Claud Hamilton, and told they were to attack Hill 70 just to the east of Loos. Macmillan’s company commander, Aubrey Fletcher, was sent forward to discover the best route into Loos.⁷⁰ Macmillan himself did ‘not feel frightened yet, only rather bewildered’.⁷¹ At 2.30 p.m. on the 27th the battalion advanced down the road into Loos in dispersed formation. They were immediately and heavily shelled by German artillery. To make matters worse, they were enfiladed from the right by a German machine-gun. As they approached Loos, Aubrey Fletcher led them running down a slope into an old German communications trench. Unfortunately he had taken them the wrong way. The brigade commander came galloping down the road and ordered the battalion not to enter the trench but follow him in an entirely different direction. The result was chaos, with the battalion split in half. In the confusion, neither half of the battalion could find the other. The main body of the Grenadiers attacked Hill 70 with the Welsh Guards. Macmillan was lucky to miss this assault. The Guards swept forward taking heavy casualties, but reached the crest of Hill 70. In the heat of battle, however, the Grenadiers advanced too far over the crest and exposed themselves to fire from the next German line. All who took part in this attack were killed.⁷²

      Meanwhile the remainder of the battalion, including Macmillan, under the leadership of Captain Jummie Morrison, had no orders whatsoever. They decided to attach themselves to the 2nd Guards Brigade and attack Puits 14, a German strongpoint to the north. This attack too was a disaster. Unbeknown to the Grenadiers, the 2nd Guards Brigade had withdrawn without them: they thus ‘found themselves completely isolated’.⁷³ They had to try and escape by crawling away from the German line. Jummie Morrison was too fat to be a good crawler. As he and Macmillan tried to take their turn, Macmillan was shot in the head. He was incredibly lucky – it was a glancing blow. He was, however, concussed and no longer capable of taking an active part in proceedings.⁷⁴ As the small, lost and bewildered force tried to make themselves safer by digging in, Macmillan was shot again, this time in the right hand. The bullet fractured his third metacarpus bone. With his right arm crippled and in excruciating pain, he was ordered by Morrison to go back and find a clearing station. The hand wound proved to be much more serious than the head wound: Macmillan was troubled by his right arm for the rest of his life. Within a few days he found himself in hospital at Rouen, ‘more frightened than hurt’.

      The Guards Division’s attack on Loos was hardly a triumph of the military art, the 4th Battalion Grenadier Guards alone having lost eleven officers and 342 men – ‘it has been’, Macmillan recorded, ‘rather awful – most of our officers are hit’. Nevertheless the Guards exculpated themselves from all blame. ‘The Guards Division,’ Macmillan proudly proclaimed, ‘has won undying glory, and I was long enough there to see the lost Hill 70 recaptured.’⁷⁵ Indeed Jummie Morrison’s sad remnant had been sent to dig in on the hill that night, although in truth the Guards had only captured the western slopes, leaving the Germans in possession of the redoubt. From both Macmillan’s perspective as a platoon officer and from Lyttelton’s rather more elevated position at divisional HQ, it seemed that the Guards elite had been let down by Kitchener’s army. ‘Some of the New Army Divisions are rather shaky,’ Macmillan wrote the day before the Guards went into action, ‘my chief feeling at present is one of thankfulness that I am in the Brigade of Guards. All the way up on the road we were greeted with delight by the wounded and all other troops. And it is so much easier to command men who seem to obey orders with engrained [sic] and well disciplined alacrity as soon as they are given.’

      ‘That the 21st and the 24th divisions,’ Lyttelton confirmed, ‘completely spoilt the show is I fear true.’ Like Macmillan he felt that, as a Guards officer, he was in a position to patronize the line infantry. ‘I’m afraid,’ he observed with all the assurance of a man of twenty-two, ‘that the New Army is trained too much with the idea: Oh we don’t need discipline. These are not recruits driven into the ranks by hunger, they are patriots, it’s ridiculous to ask a well-educated man of forty to salute an officer of twenty, and so on. The alpha and omega of soldiering and training is discipline and drill.’ ‘However,’ he charitably conceded, ‘those divisions of the New Army who have been blooded did quite creditably, the ninth and the fifteenth. The Territorials, who have some tradition if no discipline, attacked with great gallantry if not very efficiently.’ Alternative accounts circulating in London drew his derision: ‘As to the Guards Division being three hours late it is simply pour rire and goes to prove how very little people know of the war.’⁷⁶

      It was not only the Guards that used the ‘Kitchener’ divisions as scapegoats for the failure of the Loos offensive. Haig also laid the blame at the door of their tactical inadequacies. GHQ’s post-mortem on Loos called for an increase in offensive raids and enhanced training for and use of grenades.⁷⁷ Thus the Guards found themselves thrust back into low-level but high-intensity warfare in the trenches just north of Loos. The post-Loos battle lines meant that in some places the British and German trenches were only thirty yards apart. There were continuous bombing and sniping duels. For the first time 2nd Battalion snipers were issued with telescopic sights, making the duels even more deadly. Crookshank was an early victim.⁷⁸ On 23 October his company commander took advantage of visionobscuring mist to send him out at the head of a wiring party. He led his men out and back safely. As they gathered more wire to go out again, a German sniper shot him in the left leg. The bullet seems to have been a ricochet, for although it ended the 1915 campaigning season for him, it did no permanent damage. The next day he was safely ensconced on a hospital train heading back to the coast, ‘very comfortable and everything to eat and drink that we wanted’.⁷⁹ Comfort levels improved even further when he reached England: he was sent to the officers’ nursing СКАЧАТЬ