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

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СКАЧАТЬ up quickly and safely enough to keep the attack going. Lyttelton soon realized that Corry was in no hurry to push on with work on the trench since once it was completed the battalion would have to go ‘over the top’ on its raid. Lyttelton decided that ‘if anything was to be done I should have to command the Battalion’. Although he was ‘enjoying myself beyond measure’ at the taste of command, he could not persuade his fellow officers to speed up the sapping by taking the risk of climbing out of the trench and digging over ground at night. ‘This was awful,’ he realized, ‘because Porkie has got a poorish reputation for ability and is supposed to be likely to cart you.’ He had taken responsibility and now risked being made a scapegoat for failure. Since the trench was not finished in time the Coldstreams had to step in once more and carry out the operation for the Grenadiers. Lyttelton ‘could have cried with chagrin and disappointment’. He had never been ‘so bitterly despondent as I was that morning’. It was more ‘loss of name to the battalion’.⁹⁴ The post-mortem was equally depressing. The captain who had been digging the trench had in fact ‘carted’ Corry to John Ponsonby, the commander of the 2nd Guards Brigade, before Corry could blame anyone else. Corry ‘looked grey and hopelessly rattled and walked up and down swearing, accusing, excusing, asking me questions no-one could answer like a child. “Do you think the Brigadier thinks”…“It’s all the fault of the Coldstreams, they didn’t help”.’ Then the word came down the line that the brigadier was not particularly worried by the trench-digging fiasco, ‘which restored Porkie’s morale at once’.⁹⁵ At the next opportunity he got ‘very tight, and began to talk the most awful rot’.⁹⁶

      The wake-up call of the failed bombing operation did nothing to make Corry change his ways. He always seemed to find routes to avoid action. All he did was waste time by looking through a periscope, claiming ‘he can see Germans everywhere’. His boasting was incessant: ‘if he goes up alone, which is rare’, Lyttelton complained, ‘he always comes back having had the narrowest shave and having behaved with the utmost coolness’. The drinking continued to get worse, often leaving him incapable by the afternoon. He claimed credit for work done by his subordinate officers. To add insult to injury, Lyttelton noticed with the eye of an experienced gambler, he even cheated at poker.⁹⁷

      The commanding officer and adjutant of an infantry battalion perforce had an intimate relationship. Pressed daily into close contact with Corry, Lyttelton came to loathe him. While enjoying the increased responsibility thrust on his shoulders, he was placed in a dilemma. ‘I wish to heaven he would be sent home but all the time I have to work to keep him on the job and not let him flout.’ He began to despair that his superiors had not noticed Corry’s incompetence clearly enough to relieve him of his command. By December he had made up his mind that he would ‘cart’ Corry as soon as he made a mistake that was clear and important enough to be laid at his door.⁹⁸ He rightly suspected that Corry was not the only one being blamed for the battalion’s plight. Many of the other junior officers in the battalion thought he himself was ‘too casual and conceited’.⁹⁹ He was, they charged, a ‘bully and a toady’.¹⁰⁰ What he thought of as a difficult balancing act they saw as sucking up. A badly run unit was corrosive of relationships on all levels.

      Fortunately for Lyttelton’s reputation, the standards of the Brigade of Guards had not in fact slipped as much as he was coming to believe. Even without his dropping his commanding officer in the soup, senior officers had noticed that Corry was not up to the job. He was an old comrade of many of them, but he had to go. At the turn of the year, as Lyttelton was settling in to bear the same yoke he had carried through the autumn and winter of 1915, suddenly Corry was gone and Lyttelton found himself in temporary command of the battalion. Within days Ma Jeffreys arrived in a black temper. He had been confidently expecting promotion and command of a Guards brigade.¹⁰¹ ‘I hate,’ he confided to his diary, ‘going to yet another temporary job, but I am told that it is in the best interests of the Regiment and I am expected to “pull the battalion through”.’¹⁰² A brisk tour of inspection suggested that the situation was not as black as had been thought. Corry really had been the main problem. After parading each company and talking to every officer, Jeffreys came to the conclusion that ‘there is nothing much wrong except inexperience and that they are a bit “down on their luck”’. He was particularly complimentary about Lyttelton. His former subaltern had, he noted, ‘the qualities to make a good’ adjutant. In particular he had ensured that ‘the system of the Regiment is being carried out and all want to do their best’.¹⁰³ The warmth was reciprocated. ‘Ma was wonderful,’ wrote a relieved and delighted Lyttelton. ‘As soon as he found there was nothing very wrong he cheered up enormously.’¹⁰⁴ In fact Jeffreys found that after his initial pep-up the battalion did not need the special attention of a senior officer and he turned the unit over to Boy Brooke. After some difficult months, Lyttelton now found himself once more in an élite formation.

      Lyttelton was becoming a valuable asset to the army. All too few of those volunteer officers who had gained experience in 1915 were still at their posts at the beginning of 1916. As the 1916 campaigning season approached, the army therefore started to comb through its sick lists to identify officers fit enough to be sent back to France. Cranborne, Crookshank and Macmillan were each examined by medical boards, though with somewhat different results. While Macmillan, with his hand wound, and Crookshank, with his leg wound, were declared fit for service on the Western Front, Cranborne was passed as fit only for light duties.¹⁰⁵ His services as an ADC had already been requested by the commander of the reserve centre in Southern Command.¹⁰⁶ Although he was refused this dignity by a tetchy personnel officer in the War Office, he was allowed to join the general as an unpaid orderly.¹⁰⁷ Thus Cranborne departed for Swanage while Macmillan and Crookshank headed back to the 2nd Battalion in the Ypres salient.

      Crookshank was delayed at Le Havre. Like Macmillan the year before, he was caught up in the growing technological sophistication of the British Army. Whereas Macmillan was a bombing officer, Crookshank now became a Lewis gun officer. The Lewis gun was a relatively portable machine-gun designed by an American for the Belgians and brought from there to Birmingham in 1914. By the start of 1916 large numbers were being issued to infantry companies.¹⁰⁸ The Lewis gun went some way to compensating for the decline in musketry standards which affected the whole army as long-service professionals were replaced by volunteers and finally by conscripts.¹⁰⁹ Crookshank was even so less than delighted with his new role. After his Lewis gun course he ‘knew as little at the end as at the beginning’.¹¹⁰ He found it hard to drop into the role of the ‘old soldier’. He was ‘getting rather bored with some of our more stupid brother officers’.¹¹¹ Giving a series of lectures on the trench attack to new arrivals, he felt a complete fraud, ‘knowing nothing about it’.¹¹² He even managed to miss duties with badly blistered feet caused by wearing natty but insubstantial pure silk socks.¹¹³

      Macmillan would have been glad to stay on the coast with Crookshank. He looked forward to their new posting with dread.¹¹⁴ Indeed, СКАЧАТЬ