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

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СКАЧАТЬ 1916 he found himself in charge of a platoon, in an exposed trench near Ypres, completely cut off from other British forces. He could reach neither the unit on his left nor right. The communications trench to his rear was too dangerous to use in daylight, so he could not even contact the rest of his company. His only solace was reading the Passion in Luke’s Gospel. He was cold, lonely and frightened and ‘already calculating the days till my first leave’.¹¹⁵

      By early 1916 Lyttelton had sloughed off any hint of boyishness. He was an experienced soldier who had had responsibility beyond his years thrust upon him. His letters home were detailed, hard-edged and often cynically funny. Macmillan, on the other hand, retained a certain pompous innocence: he didn’t ‘know why I write such solemn stuff’ but write it he did. The army possessed that ‘indomitable and patient determination, which has saved England over and over again’. It was ‘prepared to fight for another 50 years if necessary until the final object is attained’. The war was not just a war, it was ‘a Crusade’: ‘I never see a man killed but think of him as a martyr.’¹¹⁶ He found the words of the French high command at Verdun – resist to the last man, no retreat, sacrifice is the key to victory – so stirring that he copied them into his field pocketbook. Whereas Lyttelton had felt the prick of ambition, Macmillan had to deflect his mother’s demands that he should get on. His ambition was to survive and ‘get command of a company some day’, though he disparaged his mother’s wish that he should get out of the front line to ‘join the much abused staff’.¹¹⁷

      Macmillan and Crookshank were finally united in mid June near Ypres. Crookshank had slowly made his way to the battalion in an ‘odd kind of procession’, braving the danger of inadequate messing facilities, ‘perfectly abominable…a disgrace to the Brigade’.¹¹⁸ Each was delighted to see the other. If they had to be in this awful place, it was at least some solace to tackle the task ahead with your closest friend. They immediately became tent-mates.¹¹⁹ Crookshank was assigned to his old platoon: ‘rather like going to school after the holidays seeing so many of the old faces after the long absence’.¹²⁰ Crookshank believed he had done rather well in the battalion the previous year and was much less self-deprecating than Macmillan about his chances of promotion. He was thus ‘very annoyed and disappointed’ when both of them were transferred into 3 Company under the command of another subaltern, Nils Beaumont-Nesbitt.¹²¹ In early July they went into the ‘Irish Farm’, ‘one of the worst positions [the battalion] had been in’. It offered 1,300 yards of ‘trenches’ that were ‘mainly shell holes full of water with no connecting saps, constant casualties and back-breaking work.’¹²² Raymond Asquith described it as ‘the most accursed, unholy and abominable place I have ever seen, the ugliest, filthiest most fetid and most desolate – craters swimming in blood, dirt, rotting and swelling bodies and rats like shadows…limbs…resting in the hedges’. The aspect that disturbed him most was ‘the supernaturally shocking scent of death and corruption [so] that the place simply stank of sin and all Floris could not have made it sweet’.¹²³

      Crookshank escaped the worst by being sent on a Lewis gun course at Étaples, ‘mechanism cleaning and stripping (I did but very slowly)’, although he encountered another mess that was the ‘absolute limit – had some words with the CO on the subject of servants, went to dine at the Continental’.¹²⁴ Crookshank was a fusspot. He liked things just so. His doting mother made sure that he was never short of funds to make himself comfortable. As a result his girth was beginning to swell. He was lucky to have in such close attendance Macmillan, who always appreciated the waspish humour with which he leavened his perpetual moaning. Although Crookshank’s undoubted bravery won him friends, he could be an irritating companion in those trying circumstances.

      Macmillan himself, on the other hand, having had little opportunity to shine during his last spell at the front, ‘made his name’ from the battalion’s unpromising position. On 19 July he led two men on a scouting patrol in no man’s land. They managed to get quite near the German line, but then ran into some German soldiers digging a sap. A German threw a grenade, the explosion from which wounded Macmillan in the face. One of his men was also wounded and they struggled back to the British lines.¹²⁵ Macmillan’s wound was serious enough for him to have left the battalion, but he refused to do so out of a mixture of bravado and opportunism piqued by Crookshank’s more militant attitude to promotion. ‘My first duty is to the Regiment which I have the honour to serve,’ he decided, ‘and not only are we very short of officers of any experience just now…but I was told confidentially by the Adjutant the other day that the commanding officer would probably give me command of the next company vacant, when I had had a little more experience of trench work.’ Macmillan was mentioned in dispatches for his bravery, but more immediately he basked in the good opinion of de Crespigny, who ‘was pleased with me for staying’.¹²⁶

      They all nevertheless knew that these skirmishes in Flanders were a mere sideshow, overshadowed by ‘der Tag – the first day of the great Fourth Army and French push’ on the Somme, leagues away to the south.¹²⁷ As far as they could tell, ‘the Somme seems to be progressing favourably, if slowly and methodically’. They were all too aware that ‘the casualties have been very heavy’.¹²⁸ In fact the first and indeed subsequent days of the Somme offensive were a bloody disaster. As the Guards Division was sent marching south, GHQ acknowledged that the loss of men was unsustainable. The Fourth Army would revert to a ‘wearing out’ battle until the ‘last reserves’, of which the Guards were part, could be thrown into a renewed ‘decisive’ attack in mid September.¹²⁹ News of these disasters soon filtered down to the junior officers and undermined their initial optimism.¹³⁰ One subaltern in their company was court-martialled for sending an ‘indiscreet’ letter, opened by the censors, criticizing the staff. It was rumoured that this letter was the reason why King George had not inspected the battalion when he visited the Guards at the beginning of August. It was noted that the Prince of Wales, so obvious a presence the previous year, was no longer anywhere to be seen near the battalion.¹³¹

      On the road Crookshank and Macmillan ‘were having very amusing conversations’. The northern part of the Somme battlefield was even ‘quite a nice change after Ypres’. There was a ‘wonderful view all round especially of the Thiepval plateau’, which they observed for hours. The trenches were very good. Crookshank and Macmillan were even allocated their own dugout, although it proved to be less than a blessing, located at ‘the end of a communications trench junction and well shelled’. They abandoned it after only one night.¹³² Indeed, it was at night that they had time to mull over the grimness of their situation. Sitting in their shared tent, they were ‘frightfully depressed’ by the fact that their ‘most intimate circle [had been] killed in the push, it’s enough to make anybody feel very sad’. Crookshank was particularly upset by the death of his ‘great friend’ at Magdalen, Pat Harding. Harding, a ‘great Oxford friend’ of Macmillan as well, had already risen to rank of major in a Scottish regiment before he was killed. Not only was the war cruel, it was insidious. Arthur Mackworth, for instance, a young classics tutor who had taught Crookshank at Magdalen, and who escaped the front after being transferred from the Rifle Brigade to the War Office СКАЧАТЬ