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

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СКАЧАТЬ hole and found a corporal, wounded in the head but fit enough to help. Between them the orderly and the corporal managed to carry Crookshank to a better hole, ‘where there were rather fewer shells dropping’. Like Macmillan Crookshank dosed himself with morphine and he and the corporal lay in their waterproof sheets. His orderly went back towards the British lines for help. They lay there for about an hour before the stretcher bearers arrived to evacuate them. Crookshank was conscious but mutilated: the shell had castrated him. Eventually he was taken back towards Ginchy. It was a nightmarish journey.¹⁴⁸ Macmillan’s evacuation had been equally nightmarish. He crawled until he was rescued and had no medical attention for hours. Even when he was picked up by medical orderlies, heavy shelling forced him to abandon his stretcher and scuttle back towards safety.¹⁴⁹ Although they had each escaped death by a fraction and reached field hospitals without being hit again, both were horribly wounded.

      Although it was no longer of much interest to either Macmillan or Crookshank, the whole Guards Division was also in deep trouble. On its right the 6th Division had made no progress whatsoever. The tanks over which Churchill had rhapsodized to a sceptical Lyttelton a year before made no impression on their first day of battle. As a result the Guards’ right flank was exposed to a German strongpoint called ‘the Quadrilateral’ that poured fire into it. Their own formation was breaking up under a combination of German fire and the lack of any clear features in the terrain. There were no longer Grenadiers, Coldstreamers, Scots or Irish; they were mixed up together. Small units of men led by charismatic leaders were engaged increasingly in freelance actions. Lyttelton was one such freelancer. Spotting that a gap was opening up between the Coldstream Guards, who were veering to the left, and the Grenadiers, who were trying to shore up the right, he led about a hundred men forward to try and plug their front. His party of Grenadiers caught up with the Coldstreamers, but instead of repairing the front they were simply dragged along by the Scottish regiment, losing contact with their own battalion.

      Then Lyttelton ‘heard behind me the unmistakable sound of a hunting horn’. It was the commanding officer of the Coldstream Guards, Colonel John Campbell whose use of the horn to urge on his men was remembered by most participants in the battle. By the time he came across Lyttelton, Campbell was in a frenzy. He was ‘yelling “Stop!” and using some pretty expressive language to give it “tone”’.

      So we stopped, [Lyttelton reported], and I went back to talk to him. ‘This is great fun I must say,’ was all the report I could give. ‘Fun be damned,’ Campbell shouted. ‘We have taken everything in sight but, you blasted idiot, if you go on you will be in to your own barrage. Don’t you know this is the second objective? Dig! Where’s my map? Where’s my adjutant? Damn, he’s been killed…where are those pigeons? Oliver, give me your map.’ I expressed the opinion [Lyttelton recalled] that it was the first objective, owing to the contours.

      Campbell laughed at this, pointing at Ginchy, ‘which did’, Lyttelton conceded, ‘certainly look the hell of a way off’. Lyttelton’s navigation was, in fact, superior. They had reached the first line of German trenches, the Green Line rather than the Brown. Wherever they were, it was clear that plenty of Germans were there too. Campbell ordered Lyttelton to take his Grenadiers and some Irish Guards and clear the trench using grenades. Lyttelton set off but had hardly begun when a mass of Germans, pursued by another group of Grenadiers, came running down the trench, holding up their hands in surrender.¹⁵⁰

      This jumble of small units was untrammelled by the usual chains of command. It was clear to the divisional commander, provided with the results of aerial intelligence, that the Guards could not go on. To do so would be to invite a devastating counter-attack on their exposed right flank. This was in no way clear to the young bloods in the middle of the line. After hours of confused and bloody fighting they had secured the German front line. They could finally see something. Ahead of them they could discern the village of Lesboeufs, which represented, in their minds’ eyes, a blue pencil line on their maps, the third objective. Lyttelton ran into Sir Ian Colquhoun, already leading his twenty Scots Guards forward. Colquhoun was a fearsome trench fighter, ‘credited with having killed a large number of Germans in personal combat’ and known as ‘Luss of the Bloody Club’. Colquhoun and Lyttelton decided to pool their tiny forces and advance towards Lesboeufs. Before doing so they managed to find three Irish Guards officers willing to join them, including Harold Alexander, the future field marshal.

      They had no orders: an officer could, with perfect honour, wait in the trench for the brigades to re-form or he could make a personal decision to go on. The five officers advanced with about 115 men. After travelling for 800 yards or so without opposition they dropped into an unoccupied trench running along the bottom of a little gully. To the front their vision was obscured by a line of tall crops. They were alone. There was no sign of any other British troops advancing. The Germans were out there somewhere, but were not to be seen. All realized the precariousness of their position. If any German force appeared it could attack them in the flank or cut them off from the rest of the British army with ease. After a hurried conference they decided to send back about twenty men to look for the Brigade HQ and ask for support. The messengers were to ask each officer they met on the way to come and reinforce them. Meanwhile the remaining men settled down in the trench to wait. They posted a Lewis gun at each end to give themselves some chance should Germans appear from the left or the right. It was 1 p.m. They sat in the trench and waited: 2 p.m., 3 p.m., 4 p.m. passed with no sign of any other British troops joining them. Just after 5 p.m., they realized they were no longer alone – they could see a whole battalion of German infantry advancing towards them. To their distress it soon became clear that the Germans knew they were there. Methodically the German troops worked round to the right and left of their position. Neither side fired, but the men in the trench could see they would soon be surrounded. Nervously looking to their flanks and rear, they took their eyes off the front. At 6 p.m. 250 Germans burst out of the standing crops and into the trench. The British party were in a hopeless position. Their shelter was now a death trap, but instead of surrendering they tried to fight their way out. The very violence of their response bought them a few seconds. Lyttelton fired off the six shots in his revolver, but rifle-armed German soldiers surrounded him. In utter desperation he hurled the empty pistol at them. Thinking it was a grenade, they shied away and he scrambled out of the back of the trench and ran.

      Lyttelton and the others should have been dead men. If the Germans had simply used their rifles to pick off the fleeing British it would have been a massacre. But, with adrenaline pumping, they continued their charge. Eight hundred yards was twice the distance a man can sprint. To run the distance over rough ground was lungbursting. Their salvation was the lack of artillery fire. Vision was not obscured, as it usually was, by smoke. As the remnant of Colquhoun and Lyttelton’s forlorn hope fled towards the British line, the Guards in the front trenches could see their plight: they opened up concerted fire on the pursuing Germans, who either died or fled. Even so over forty of the sally were either killed or wounded – although observers considered these casualties ‘astonishingly low’ given the circumstances.¹⁵¹

      If it is possible to talk of a day changing men’s lives then 15 September 1916 was that day for Lyttelton, Macmillan and Crookshank. As night fell, Macmillan and Crookshank were cripples, Lyttelton was a hero.¹⁵² In retrospect, to dare such things and survive appeared to him the very acme of pleasure. ‘The 15th was the most wonderful day of my life,’ he wrote. ‘I drank every emotion to the dregs and was drunk. It was superbly exhilarating.’ ‘About 2 a.m.’ on 16 September ‘I was sent for by Brigade HQ to report on the situation. Unfortunately the orderly lost his way – very naturally, it being as black as your hat – and did not get there until about 4.30 or 5. I was given a whisky and soda and went to sleep on my feet. The brigadier kept me at his HQ until the relief so I do not know much more.’ He could bask in his ‘name’ – he was awarded the DSO for his conduct in the battle. It had been a ‘wonderful СКАЧАТЬ