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

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СКАЧАТЬ a well-deserved jaunt. The Corkran party’s journey to Salonika was a golden opportunity for tourism. They travelled via Paris, Rome and Taranto. Once in Greece there was plenty of time to indulge in classical sightseeing at Delphi and the Vale of Tempe. They arrived in Salonika ten days after they left London. A week later they addressed the main point of their mission – to visit and report on the state of Serb forces. In mid October they set out in a Vauxhall staff car along the Via Ignatia from Greece into Macedonia. At the headquarters of the Serb army they conducted a brief tour of the lines and were able to view the Austrian army at a distance through binoculars. The staff car then whisked them back to the comfort of Salonika. The whole tour of inspection had taken three days.¹⁷¹

      With Corkran’s primary mission completed, Crookshank turned to his own primary mission of finding them somewhere elegant and comfortable to live in Salonika. In a city overflowing with troops doing little fighting, accommodation was at a premium. House hunting was considerably more challenging than military liaison – it took three weeks to get them installed in a house.¹⁷² Their main task in Salonika was to try and estimate the actual number of troops the Serbs had under arms – a question to which it proved impossible to get a straight answer. In reality the bulk of Crookshank’s time was taken up with eating, drinking and sightseeing. The general was happily engaged in shooting geese and learning French from a pretty Greek lady.

      To Crookshank’s delight, Salonika was full of the flotsam and jetsam of war. He took tea with Flora Sandys, the cross-dressing Englishwoman whose service with the Serbian army had made her a minor celebrity in Britain.¹⁷³ He found Sandys rather dull. More to his taste was the Reverend R. G. D. Laffan, who had left Eton the year Crookshank arrived and was ‘funnily enough’ the chaplain to the Serb First Army and seemed ‘a complete favourite naturally’. At dinner Crookshank and Laffan ‘had a tremendous talk partly Eton shop and partly on religion and High Church both being rather unusual subjects up here I think’.¹⁷⁴ On the other hand, with his Guards trained eye, Crookshank did not think much of the British forces in Salonika and the pretensions they gave themselves. ‘The main marble step entrance of the new GHQ,’ he noted, for example, ‘is reserved entirely for Brigadiers and Generals and upwards: this is a typical order of the British Salonika forces.’

      Lyttelton, in contrast, was spending another miserable winter on the Western Front. He also was beginning to take a somewhat jaundiced view of the higher directors of the war in the ‘seats of the mighty at Versailles’. ‘Walter Dalkeith,’ his Eton and Grenadier contemporary, he complained, ‘is in a Louis Quatorze house with five bathrooms and unlimited motor cars. I think if I finish five years continuously out here I must get a job as a [staff officer] there!’¹⁷⁵ In fact his eyes were still firmly fixed on achieving the brigade majorship of a Guards brigade. When he finally achieved his ambition at the beginning of 1918, it was something of a mixed blessing. To make their manpower go further, the army had begun to reduce the number of battalions in each brigade. As a general rule infantry battalions were broken up and used as reinforcements for the remaining battalions of the regiments to which they belonged.¹⁷⁶ The three ‘spare’ Guards battalions, on the other hand, were put together to form a new 4th Guards Brigade under the command of Lord Ardee, a very inexperienced officer, with Lyttelton as his brigade major. But instead of staying with the Guards Division the new brigade ‘departed very sorrowfully to a line division’, the 31st.¹⁷⁷ They did not stray too far, however, the 31st and the Guards Division being deployed next door to each other in the Arras sector of the Third Army. Nevertheless Lyttelton had transferred from one of the best divisions in the British army to what was usually regarded as the poorest, the ‘thirty-worst’.

      Lyttelton seems to have had a genius for finding the action. A little over a month after he took up his new job the massive German March offensive hit the British line. In many ways the battles of March and April 1918 showed the British army at its least impressive. Loos, the Somme and Passchendaele had been static battles. The British attacked from a firm line. Now the army was on the back foot, fighting a battle of manoeuvre in which the positions of enemy and Allied troops were unclear, the battle lines confused and lines of command often disrupted. Regrettably, not only did these battles show up a lack of competence, they also revealed a tendency to panic, a ‘funk’ that almost amounted to cowardice in the face of the enemy.

      Expelled from the protective cocoon of the Guards Division, the 4th Guards Brigade experienced these problems in full. Even before the Germans attacked there was a worrying feeling of uncertainty. Rumours abounded that while the Fifth Army would retreat if attacked, the Third Army, of which both the Guards Division and Guards Brigade were part, would attempt to stand its ground: ‘everyone to the private soldiers knew the troops on their flank would retire, so that rumours of these divergent policies weakened the junction of the Third and Fifth Armies’. A junior officer in the Gordon Highlanders in the same corps as Lyttelton reported that commanders had the ‘wind up’ from bombing and shelling of back areas. They deluged formations with paperwork about resisting tank and aerial attack and so undermined morale.¹⁷⁸

      Lyttelton shared these worries. Within a few days of joining 31st Division he had an ‘unpleasant feeling that the professional standards were different from our own’.¹⁷⁹ He was even less impressed with the command of VI Corps, to which the division was assigned once the German attack began. The commanding officer of the 31st Division bitterly accused the corps staff of running away – they ‘upped it and left us in the soup’.¹⁸⁰ Lyttelton agreed that the commander of VI Corps, Sir Aylmer Haldane, had abandoned his post. Lyttelton accompanied his boss Ardee to see Haldane on 22 March. ‘We were,’ he recalled, ‘neither of us particularly reassured by the atmosphere at Corps HQ, which was busy packing up, and we had the uncomfortable feeling that something near a rout had taken place, and that the General no longer had any control over the battle…the spectacle of a general clearing out in some disorder is never very encouraging.’¹⁸¹

      These fears were borne out when the brigade moved into the line. The 40th Division on the left of the 31st Division began to cave in. Rumours buzzed along the line that the Germans had broken through. When the brigade pushed forward a battalion to try and find out what was happening, they discovered that troops of the 40th Division were paralysed with fear and refused to help them. The line infantry had become a ‘rabble’. Lyttelton arrested an officer who tried to flee through the Guards.¹⁸² To make matters worse, the Guards were shelled by British artillery and no one could be found to tell them to stop.¹⁸³ On 24 March the brigade moved back to try and form a new defensive line, but along with their surrounding formations they had to retreat again on each of the next two days.

      Lyttelton had already lost all confidence in the chain of command when he found himself a player in the so-called Hébuterne incident of 26 March 1918. When Ardee was gassed Lyttelton rode over to the Guards Division and tried to place the brigade back under its command. He was reassured to find the divisional staff officer, Ned Grigg, who had joined the second battalion with him as a subaltern in 1915, playing badminton. He greeted the re-establishment of communications with 31st Division and the resumption of the proper chain of command with deep regret. This regret was deepened even further when the brigade received a message from the division that the Germans had broken through to the south of their position.¹⁸⁴ Then communications went dead. Lyttelton and many others feared the worst – a complete collapse СКАЧАТЬ