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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.
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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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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 show’.
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These, however, were the sentiments of one who had miraculously emerged unscathed. Macmillan, by contrast, would never recover sufficiently to play an active role in the army. During his brief military career, he had been shot in the head, the face, the hand, the knee and in the back. He barely survived the last wound. His right arm and left leg never worked properly again. Over the same short period, Crookshank had been buried alive, shot in the leg and blown up. It was horrifyingly apparent that he would never father children; it took him a year to recuperate, and even then he had to wear a surgical truss for the rest of his life. As in 1915, therefore, Lyttelton alone was left at the front.
Lyttelton had experienced an intense emotional high at the Somme, though in reality the life of discomfort and danger was beginning to pall for all the officers in the division. When during the spring of 1917 Lyttelton revisited the trench he and his band had reached on 15 September, he was much less sanguine: ‘this country stinks of corruption’, he noted in disgust. ‘As far as the eye can reach is that brown and torn sea of desolation and every yard there is a grave, some marked with rifles, others with crosses, some with white skulls, some with beckoning hands. But everything is dead: the trees, the fields, the corn, the church, even the prayers of those that went there in their Sunday clothes with their sweaty pennies for the plate: it is all dead and God has forsaken it.’
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The 3rd Battalion was not used again at the Somme because it had lost over three quarters of its officers and had ceased to function as a serious fighting force. The survivors were sent back to Paris to enjoy the high life. The Parisian hoteliers were doing their bit for the war effort while maintaining the social exclusivity of their clientele. ‘At present I am wallowing in the luxury of this place,’ Lyttelton wrote from the Ritz. ‘Everything is done wonderfully well…all for 10 francs because we are officers in the Brigade.’ After the Ritz the life of the front-line infantry officer held few attractions.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘I think I should quite like a change,’ Lyttelton, back at the front, told his mother, ‘when I wake up in the morning and see a vignette of the Somme battlefield communications through the bellying flaps of my tent and mud, mud, mud.’
(#litres_trial_promo) His former boss and current corps commander, Lord Cavan, agreed with him. At the beginning of November 1916 he ‘mutinied’ and refused to send his men into the attack once more. ‘No one who has not visited the trenches,’ Cavan said in a swipe against chateaux-bound staff officers, ‘can really know the state of exhaustion to which the men are reduced. The conditions are far worse than the first battle of Ypres, all my General officers and staff officers agree that they are the worse they have seen, owing to the enormous distance of the carry of all munitions – such as food, water and ammunition.’
(#litres_trial_promo) At the same time as the Somme offensive ground to a stop in the winter mud of northern France, Oliver Lyttelton was applying for a job as a staff captain.
For much of their lives Lyttelton, Crookshank, Macmillan and Cranborne had marched in close step. At Christmas 1916, however, they were operating on entirely different time-scales. Crookshank and Macmillan, lying in London hospital beds under the watchful eyes of their mothers, could barely think about more than one day at a time. For them survival was victory. Crookshank’s wound was horrible, but Macmillan’s was more life threatening. He had received inadequate initial treatment: the wound became infected and the bullet was still lodged in his body. Crookshank was declared fit for ‘very light duty’ six months after the Somme at a time when Macmillan’s recovery was still in doubt.
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Cranborne, on the other hand, was looking forward to the bright horizon. His wife had just given birth to a son, thus securing the Cecil succession for another generation.
(#litres_trial_promo) Acquaintances urged him to take up his rightful position in national life. ‘God knows,’ one star-struck admirer wrote, ‘there will be need of all straight men who have no axe to grind after this war is over…the country has need of you and your obligation to its service did not begin and will not end with the War.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He was starting to put out feelers about opportunities in the two civilian careers he was eventually to follow – the City and politics.
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Lyttelton was looking ahead a few months. He knew ‘the one job I really would like, which is staff captain of one of the three Guards brigades’ and was manoeuvring to achieve it.
(#litres_trial_promo) To get a good post outside the regiment, one had to attract the attention of a senior officer, either through connections or by personal conduct. When Lyttelton stumbled into the headquarters of 2nd Guards Brigade to report on the events of 15 September he was taken under the wing of Brigadier John Ponsonby, an officer who ‘broke most of the rules and refused to take life too seriously’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Although Ponsonby was a Coldstreamer he was another character like the Grenadiers Jeffreys, Brooke and de Crespigny. He had a very bad speech impediment that set for his staff a challenging task of translation, and he refused to wear any head protection, favouring a pith helmet instead. Ponsonby and Lyttelton were to become firm friends. Both had a taste for the high life in the Ritz and the casinos of Paris.
(#litres_trial_promo) Ponsonby certainly had no objection to Lyttelton parading his new mistress – ‘a French lady married to an American officer in the flying corps…[who] belonged to the substantial (and I don’t mean fat) type’ – in either venue.
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Lyttelton returned to Flanders in April 1917 to prepare for the battle of Passchendaele as a fully fledged brigade staff officer. His duties were mainly involved with the organization of logistics. The work was important but routine. His most exciting moment came when he had to take a mule train up to resupply the 3rd Battalion Grenadiers under heavy shell fire. His former comrades subjected him to much ribbing about a member of the ‘gilded staff’ being reduced to a humble muleteer.
(#litres_trial_promo) Once again the experience of the Guards differed from other parts of the army. Used as an assault force, the Guards Division achieved a brilliant tactical success in crossing the Yser canal and seizing most of its objectives east of Boesinghe at the beginning of the battle on 31 July 1917. Their attempts to learn from the Somme through intensive training on mock attacks thus paid off before Passchendaele degenerated into ‘an almost impassable quagmire’ and ‘pursued its dreary and exhausting course’ to eventual failure. Before the offensive, Lyttelton had dared to hope that the Germans were cracking – it was ‘not all we take in the way of ground or even of prisoners, but it is they allow them to be taken…if in two months the submarine campaign is no better for them, they will chuck it’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The vision of endless mud and seemingly endless war was a crushing disappointment even for those like Lyttelton who believed in the ‘battle of attrition’ – ‘the Hun when we have a few young Somme offensives going in the spring hasn’t an earthly’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet although Lyttelton’s hopes of victory were dashed, his interest in soldiering was sustained by his continued hopes for promotion.
As Lyttelton returned to England to further his ambitions with a staff course, Crookshank set out to the wars once more. He too had caught the eye of a Grenadier general, ‘Corky’ Corkran, who had been appointed as the British military liaison officer to the Serb army. In a private arrangement with the War Office Political Department Crookshank was appointed as Corkran’s ADC.
(#litres_trial_promo) Whereas Lyttelton strained at the bit for promotion, however, Crookshank no longer had any such thoughts. Crookshank’s preparatory meetings with the Political Department suggested that they did not view Corkran’s mission as entirely serious.
(#litres_trial_promo) Corkran himself viewed his trip to Greece as little more than 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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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!’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) To make matters worse, the Guards were shelled by British artillery and no one could be found to tell them to stop.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) Then communications went dead. Lyttelton and many others feared the worst – a complete collapse of the British line. Other units of the division abandoned their positions and tried to retreat. The next day the Guards Brigade found itself defending the whole divisional front against a German attack. Not only had the original signal been false, but it also turned out that the loss of communications was caused by the incompetence of a staff officer who had felled a tree on to the telephone lines while trying to build a defensive position.
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When Lyttelton’s brigade was withdrawn from the line on 31 March it had lost 14 officers and 372 men. ‘We had,’ Lyttelton wrote, ‘emerged from the battle with little confidence in the command and still less the staff of our new Division.’ As usual, however, the Guards were proud of their own performance. They were soon in ‘good trim’ under a new commanding officer, Brigadier Butler. ‘That’s that,’ was Lyttelton’s feeling.
(#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately the Germans had merely shifted the attack further north. On 9 April they carefully picked a weak point in the line held by Portuguese troops and drove straight through them deep into the British line.
Instead of being able to lick its wounds, the Guards Brigade was thrown back into the fighting in a desperate defence. In the words of Rudyard Kipling, the Guards were sent to ‘discover and fill the nearest or widest gap…to get in touch with the Divisions on their left and right, whose present whereabouts were rather doubtful’. Lyttelton thus found himself back where he had begun his military career near Festubert. As brigade major, he was supposed to be at the hub of information coming into brigade headquarters and orders being issued from it. But he had little information and that which he did receive was nearly always wrong. On 12 April the brigade was ordered to advance in search of friendly troops. As soon as they moved off they were caught in a vicious crossfire from enemy troops waiting for them with rifles, machine-guns, mortars and field guns operating at close range. At 4.30 p.m. the Germans attacked in force. Desperately, the Guards fought them off. Butler and Lyttelton signalled the division that they could not hold another attack on such a wide front. They believed they had been informed that another division would send troops to take over part of their line. But no troops arrived.
When the Germans came on again at 6.30 the next morning it was war to the knife – German troops masqueraded as Grenadiers so as to get close to the British lines before opening fire. Lyttelton later called this a ‘soldier’s battle,’ but the reality was much grimmer.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Guards were isolated and being wiped out piecemeal. Companies were cut off from each other in their own pockets and fighting the best they could. At 3.30 p.m. the commander of the Grenadier company on the far left flank managed to get a message through that he was surrounded. Brigade HQ ordered the Irish Guards to send a company to try and rescue him: only one NCO and six men survived the ensuing massacre. The Grenadiers fought and died where they stood. Lyttelton later said that when their leader, Captain Pryce, who was awarded a posthumous VC, had less than ten men left he charged the enemy. By the time the Guards were rescued by Australian troops late in the afternoon, the brigade had been shattered. In two days of fighting it had lost 39 officers and 1,244 men. The butcher’s bill was worse than the Somme.
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It was perhaps ironic that, having survived this maelstrom intact, Lyttelton was gassed a few days later while sitting at his table writing. A shell-burst spattered him with liquid mustard gas. His scrotum, penis and thighs were severely burned, his lungs were damaged and he was blinded.
(#litres_trial_promo) Like Macmillan and Crookshank before him, he returned to his mother and a private hospital.
(#litres_trial_promo) He made, however, a near-miraculous recovery.
(#litres_trial_promo) There was no long-term damage and he was even able to return to the Guards Division in time for the final advance and the occupation of Germany.
As Lyttelton was shipped home to England, Cranborne was finally making his way back to France. He went out as ADC to an old comrade-in-arms of his father, General Sir Walter Congreve, who had won a VC in the Boer War.
(#litres_trial_promo) General Congreve had unfortunately not shown up too well in the March débâcle. He was described as ‘absolutely down and out and incapable of any clear thinking’. His chief of staff, another VC, with whom Cranborne was supposed to work, was, in the words of an old friend, ‘a monstrous appointment’ who had ‘failed to pass into the Army through any orthodox channel…with a minimum of intellect…cool and collected, but had not the slightest idea of what was going on’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Since they were likely to be dégommé, limogé, stellenbosched – the army had any number of loan words for sacked – Cranborne moved rapidly on, ending up as ADC to the GOC XXII Corps, Alix Godley.
(#litres_trial_promo) There had been plenty of other options. Lord Derby was willing to take him to Paris; Douglas Haig wanted him at GHQ.
(#litres_trial_promo) He discovered, as he told Macmillan, that the war could even be ‘pleasant’.
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Cranborne’s war ended in October 1918 when a bout of sickness forced him to give up his staff job and return to London.
(#litres_trial_promo) Crookshank’s war ended in June 1918, his Balkan mission completed, standing on Victoria station in the rain.
(#litres_trial_promo) At the time of the Armistice Macmillan was still in hospital. Only Lyttelton saw it through to the bitter end. He finished the war in France as Boy Brooke’s brigade major in the 2nd Guards Brigade.
(#litres_trial_promo) Each of the quartet had experienced ‘the pity of war distilled’. The war had not, however, changed either their personalities or their world view. In each the effect of being a combatant was rather to magnify existing personality traits.
The war touched Cranborne least. He saw the least service, he made a conventional marriage, he fathered a son during the war. Two factors were now to play a major role in his future. The first was the family project. This was unaltered by the war. His grandfather had intended to found a dynasty that would add political power to its wealth and social status. His father, though by temperament ill-equipped to further this project, had nevertheless tried his best to do so. His uncles and his mother were even keener that it should continue. Neither before nor after the war did Cranborne show any sign of kicking against the traces. He embraced his destiny as an ineluctable duty, though in this he suffered a severe impediment. He had inherited his father’s weak constitution. The war exacerbated his medical problems. His health first broke down in 1915 after a few weeks’ service on the Western Front. He then spent most of the war on sick leave or light duties. He even had to return home from his staff duties in 1918 because of a renewed bout of illness. Yet these chronic illnesses would have affected him whether or not he had fought. Crookshank and Macmillan had serious health problems for the rest of their lives as a direct result of their war wounds. Cranborne’s most debilitating post-war illness was the polio that struck him some years after the end of the war in the 1920s.
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Despite the handicap of a lack of any sporting prowess, Crookshank had turned himself into a highly professional infantry officer. His rapid return to duty after his entombment in 1915 was regarded by his acquaintances as particularly heroic. Nevertheless he had been humiliated by his loss of manhood. Although his physical wounds had healed surprisingly smoothly, he would never be entirely whole. He had always been a serious young man, working hard at Summer Fields, Eton, Oxford, in the Masons and in the Grenadiers. His early diaries reveal a habit of tart comment on the shortcomings of others. At home he was used to things being organized just as he liked them. Trifles such as badly cooked food or inattentive servants drew from him torrents of complaint. And far from lessening his own fine conceit of himself, his suffering increased it. He now found it even harder to admire the efforts of others. He became even more dismissive of anything that did not meet his own needs. His family had always treated him with adulation. Crookshank’s terrible wound thrust him back even further towards them. Deprived by the war of the normal reason, marriage, to leave home, he never did. At home he was never exposed to any hint of criticism. He always seemed to find it hard to understand why others did not afford him the same unstinting admiration as he received from his family. He returned from the war dissatisfied, embittered and convinced the world was unjustly determined to do him down.
Macmillan too was forced back into the bosom of his family. At Oxford he had been torn between smothering intimacies, whether of Sligger Urquhart or Ronnie Knox, and the wider society of the university. This wider world was beginning to win out by 1914 – he was becoming, albeit slowly, less of a cosseted ‘mummy’s boy’, less pompous, more worldly. His successes in the Union indicated a gift for public speaking and an ability to charm voters. His wounds, on the other hand, drastically retarded the emergence of his maturing personality. He once again became entirely dependent on his mother, immersed in his books and lacking the company of men and women his own age. As a result for the next quarter of a century he was regarded, by both friends and enemies, as impossibly pompous, self-obsessed and utterly lacking in charm. This reputation only began to change during the Second World War, six years after his mother’s death.
The contrast with Lyttelton is striking. He also had a mother to whom he remained exceptionally close. Four years of active service had, however, made Lyttelton entirely his own man. For the first time he had achieved something in a field that his father had not effortlessly dominated before him. His contact with the Guards ‘characters’ had convinced him that he too was a ‘character’. He was, for the rest of his life, self-confident and self-assured. If anything he was too convinced of his own opinion and too proud to conceal it from those he considered his inferiors – a disadvantage in a political system so full of egos that the ability to dissemble the extent of one’s own ego could be vital.
3 Bottle-washers (#ulink_097165f5-e194-5ceb-96d2-a85f82033733)
The end of the war came as a shock to many young men. As Lyttelton told his mother, ‘with youth the war is tolerable even enjoyable’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Peace did not appear at all enticing. All the plans and hopes entertained in 1914 had had to be put to one side. Now, quite suddenly it seemed to them, they needed to take stock of their situation.
Macmillan, confined to a hospital bed in Belgrave Square, had the most time to think. His prospects seemed bleak. One operation had removed half the bullet lodged in his back but he needed another. He had little to do except read and look forward to visitors. With the most exciting event in his life being a trip to see Thomas Beecham conduct Mendelssohn, he envied Cranborne his sojourn in France. ‘France’ was, in his imagination, ‘wonderful’. England, in contrast, seemed suburban, bourgeois and corrupt. Macmillan responded enthusiastically to Cranborne’s tongue-in-cheek idea that ‘after the war, we really must start a League of Individuals’. ‘We will refuse to do things…and all go to Italy,’ Macmillan enthused, ‘and live in a villa in Fiesole, with Cypresses…and dear Italian wines with their ravishing names. How wonderful it would be! Let George and Beaverbrook and the rest of them reconstruct to their hearts’ content, as long as we are not obliged to live in their monstrous edifice.’
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Many men of a poetic temperament – one thinks of Robert Graves and his retreat to Majorca – put these principles into practice. Pragmatists like the Guardsmen did not let this reverie last for long. Before the war they had been committed to seeking conventional worldly success. Within weeks of the end of the war they were again embracing this goal. Even Macmillan found, once he was released from hospital, that maudlin thoughts of inaction or exile dissipated. ‘To a young man of twenty-four, scarred but not disfigured,’ he recalled, ‘with all the quick mental and moral recovery of which youth is capable, life at the end of 1918 seemed to offer an attractive, not to say exciting prospect.’
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The door that the war had opened to the military career unconsidered by any of them in 1914 was rapidly closed. The fact that none of them remained a soldier was not of their own choosing. As early as 1916 Lyttelton had applied for a permanent commission in the Grenadier Guards.
(#litres_trial_promo) Crookshank too explored the possibility at the end of the war. In 1918 they both applied to remain in the regiment. They were both men in good odour with dominant figures in the Guards. But the Guards traditionalists were determined to get back to normal, purge their ranks of ‘patriots’ and guarantee the careers of regular officers.
(#litres_trial_promo) By the time they reconsidered this policy, it was too late. Lyttelton and Crookshank were launched on other careers. Even Ma Jeffreys couldn’t get them back.
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The war also ended Lyttelton’s ambition to enter the law – his contacts, so good at the time his father died, had gone stale. Not that this altered the central fact that he had to do something that made plenty of money. Even if his father’s experience of politics had not soured him on Parliament, his father’s example had shown the necessity of securing financial security before considering other avenues. In the months after the Armistice he courted Lady Moira Osborne, the daughter of the Duke of Leeds. His Grace disapproved of his daughter’s suitor on grounds of his poverty. Their engagement was made possible by Didi Lyttelton making ‘a kind of financial hara-kiri’ to provide her son with a respectable establishment. Retreating to visit Cranborne, he considered his good fortune: ‘Perfect Hatfield though baddish morning with the thermometer at 90 degrees in the shade. Phew but happy.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Oliver and Moira Osborne were married a few months later at St Margaret’s, Westminster.
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For a young man in need of cash the City was the obvious place to be. Many of Lyttelton’s Etonian contemporaries had already gravitated towards it. At least his army career exempted him from the jibe of his friend Geoffrey Madan, ‘Attractive Etonians who go straight on to the Stock Exchange…the raw material of the great bores.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1919 Lyttelton joined the firm of Brown, Shipley & Co. ‘The change,’ he remembered wryly, ‘from being a guardsman and a brigade major, under whose eye every knee stiffened, to being a clerk in the postal department was marked.’
