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

The importance of being a ‘thruster’ was brought home to Lyttelton when he arrived at the 3rd Battalion. This was a world away from Jeffreys’s élite 2nd Battalion in which Lyttelton had been schooled. ‘I never realized till that day,’ he wrote after a month with his new unit, ‘how good the 2nd Battalion were.’ 87 Like the 4th Battalion, the 3rd had been badly mauled at Loos. Only six officers had survived the battle and Lyttelton did not find them an impressive group: ‘I knew some of them but was not writing home about them.’ ‘They were all in a state of “Isn’t it awful” and doing very little to make it less so.’ 88 As one of those officers later confirmed, ‘I think we felt a bit dazed and were glad enough when we were relieved [in the front line].’ The situation was no better among the other ranks. The battalion had been severely weakened in the summer of 1915 when it had been ‘skinned’ of some of its best NCOs to create the 4th Battalion. After Loos most of the remaining experienced NCOs and nearly 400 men were dead and had been replaced by new drafts. 89

The worst problem by far, it so happened, was the commanding officer. Lieutenant-Colonel Noel ‘Porkie’ Corry was the senior battalion commander in the brigade. He had specifically requested Lyttelton’s assignment to his battalion. Corry’s son, Armar, had not only been at Eton with Lyttelton but had also served with him in the 2nd Battalion, where he gained the reputation of an audacious trench raider, finally falling victim to a severe face wound during the pre-Loos skirmishing of August 1915. He was to lose his life at the Somme in 1916. Corry père was another matter entirely. Behind the lines he cut quite a dash. 90 The trenches, however, had broken his nerve. He was an incompetent, a coward and a drunkard. 91 Even worse for Lyttelton, he was desperately trying to deny his inadequacies both to himself and to his superiors by blaming others for the shortcomings of his unit. The situation was excruciatingly dangerous. Like the 2nd Battalion, the 3rd was expected to undertake aggressive skirmishing. Such operations were potentially deadly enough when carried out by brilliant young ‘thrusters’ under the command of equally brilliant officers like Jeffreys; they were doubly so when run by incompetents. Just before Lyttelton arrived, the battalion had been surprised by a German attack as they ham-fistedly tried to change over forward companies. ‘The Germans had got possession of the whole battalion’s front’ and had to be ejected by the Coldstream Guards. 92

As the 3rd Battalion moved back into the trenches near Loos Lyttelton’s heart sank. The manoeuvre was carried out in a farcical manner. Porkie was ‘rather like a monkey on hot bricks and one could see he was no good’. He didn’t seem to know what his battalion was doing and blamed everybody else for the confusion. He fastened on to the problem of sandbags. ‘It was so simple,’ noted a frustrated Lyttelton, ‘send a party for sandbags with an officer and let them follow us up the trench. Meanwhile let us go on. But he would have it that the whole battalion should go off and get the sandbags…come back and go on.’ Lyttelton was forced to stand in a trench arguing with his commanding officer. His arguments prevailed but they wasted precious time, moving neither forwards nor backwards, until the Germans started to shell their communications trench. As Lyttelton noted viciously: ‘this bit of shelling put the wind up Porkie’ and all talk of sandbags was abandoned in the rush to a safer position. 93

Things became even worse when the battalion was given the chance to ‘recover its name’ by carrying out a bombing attack on ‘Little Willie’, on one of the flanks of the formidable German strongpoint known as the Hohenzollern Redoubt. Before the attack could go in, the battalion was ordered to dig a trench over to the Coldstreams to ensure that grenades could be moved 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.