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 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.185
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.186 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.187 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.188
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.189 Like Macmillan and Crookshank before him, he returned to his mother and a private hospital.190 He made, however, a near-miraculous recovery.191 There was no long-term damage and he was even able to return to the Guards