of his father’s relief at Ladysmith came in the last days of Paardeberg and at his point White does not expand any further on the horrors of his own experiences there. This is the only time when White’s comments on military matters include a criticism of Kitchener who surely warranted something far stronger than White’s comments about Methuen. His loyalty to his father seems to have been conflated with a similar feeling for Kitchener who, although treating White well later on in India, did not return any loyalty on the outbreak of the Great War when White looked for an audience to explain his plan for the Irish Volunteers. It is also possible that, although later battles had their fill of horror, Paardeberg had a uniquely nightmarish aspect to it that would have jarred with the rather jaunty tone he adopted through the rest of the war.
In the next engagement he writes about in detail White, again, omits criticism of the commanding officer, but, in this case, he displays a certain admiration for General Sir Ian Hamilton, not as a military man but as a friend of White’s family. Although Pakenham is scathing of Hamilton’s order to storm the heights at Doornkop, there are no adverse comments from White except to point out that the cavalry had decided it was a job for the infantry. ‘It was not, but no matter’ he said curtly.32 Winston Churchill, working as a war correspondent, found his naïve patriotism challenged when he saw the slaughter that had ensued, and all for the possession of the gold mines in the area. The Boers had occupied a high ridge at Doornkop: ‘the Doornkop, the actual kopje, beside the farmhouse, where Jameson had raised the white flag, five years before’.33 This was Jameson of the infamous Jameson Raid which had gone ridiculously wrong and which Hamilton had now the opportunity of avenging. Whether the cavalry had any part to play in the tactics is not clear, but they were led by Sir John French. (He was later the commander of the British Home Forces who dealt with the Easter Rising in Ireland and certainly, in South Africa, displayed the callousness that distinguished him in Dublin.) In any case, the ‘grunts’, the old reliable cannon fodder, were the unfortunates selected to avenge Jameson, and they were ordered to storm the hill, leaving themselves exposed to a rain of bullets from the Boers. According to White, the Gordon Highlanders ‘had lost a hundred men in ten minutes, but they had done the trick’.34 They were rewarded by the presence of Hamilton himself that evening telling them how proud he was of them and that they had done, in that adverb reserved exclusively for the military commentator, splendidly, and, of course, the gold mines were secure. Leo Amery, that irredeemable exponent of the imperial grands écrits, is worth recalling, as Pakenham says, for his commentary with ‘its ghastly anachronistic ring’. He wrote of ‘the steady enduring discipline of the men under fire, [and] their absolute indifference to losses, contributed to carry on the glorious tradition of the British infantry’.35
White, as a child of his time, was certainly not completely free of these kinds of values and despite his dismissal of most of the constructs of the dominant hegemonies, whether it was the Catholic Church or the British Empire, betrayed an ambivalence to the radical forces he espoused whenever his old comrades hove into view. He was continually torn in his loyalties, and this probably contributed significantly to the irascibility of his demeanour. He describes Doornkop as ‘the first of the only two real hot fights I claim to have experienced till I came to Ireland […] [although] it had its farcical element’. He called it ‘very unhealthy’, and although he makes little of what must have felt like a suicidal procession up the hill, he again expresses his empathy with the misfits: ‘I found on these occasions the drunkards and the religious fanatics had a way of standing out.’ 36 (White’s war writing has a vibrant realism, recalling Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, but would have benefited from some judicious editing.) His perspective on the action was that the Boers had a ready escape route behind the row of ridges they occupied and, while they had targets sufficiently far away to allow escape, they continued to fire. White was part of the tenth row of fourteen spread across about four miles, and by the time they got near the top, most of the Boers had been cleared off; nevertheless, he certainly came under fire and along with two others had got fifty yards ahead of his own line. The three of them were either in the act of charging or contemplating a charge when the rest of his regiments behind charged also.
This all leads to the incident referred to at the beginning of Chapter 1 and that arguably defined White as no other has. There have been no corroborating accounts uncovered, but it is an event in keeping with his character, and White’s frankness lends credibility to what he has to say. For example, his later account of how he came to be awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for bravery is not told with any self-deprecatory modesty but rather with an apparently genuine detachment from his own fright and foolishness, which lends further validity to this earlier event at Doornkop.
As he charged up the hill believing, as he said, that most of the Boer had made good their escape at this stage, he had contemplated the possibility of a VC, gained under false pretences. He then spotted a gun protruding from behind a rock. He grabbed it and apprehended a very frightened youth. When his men arrived they were all for bayoneting the young Boer on the spot, and White’s superior officer actually ordered the youth be shot. White describes what happened next:
A wave of disgust swamped my sense of discipline. ‘If you shoot him,’ said I, pointing my carbine at him, ‘I’ll shoot you’ and he passed on. He is now a General, that officer and I am a Bolshevik, or reported as such.37
Whether it was White’s own forceful personality, or more likely the fact that his father had become famous only a few weeks before, it typified the kind of defiance that he practised all his life. Of course it must be acknowledged that he displayed a great sense of justice. To balance this, he also included a counter report, purportedly written by one of the soldiers present, which appeared in a local paper, the Bloemfontein Post, about the incident, which was not at all flattering to him:
I will now mention an incident that has made a good deal of bad feeling in the regiment. During the final charge, one of the Boers was seen to pick off five of our lads with his last five cartridges. Then he held up his hands and surrendered. Our boys were going to avenge their comrades when a young officer [White] came up and insisted that his life should be spared.38
His comment about writing like this preparing him for ‘the truths of psycho-analysis’ twenty years later is typical of the kind of obtuse remarks he made from time to time. Although White’s account is extraordinary in that it has him escaping from being charged with mutiny, his version still has a more authentic ring to it than the newspaper’s pat and ready tale of five bullets finding five of ‘our lads’. Whatever version was closest to what actually happened, and assuming that both White and the Bloemfontein Post are referring to the same incident, it shows him in at least a favourable humanitarian light and demonstrates his willingness to defy the general consensus even under the most stressful of conditions.
Having subverted the authority of the British Army, and with his account of mutiny providing an antithesis to the regimental chronicle of glory that Doornkop became, White then continues to strike a more realistic note when relating how the sixteen bodies of the dead men were laid out the following morning (the seventeenth body, that of the officer, St John Meyrick, had been granted more decorum). These were the same bodies that Churchill witnessed which led to his temporary epiphany about the real reasons for the war. He does not corroborate White’s story, however, about the competition for the boots of the dead men among their surviving comrades. White also relates that ‘an elegant figure drew up beside’ him:
the Duke of Marlborough, known to me by sight, for my crammer was at Woodstock and we had sat immediately behind the ducal pew in church. He gazed at the ranks of death. ‘C’est magnifique mais ce n’est pas la guerre’ he said. No your grace, it was not even magnificent. Its magnificence was of the same order as your own.39
Being a horseman of renown, White was automatically seconded to the oxymoronically named mounted infantry (MI) which, according to him, Kitchener had formed. Pakenham, however, states that it was General Sir Redvers Buller who had first recognised the need for a more flexible infantry than the one they had, which quite
