a generosity to his character that would have found him complying with the demands being made on him. Although his ideology, complicated though it was, found its allies in peoples and movements that were fundamentally alien to him, his friends formed a bond with him that he never quite abnegated despite his differences. Even in the experiences which he was now about to undergo for the next couple of years, and in which he could never have believed in, there is a striking lack of bitterness or even critical comment about most of the characters he met.
The Second South African War
The Second South African War, more commonly known as the Boer War, began on 11 October 1899. Although it would be another twenty years before the British empire had reached its apogee in terms of territory, in South Africa there occurred the first indications of fragility in what was, up to then, a belief in the inalienable entitlement of the British people to govern more than one quarter of the entire globe. Thomas Pakenham described it as ‘the most humiliating war for Britain between 1815 and 1914’.
Although E.P. Thompson’s ‘enormous condescension of hindsight’ can readily perceive the inevitability of war, it is presumptuous to pick on one specific casus belli. For all that, the fact that an independent sovereign Transvaal, run by Boers, had discovered gold in 1886 has to be of especial significance. By 1898, the year before war started, it had become ‘the largest single producer of gold in the world’. A Cecil Rhodes inspired adventure, the ‘Jameson Raid’, had attempted a few years before that to win back the mines from the Boers. According to Pakenham, Dr Jameson, the eponymous leader, was going ‘to lick the burghers all round the Transvaal but instead had been humiliated by having to raise the white flag and weeping … was led away in a cart to the gaol at Pretoria’.21
The conventional opinion (conventional as in any enterprise that begins in the early autumn) that the war would last until Christmas indicates the general lack of awareness of the task Britain had set for itself. The Jameson Raid itself seemed almost a harbinger of what awaited the British Army in their encounters. Arthur Conan Doyle, while working as a medical doctor with the army, wrote an account of the affair with an immediacy that is impressive even by today’s standards. He stated that ‘Napoleon and all his veterans have never treated us as roughly as these hard bitten farmers with their ancient theology and their inconveniently modern rifles.’ 22
The criticisms that White had about the practices at Sandhurst were further compounded by his accounts of what was, at its least, a marked inefficiency by the military in the field.
But there were other aspects of the war that would later have enormous relevance to White’s thinking. It is unlikely his political consciousness had started to develop as early as this, but, the dominant elite that he was to encounter in Gibraltar a couple of years later would have been representative of what J.A. Hobson wrote about in his critique –Imperialism: A Study. Completed in 1902 and although writing more generally on imperialism Hobson’s remarks are very relevant to the Boer War – and, it has to be noted, almost eerily appropriate to today, post Iraq.
The vast expenditure on armaments, the costly wars, the grave risks and embarrassments of foreign policy, the stoppage of political and social reforms within Great Britain, though fraught with great injury to the nation, have served well the present business interests of certain industries and professions.23
Although tainted with anti-Semitism, Hobson’s Marxist analysis, where he saw the whole exercise of imperialism being of heavy economic cost to the nation but hugely profitable to a very tiny minority, is acknowledged even today for its validity.24 In South Africa, White was about to see the fundamental driving issues of war, particularly at Doornkop, where the gold mines were located.
He served first in the Gordon Highlanders and then as a member of a scratch collection of various companies to make up a mounted infantry (6 th M.I.) column. Among the engagements he was involved in were the battles at Magersfontein (December 1899) and Doornkop (May 1900). His regiment, the Gordons, formed part of the Highlanders force in both of these engagements.
In Magersfontein more than 3,000 men broke lines and ran. In the face of such an outright and sustained retreat the military powers seemed to have had no choice but to ignore what happened and carry on as normal. Pakenham relates that Lord Methuen, the overall commander, believed he was unlucky and could just about have achieved a victory but for the fact that some of his officers had insisted on carrying on a night march in close formation for too long. This brought them to a position where they were a very soft target for the Boers. After nine hours of marching in very difficult terrain at night and then finding themselves under sustained fire without any hope of responding and with a confusion of orders being given, it was regarded as understandable that a general panic eventually ensued.25
Of course White’s perspective on the whole catastrophe was quite different: ‘it was not a fight; it was half massacre, half farce’.26 He and his troops had landed in South Africa barely a fortnight before, but they were very experienced, being mostly veterans from the Afghan campaign (Dargai, they were called). Their job was to back up the force of Highlanders that had been involved in the night march, and White’s first encounter with them involved coming across groups of men lying around the great plain, ‘which crackled with musketry like a fire of dry sticks’, playing cards and complaining they were fed up. Eventually White and his comrades found themselves taking cover under fire and encountering scattered groups of dead Highlanders. After a period where there was absolutely no communication White found that the original assault force had turned back. He seems to have made some attempts to stop them but eventually found himself joining what he sardonically termed the ‘homers’. He was scathing about the complete lack of communication from the command and pointed out that the sangfroid demonstrated by his men was as impressive as any of the newspaper reports made them out to be. Their ‘nonchalant gallantry’ was totally wasted, he said, because ‘nobody told them to go anywhere’. Methuen, he said, ‘disclaimed giving any such order [to retreat] as well he might. He had no means of giving any order at all. It was the days before loudspeakers’.27
Whether White was absolutely critical of Methuen as a commander or of the system that pitched men into battle without either clear organisation or instructions is debatable. More importantly, he instinctively had seen the whole phantasmagoria for what it was and questioned why such an activity should be regarded as praiseworthy: ‘Oh very singular military mind! Most amazing of all I could not find my dumbfounded wonder at it all reflected in the minds of those with whom I subsequently discussed it.’ 28
White, for all his scepticism, did not refrain from a kind of jingoism in describing his own involvements: ‘though I had never been under fire before […] All the better; this was rather fun, and my section, nearly all old Dargai men, seemed to enjoy it too.’ This can be interpreted as the language of one who has not experienced the realities, or more correctly the horrors, of warfare but in White’s case it could be argued that this was not so. He was either a member of that peculiar, but nonetheless real group, who relish these types of conditions, possibly from some kind of adrenalin addiction, or else he believed that this was the type of attitude to aspire to in coping with the stresses of battle. He certainly openly acknowledged his own fearfulness: ‘I recognized my own cowardice indeed cowardice begot the courage of self preservation’ and perceptively went on to observe:
I was naturally sympathetic, therefore, to the cowardice and self preservation of others. But those who are unwilling to recognize their own cowardice hide it from themselves by cruelty to others. Yet they will go to amazing lengths of self deception and mendacity.29
The engagement at Paardeberg, which, according to Pakenham, displayed a callous and obtuse Kitchener at his absolute worst, was a horrific blunder where, on Kitchener’s orders, suicidal charges were made against almost unbreachable defences.30 Although his regiment took a relatively insignificant role there, White was involved and treated it very summarily: ‘At Paardeberg I got a little glimpse of what the Great War must have been like, for we had about a week
