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Chapter 2

Training for Imperialism

Childhood and Education

White’s first reminiscence consists of what he calls his ‘consecutive memories’ at the age of seven when he was told either that no one could stand on a three-legged stool or that he specifically was not allowed to do so. Having done so, and having fallen and cut his head, he still persisted in maintaining that authority was wrong. The floor was uneven; if it had not been so, he would have been unhurt – therefore he was correct in his refusal to accept the edict handed down to him.1 In the early schools he attended he recalls the constant corporal punishment, and although the amount of beatings he took would not have been exceptional in those days, there does seem to have been a rebelliousness in him that made him stand out from the other children.

At the same time, his autobiography demonstrates a remarkable good-naturedness about his recollections of travails, a readiness to accept that people found themselves at the mercy of forces over which they had no control, whether these were external pressures and conditioning, or internal in the sense that it was their nature to behave so. This attitude is one that persisted right through his life, showing itself overall as a lack of bitterness about various injustices that he suffered, coupled with a deep appreciation of kindnesses that were shown him. Of course, this could have been with the hindsight of many years – he was 50 when he wrote Misfit; on the other hand, there are numerous occasions when he attempted to concentrate on what he imagined to be the good side in some recalcitrant opponent. More interestingly, he demonstrated sensitivity to the suffering of others from a young age. He recalls, for example:

periodical killing of pigs in the farmyard that adjoined the school. Pig-killing day was a red letter day to the other boys and myself, but in different ways. They loved it and I dreaded it, I used to shut myself up in the class room and close the shutters to shut out the pigs’ screams.2

He describes, with affection, his first schoolmaster, Dr Williams of Summerfield. Although having ‘flogged enough Latin and Greek’ into him, White still demonstrated an appreciation of what was done for him despite the various grades of punishments he received, ranging from slaps on the hand to more serious lashings. All administered in a courteous way, as he would have it.

He believed he had a dual relationship with another headmaster, Dr Fearon, the ‘Bear’, at Winchester; one was of two equals discussing the vagaries of school, the other was of master and pupil that involved a chronic history of transgression and punishment. White’s account of the conversations he had with the ‘Bear’ is amusing; he suggested that he negotiated his expulsion from the school. At first, this was to avoid expulsion and, then, when he deemed himself tired of the whole system, to actively encourage it. White’s rendering of the bewilderment of the teacher and his subsequent resignation to behaving in a manner contrary to his kindly disposition by expelling the boy is a masterly piece of writing in its overturning of conventional expectations.

White’s accounts of his battles with the housemaster Smith, ‘The Prowler’, are evidence, if there is much substance in them, of a very high-spirited

youth, including stories of attempts at setting off explosions and taking unauthorised trips to town to sample everything from drink to the local girls. However, the most illuminating story details his succumbing to ennui while fielding on the cricket pitch:

It seemed to me I had been there since the world began, and the sun sinking towards the horizon was about to terminate a cycle of creation without incident or meaning. Something must enliven, or, if need be disrupt, this aeonic monotony. The cycle must not close carrying my ego with it to unbroken nothingness. I began to make water for height, not, I think, with any intention of outrage of display, but anaesthetized from the mass-consciousness by my own boredom, and wishing to revive in myself the atrophying faculty of interest in something. I was soon observed, there was a roar of delighted amusement from twenty-two boys; […] I was flogged of course. I was always being flogged.3

This anecdote elevates a conventional account of schooldays to something more significant. Along with the consistent rebelliousness, there was a conviction that he did not really fit in and was in any case disliked by the majority. He appeared to require a continual stimulation and this was often provided by getting into trouble for reasons that puzzled him as much as others. He continues about his punishment:

Thus it has always been, I possess the capacity of being bored to desperation, which moves me to break the mechanical routine under which others silently suffer. They rejoice for a moment at a glimpse of vicarious revolt, then round on the rebel.4

Singled out for general derision, he is sore and surprised to be once again unsupported by his schoolmates. It is as if his display was a desperate foray to achieve popularity and this, briefly attained when they roar with laughter, is again denied him when they realise what he has done.

He puzzles over this, not his seeking of the popular vote, which he probably could not admit to himself, but the fact that even to himself he is incorrigible and incomprehensible. He talks about reaching a ‘desperation point where I knew I was no longer responsible for my actions’ and quotes a previous teacher who said, ‘White, you are in for more trouble than any boy in the school, but you are not the worst boy in the school. For whatever you do you are always found out.’ 5 Then White goes on to consider if he might have wanted to be found out and finally surrenders by saying, ‘I wanted to preserve something, though I don’t know what’, and there is no explanation, thirty-five years later, of what that might be.6

There were further adventures, including an abortive attempt to blow up one of the teachers and another story of having returned to the school dressed up as a prospective guardian. While probably daring escapades judged by any criteria, they are such that a large number of schoolboys could admit to having been involved in without any great sense of achievement; it does, however, indicate high spirits which in view of some episodes from his adult life are not surprising.

In recounting his struggles with various authorities and his almost automatic rejection of anything that was presented to him as received wisdom, White never mentions his parents except when he is finally requested to leave Winchester. Earlier in the text he writes about his doting grandmother, Archdeacon Baly’s wife, and the good priest himself, as a man who had no idea about children, but beyond that he seems to have perceived his life as a solitary, almost orphan-like one. His son Derrick has commented when he first read the autobiography (late in life) that he was taken aback by the seeming self-centredness of the man, but this could also be seen as self sufficiency.7

Winchester has no records of note about White except that he featured in several of the school magazines as a member of the debating team where he seems to have performed adequately. The one speech of his whose substance was noted (without being recorded) was a spirited defence of Oliver Cromwell. Winchester could provide no evidence or record of his expulsion, but it is possible that public schools would perceive a need to expel a pupil as some sort of failure on their part. The school confirms that he got ‘an exhibition’ but points out that this was not as elevated as a scholarship.8

Sandhurst

White related that despite his absence from formal education for six months after his departure from Winchester, he still succeeded in gaining a King’s cadetship for Sandhurst. Whatever other admissions he made about being incorrigible or even mad, or later, cowardly, it was always important for him not to be seen as a fool.

His becoming a soldier could be seen as puzzling, and he does not comment on it, although his radical tendencies soon caused him problems. More than likely the decision arose from a combination of his father’s influence and the fact that there was little other choice open to him. There is a general consensus that the august military academy of Sandhurst was far from being an efficient training ground at that time. Like Sir George who, at the outset of the Boer War, ‘had never commanded an army in the field against forces armed with modern weapons’,9 Britain itself had had very few serious military engagements for nearly fifty years. This became evident in Africa when the general flabbiness of the military thinking in the college was shown up. The historian A.P. Thornton quotes Admiral of the Fleet Jackie Fisher, who said in 1903 about the Boer War that it was ‘accepted and continuing opinion in naval circles’ that:

One does not wonder at South Africa when one sees every day the utter ineptitude of military officers. Half the year they are on leave and the other half of the year everything is left to the sergeant-major and the NCO’s.10

White’s apparent perversity came to the fore when faced with what he might have believed to be a totally unnecessary task, but there was a justification to his discontent. The study of fortifications in particular aroused his ire, and he saw all the instruction as outdated by at least fifty years.11 This recalcitrance was reflected in his marks, but the most notable evidence was his rustication for riding in a point-to-point when he had been specifically forbidden to do so because of some previous infringement. He relates meeting at this time with his father, about to become Quartermaster General at the War Office, who had come back from India having broken his leg in seven places in a horse race in Calcutta (this man was now sixty-two). When White went with his mother to meet him off the boat, Sir George had already heard about Jack’s suspension:

Lying in his cabin with his leg in plaster of Paris, he greeted me ‘Well, Jack, I hear you’ve made a damned fool of yourself’. I knew I had, but I had learned the futility of too much self-abasement. ‘Well, Father,’ said I, ‘I heard something of your coming to grief in a somewhat similar manner’. My father smiled and the incident was closed.12

This is one of the rare comments on record of his father’s attitude to White’s exploits, but it does not appear to be inconsistent with the other details of Sir George’s attitude to his son’s behaviour. The telegrams (discussed in Chapter 4) that Sir George sent to Dollie, White’s fiancée, display a tolerance of, if not even some kind of resignation towards his son who seemed to be bent on a self-willed course regardless of any one else’s feelings.13

Alan, Jack White’s second son, believed Sir George was indulgent, particularly because he was both an absentee father and one who came to parenting rather later in life.14 It is possible nevertheless that Sir George saw something in his son that was not going to respond to any direct discipline, that is, an intransigence in the face of authority. Of course another perspective could see Sir George, faced with an obdurate son and an adoring mother, as taking the path of least resistance.

White certainly served his father loyally in his own way; there is not a single critical word about him anywhere in White’s writing, but the same cannot be said for his mother. In a letter to his niece, Pat English, he said that it was ‘the force of female suction that killed Rosie [his eldest sister]’ and implied that it was also responsible for his ‘father’s stroke’.15 This seems to be a reference to his mother, which is borne out by his niece who remarks that ‘from what I remember of her (and I was very fond of her) she would by any normal standards have been called a greedy selfish woman and a very powerful vampire’.16

It appears that Lady Amy White was a dominating woman who lived into her eighties. Certainly she was a very energetic woman; her diary in 1935, the year of her death, is filled with entries of social meetings and household tasks: ‘today I did out the boudoir cupboard, a long and tiresome job which I had not finished by luncheon […] after which I rested for one hour, […] I then dressed for Mrs MacGregor’s tea party’. She goes on to fill an entire foolscap diary page with details of people met and discussions had, before going back to finish the cupboard before dinner.17

At the end of his account of his Sandhurst days, White mentions two revealing incidents. The first describes the company he kept while awaiting his commission: he ‘gravitated towards the higher ranks of the aristocracy’. Their appeal, he conceded frankly, was ‘a certain recklessness’ and his ‘whole hearted snobbery’. This frankness runs right through all his writings and was the very essence of his disposition. Although at times endearing, it also provokes suspicion about its sheer manipulativeness. On a number of occasions he confesses to some unattractive behaviour on his part and it seems as if he is using it to forestall later criticism or in some way make it excusable. Certainly it adds weight to his credibility, and incredulity about some of the incidents related is often put in abeyance by the honesty he has demonstrated elsewhere.

In recalling his days mixing with ‘aristocratic friends’ he refers to his ‘unexpected bit’ as preventing his success as a snob. Having dressed immaculately to dine, he could not find a properly fitting top hat and so wore a bowler hat, which would appear to have been a deliberate social faux pas and probably looked ridiculous as well – ‘an outrage’. He wrote presciently, ‘I was never secure against this latent anarchist. He kept cropping up until he got me altogether in the end.’18 This was written at least six or seven years before his experience of Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War convinced him that he was an anarchist, at least politically. However, he seems to have been aware of his ‘unexpected bit’ long before that and it formed an explanation of sorts to himself for the various adventures he found himself involved in.

He finishes his account of his experiences in Sandhurst with another revelation of recalcitrance. He had been ‘gazetted to the 1st Gordon Highlanders then quartered in Edinburgh Castle’ and claims:

I did not like my brother officers and they did not like me. […] I disliked the self effacement which was the tradition for newly joined subalterns. I disliked being drilled over again. […] I disliked the salt I was obliged to eat with my porridge. I disliked everything and every one.19

He seems to have missed entirely the point about military training, which demanded a monastic-type obedience and submission to the will of whatever the soldier perceived to be his ultimate authority. He was completely unable to comply with any kind of subordination demanded of him unless he could establish an acceptable reason for it; orders for the sake of orders were a nonsense. His resistance was such that when his colleagues performed a mock court martial of him he was prepared to rebel to the point of killing someone: ‘the light irresponsible feeling had come to me,’ is how he describes the murderous emotion as if it was some kind of possession or even insanity over which he had no control.20

This was the autumn of 1899 and White, born into privilege and educated and trained as an executive of empire, now found that the time had come to support all that he had been conditioned to hold dear. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori was a concept that he would almost automatically question, but there was 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 in mud filled, corpse surrounded trenches, sapping up to Cronje [The Boer commander].’31 News 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 often was unable to move much more than eight miles from a railway. Originally called the Imperial Yeomanry, it became the first real response to the mobility of the Boers.40 White commented: ‘War according to the text book may have been over; hard and continuous fighting was just beginning.’ 41 He joined the 6 th M.I. and it seems to have suited him eminently, galloping around the countryside engaging in guerrilla tactics similar to those employed by the Boers, and with little of the irritating discipline that brought out the worst in him.

On one occasion White was sent on a scouting mission and was captured by some Boers who deprived him of his trousers and horse. He barely escaped being shot but managed to run away and covered a distance of six miles to summon reinforcements to attack the enemy. It is difficult to establish exactly what White did because of the light-hearted way he treats the whole incident. He maintained, for example, that when he was spotted by some local people they were awestruck, having never seen a white man near naked before, and came to the conclusion he was some kind of deity. He was also laughed at by his own forces when he eventually caught up with them.

This unlikely account does not take from the fact that his fellow subaltern, an Irishman called Cameron, whom he described as fearless, was killed in the same adventure. Cameron was mentioned in despatches but it was White who was awarded the DSO.42 There must have been some behaviour of military significance on White’s part for him to win this; a DSO is a level two award in the hierarchy of military awards, ranking just below a VC and above the Military Cross.43

In his resumé of his feelings during the whole event, he is particularly harsh on himself, describing how he lost heart when separated from his comrades and how frightened he was. He said that to do himself justice he did his best to prevent himself getting the award and told his commanding officer that he had behaved like a coward. Accentuating his alienation he says, ‘I was already becoming accustomed to the non-acceptance of my standards of merit or demerit.’44

This is an impressive piece of openness, something far beyond the false self-deprecatory stance of many so-called heroes. Protesting that he had behaved as a coward, he speculated that ‘Kitchener seems to have been so tickled at the idea of me running away in my shirt that nothing would do him but to recommend me for the DSO.’ 45 (There is another later light-hearted notion that, as his father had been awarded every other decoration, the DSO went to the family to make up the collection.) Again one is reminded of Orwell in his accounts of military action and their depiction of destructiveness and logistical insanity.

There is no political analysis of the war itself offered anywhere. He is brief but honest about the depredations engaged in by the British under the directions of Kitchener in an attempt to crush the Boer resistance: ‘We led the life of filibusters and stole everything we saw’ and talks about his unit as one of ‘the “pastoral” columns [that] had been at work, taking the women into concentration camps, burning the farms, destroying every living thing, except the men, whom we couldn’t catch’. 46

Of course it is far too early to detect any kind of philosophy in a period prior to much consciousness on his part of the struggles of the world, whether in defence of class, country, or vested interests, although his taste for the metaphysical is first recorded when he recalls lying in the Crocodile River and having the ‘most complete sense of physical well being’ he had ever known.47 As his life developed, he began to place more and more importance on these transcendent experiences. But even from the vantage point of thirty years later, White still makes little or no comment on what was essentially a serious reversal of Britain’s place in the world and possibly the earliest harbinger of fragmentation in the Empire. His critiques are concerned with warfare, its practice, and its administration, rather than as a political weapon per se, although that perspective was to change later with his rather idiosyncratic adoption of pacifism.

This apolitical stance could also be taken as a demonstration of where White’s original loyalties lay and where they remained to some extent right up to his death. There is little evidence of any sympathy on his part for nationalist causes in Ireland at any time, and it could be argued that his antipathy towards the Unionists lay in what he saw as a movement inimical to the interests of the United Kingdom despite its overt agenda. He said in a letter to the new Northern Ireland Prime Minister J.M. Andrews on 16 December 1940:

I was Red – I was never Green, I never had any use for neutrality in this war, so little indeed that though I have done all in my power to forestall such a terrible possibility, I believe I would fight against Eire if it came to the pinch.48

Although written to impress upon a sceptical government his value as a soldier in the fight against Nazism and probably causing consternation among his nationalist admirers, it displays little that could be said to be inconsistent with his actions and speeches down through the years.