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