Leo Keohane

Captain Jack White


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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