The Story of Baden-Powell Part 4

This is often, indeed generally, the case, and corroborative evidence should always be sought for.

In the present instance my deductions proved pretty correct. I saw the couple later on, followed by their collie dog, riding along a lower road; but I could not determine their relations.h.i.+p to one another.

_Note on Examples I. and II._

Incidentally, the horse-tracks of No. 2 gave me a clue to the hour at which the invalid in the rickshaw had pa.s.sed that way.

Thus: I came on the droppings at 7.14.

a.s.suming that they were actually 15 minutes old and the horses had walked 1/4 mile since pa.s.sing the rickshaw, 19 minutes must have elapsed since the pa.s.sing; _i.e._ they pa.s.sed each other at 6.55.

On my arrival at the point where they had pa.s.sed, the rickshaw would now be 23 minutes ahead of me, or about 11/4 mile.

But it is not only on set occasions that Baden-Powell practises scouting. He rarely takes a walk, boards a 'bus, or enters a train, without finding opportunity for some subtle inductive reasoning. Thus he recommends the men in his regiment to notice closely any stranger with whom they may come in contact, guess what their professions and circ.u.mstances are, and then, getting into conversation, find out how near the truth their surmises have been. Therefore, dear reader, if you find yourself in a few months' time drifting into conversation with a good-looking, bronzed stranger, this side of fifty, who puts rather pointed questions to you, after having studied your thumbs, boots, and whiskers intently, take special delight in leading him harmlessly astray, for thereby you may be beating, with great glory to yourself, the "Wolf that never Sleeps."

The joy of a walk in the country is heightened, I think, by following the example of Baden-Powell, and paying attention to the tracks on the ground. It would be an uncanny day for England when every man turned himself into a Sherlock Holmes, but there is no man who might not with advantage to himself practise scouting in the Ess.e.x forests or on the Surrey hills. The world is filled with life, and yet people go rambling through fields and woods without having seen anything more exciting than a couple of rabbits and a few blackbirds.

The chief joy of scouting, however, is not to be found in what Baden-Powell calls "dear, drowsy, after-lunch Old England." They who would seek it must go far from this "ripple of land," far from

The happy violets hiding from the roads, The primroses run down to, carrying gold,-- The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths 'Twixt dripping ash-boughs,--hedgerows all alive With birds and gnats and large white b.u.t.terflies Which look as if the May-flower had caught life And palpitated forth upon the wind,-- Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist, Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills, And cattle grazing in the watered vales, And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods, And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere, Confused with smell of orchards.

Far from our tight little island must they journey for that inspiring spell which turns the man of means into a wanderer upon the earth's surface, driving him out of glittering London, with its twinkling lights and its tinkling cabs, out of St. James's, and out of the club arm-chair--out of all this, and wins him into the vast, drear, and inhuman world, where men of our blood wage a ceaseless war with savage nature. And it is when Baden-Powell packs his frock-coat into a drawer, pops his s.h.i.+ny tall hat into a box, and slips exultingly into a flannel s.h.i.+rt that the life of a scout seems to him the infinitely best in the world. No man ever cared less for the mere ease of civilisation than Baden-Powell.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FLANNEL-s.h.i.+RT LIFE

In _The Story of My Heart_ Richard Jefferies begins his enchanting pages with the expression of that desire which every son of Adam feels at times--the longing for wild, unartificial life. "My heart," he says, "was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge.... A species of thick clothing slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked, little habits become part of existence, and by degrees the mind is inclosed in a husk." Then he goes on to tell of a hill to which he resorted at such moments of intellectual depression, and of the sensations that thrilled him as he moved up the sweet short turf. The very light of the sun, he says, was whiter and more brilliant there, and standing on the summit his jaded heart revived, and "obtained a wider horizon of feeling." Th.o.r.eau, too, went to the woods because he wanted to live deliberately, and front only the essential facts of life. "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so st.u.r.dily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."

This longing for a return to nature in minds less imaginative than Th.o.r.eau's and Jefferies' results in globe-trotting or colonisation--according to circ.u.mstances,--it wakes the gipsy in our blood, be we gentle or simple, and sends us wandering over the waste places of the earth in quest of glory, adventure, or a gold mine--anything so long as it entails wandering. When it stirs in the mind of the disciplined soldier it turns him into a scout, and drives him out of the orderly-room, out of the barrack square, to wander in Himalayan pa.s.ses and ride across the deserts of Africa. Baden-Powell is a nomad. The smart cavalry officer who can play any musical instrument, draw amusing pictures, tell delightfully droll stories, sing a good song, stage-manage theatricals--do everything, in short, that qualifies a man to take his ease in country houses, loves more than any other form of existence the loneliness and the wildness of the scout's. Often, he tells us, when he is about the serious business of handing teacups in London drawing-rooms, his mind flies off to some African waste, to some lonely Indian hill, and straightway he longs with all his soul to fling off the trappings of civilised society, and be back again with nature, back again in the dear old flannel-s.h.i.+rt life, living hard, with his life in his hand.

Once, after two months of wandering, he got into a hotel and, after dinner, into a bed. But it would not do, he says; in a twinkling he had whipped the blankets off the bed and was lying outside on mother earth, with the rain beating upon his face, and deep in refres.h.i.+ng slumber. The best of beds, according to B.-P., is "the veldt tempered with a blanket and a saddle." When he is on his lonely wanderings he always sleeps with his pistol under the "pillow" and the lanyard round his neck. However soundly he sleeps, if any one comes within ten yards of him, tread he never so softly, Baden-Powell wakes up without fail, and with a brain cleared for action.

One of the sayings of Baden-Powell which I most like is that which most reveals this side of his character. "A smile and a stick," says he, "will carry you through any difficulty in the world." And he lives in accordance with this principle; and it is typical of the man. Over the world he goes on his solitary expeditions, hunting animals, hunting men, making notes of what foreign armies are doing, what are the chief thoughts occupying the minds of distant and dangerous tribesmen, and he never goes about it bl.u.s.teringly or with the Byronic mystery of the stage detective. He trusts to his sense of humour--to his smile--first; after that, and only when there is no hope for it, do those hard jaws of his lock with a snap, the eyes light up with resistless determination, and _whir-r-r_ goes the stick, and--well, it requires a tough head to bear what follows.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Family on Board the _Pearl_]

Baden-Powell's friends were amused during the early days of the siege of Mafeking by the complaint of some fellow in the town who had incurred the Colonel's wrath. I forget the exact words of the silly creature's complaint, as, indeed, I forget his offence, but it was something after this fas.h.i.+on: "The Colonel called me before him and, in a dictatorial manner, told me that if I did it again he would have me shot. He then most insolently whistled a tune." The last words I believe to be quite correctly quoted: "He then most insolently whistled a tune." How they suggest laughter! One of Baden-Powell's choicest epigrams refers expressly to this very trick of whistling: "There is nothing like whistling an air when you feel exasperated beyond reclaim." Uncle Toby whistling "Lillabullero" when muddled by his scarps and counter-scarps, and Baden-Powell whistling a sc.r.a.p from _Patience_ to prevent himself from kicking a dangerous idiot out of his presence! "He then most insolently whistled a tune." I recall those words sometimes when I am dropping off to sleep, and they wake me up to laugh. I tell this story not only for its own dear sake, but because it is necessary to remember, when considering Baden-Powell's character, that though he meets you with a smile on his face he carries a stick in his hand to prevent you from taking liberties with his good nature. The best-tempered fellow in the world, and blessed with the keenest sense of humour, he can be as uncompromising a martinet as the sternest fire-eater of old days--_when there is real necessity for it_.

In this flannel-s.h.i.+rt life of his, Baden-Powell has had many adventures, but few, I think, are more interesting in a subdued way than one he records in his diary of the Matabele campaign. I give it in his own words: "To-day, when out scouting by myself, being at some distance from my boy and the horses, I lay for a short rest and a quiet look-out among some rocks and gra.s.s overlooking a little stream, and I saw a charming picture. Presently there was a slight rattle of trinkets, and a swish of the tall yellow gra.s.s, followed by the apparition of a naked Matabele warrior standing glistening among the rocks of the streamlet, within thirty yards of me. His white war ornaments--the ball of clipped feathers on his brow, and the long white cow's-tail plume which depended from his arms and knees--contrasted strongly with his rich brown skin. His kilt of wild cat-skins and monkeys' tails swayed round his loins. His left hand bore his a.s.segais and k.n.o.bkerrie beneath the great dappled ox-hide s.h.i.+eld; and in his right a yellow walking-staff. He stood for almost a minute perfectly motionless, like a statue cast in bronze, his head turned from me, listening for any suspicious sound. Then, with a swift and easy movement, he laid his arms and s.h.i.+eld noiselessly upon the rocks, and, dropping on all fours beside a pool, he dipped his muzzle down and drank just like an animal. I could hear the thirsty sucking of his lips from where I lay. He drank and drank as though he never meant to stop, and when at last his frame could hold no more, he rose with evident reluctance. He picked his weapons up, and then stood again to listen. Hearing nothing, he turned and sharply moved away. In three swift strides he disappeared within the gra.s.s as silently as he had come. I had been so taken with the spectacle that I felt no desire to shoot at him--especially as he was carrying no gun himself." It is little adventures of this kind, I think, which most impress one with the romance and fascination of a scout's life.

On his solitary wanderings over the earth Baden-Powell has had many narrow escapes of death, but none so near, perhaps, as that of an excited native who, after an action, told B.-P. with bubbling enthusiasm that a bullet had pa.s.sed between his ear and his head!

Once Baden-Powell came unexpectedly upon a lion prepared to receive him with open jaws, and but for perfectly steady nerves, which enabled him at that critical moment to fire deliberately, he had never brought home another lion's skin to decorate his mother's drawing-room in London. Another narrow escape occurred during the Matabele campaign, when Baden-Powell was quietly and peacefully marching by the side of a mule battery. One of the mules had a carbine strapped on to its pack-saddle, and by some extraordinary act of carelessness the weapon had been left loaded, and at full-c.o.c.k. Of course the first bush pa.s.sed by the battery fired the carbine, and Baden-Powell remarks of the incident, "Many a man has nearly been shot by an a.s.s, but I claim to have been nearly shot by a mule."

It is Baden-Powell's habit to keep in perfect readiness at his London house an entire kit for service abroad. The most methodical of men, he has made a study of this important branch of a wanderer's service, and when he sets out on his journeys he carries with him everything that is essential both for himself and his horse, and packed in such a way as would be the despair of the deftest valet. When the War Office asks him how long he will be before starting on a commission abroad, B.-P. answers, "I am ready now." Everything is there in a room in his mother's house, and Baden-Powell is never so happy as when that khaki kit leaves its resting-place and is packed away in a s.h.i.+p's cabin. And what journeys he has been on Queen's service! Before he was twenty-three he had travelled over the greater part of Afghanistan, and then after seeing most of India, he was in South Africa at twenty-seven, and did there a wonderful reconnaissance, unaccompanied, of six hundred miles of the Natal Frontier in twenty days. He has travelled through Europe, knows the Gold Coast Hinterland as well as any European, and has almost as good a notion as the Great Powers themselves concerning their frontier defences.

This reminds me that Baden-Powell sometimes spends his holidays in visiting historical battlefields and travelling through various countries to see how their defences and their guns are getting along.

He is an excellent linguist, and can make his way in any country without arousing suspicions. During some military manoeuvres one autumn (we need not enter into special details) Baden-Powell was wandering at the back of the troops, seeing things not intended for the accredited representatives of Great Britain, who had the front row of the stalls, and saw beautifully what they were meant to see. What he noted on this occasion is regarded by military authorities as very valuable information.

But exciting as these adventures are, they possess no such fascination for Baden-Powell as the life in breeches, gaiters, flannel-s.h.i.+rt, and cowboy's hat--when the mountains infested with murderous natives are blurred by the night, and he is free to steal in among their shadows at his will, and creep noiselessly through the enemy's lines. The Matabele, of whom we shall speak later on, soon got to distinguish Baden-Powell from the rest of Sir Frederick Carrington's troops in 1896. They christened him "Impessa" then, and to this day he is spoken of by the Kaffirs with awe and admiration as the "Wolf that never Sleeps." Silent in his movements, with eyes that can detect and distinguish suspicious objects where the ordinary man sees nothing at all, with ears as quick as a hare's to catch the swish of gra.s.s or the cracking of a twig, he goes alone in and out of the mountains where the savages who have marked him down are asleep by the side of their a.s.segais, or repeating stories of the dreadful Wolf over their bivouac fires. This is the life which has most attractions for Baden-Powell, and if he had not been locked up in Mafeking all through those precious months at the beginning of the war, it is no idle guesswork to say that we should have lost fewer men and fewer guns by surprise and ambuscade.

In this flannel-s.h.i.+rt life, however, Baden-Powell is not always on the serious emprise of soldiering. Most of his holidays, at any rate while he is abroad, are spent in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves. His periods of rest from the duties of soldiering are given over to expeditions which carry him far away from the smooth fields and trim hedges of civilisation; he is for ever trying to get face to face with nature, living the untrammelled romantic life of a hunter, independent of slaughterman, market-gardener, and tax-collector. In his boyhood, as we saw, he loved few things more than "exploring," and now he has but exchanged the woods of Tunbridge Wells for the Indian Jungle and the Welsh mountains for the Matopos.

Happy the man who carries with him into middle-age the zest and aims of a clean boyhood. There is something invigorating, almost inspiring, in the contemplation of Baden-Powell's meridian of life. The fifties which gave him birth seem now to belong to a remote and benighted era; and the blindest of his unknown adorers, if she has bought a hatless photograph, cannot deny that Time's effacing fingers have something roughly swept the brow where she could wish his hair still lingered,--and yet at forty-three, Baden-Powell, Colonel of Dragoons, goes wandering into bush and prairie, striding by stream and striking up mountain, with all the eagerness, all the keenness, all the abandonment of the gummy-fingered boy seeking b.u.t.terflies and birds'

eggs. For him life is as good now as it was with big brother Warington. He is up with the lark, his senses clear and awake from the moment the cold water goes streaming over his head; there is no "lazing" with him, no beefy-mindedness, no affectation and effeminacy.

And I cannot help thinking that if the decadents of our day--for whose distress of soul only the stony-hearted could express contempt--would but for a week or two lay aside their fine linen, donning in its place the magic flannel s.h.i.+rt of Baden-Powell, they would find not only a happy issue to their jaundice, but even discover that the world is a good place for a man to spend his days in--if he but live like a man.

Hear Baden-Powell on this subject, and get a glimpse of his serious side, which so seldom peeps out for the world to see: "Old Oliver Wendell Holmes," he says, "is only too true when he says that most of us are 'boys all our lives'; we have our toys, and will play with them with as much zest at eighty as at eight, that in their company we can never grow old. I can't help it if my toys take the form of all that has to do with veldt life, and if they remain my toys till I drop.

"Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its grey, The stars of its winter, the dews of its May; And when we have done with our life-lasting toys, Dear Father, take care of Thy children, the boys.

"May it not be that our toys are the various media adapted to individual tastes through which men may know their G.o.d? As Ramakrishna Paramahansa writes: 'Many are the names of G.o.d, and infinite the forms that lead us to know of Him. In whatsoever name or form you desire to know Him, in that very name and form you will know Him.'"

CHAPTER IX

ROAD-MAKER AND BUILDER

King Prempeh was the first celebrity to receive the attention of B.-P.

In his capital of k.u.ma.s.si, which being interpreted is "the death-place," this miserable barbarian had been practising the most odious cruelties for many years, ignoring British remonstrances, and failing, like another African potentate, to keep his word to successive British Governments. Among the Ashantis at this time (1895) the blood-l.u.s.t had got complete dominion, and the sacrifice of human life in the capital of their kingdom was so appalling that England was at last obliged to buckle on her armour. To quote B.-P. in a characteristic utterance: "To the Ashanti an execution was as attractive an entertainment as is a bull-fight to a Spaniard, or a football match to an Englishman." Even the most coddled schoolboy will appreciate the force of this comparison.

To give a general idea of these cruelties we will quote a vivid pa.s.sage from Baden-Powell's book, _The Downfall of Prempeh_: "Any great public function was seized on as an excuse for human sacrifices.

There was the annual yam custom, or harvest festival, at which large numbers of victims were often offered to the G.o.ds. The late king went every quarter to pay his devotions to the shades of his ancestors at Bantama, and this demanded the deaths of twenty men over the great bowl on each occasion. On the death of any great personage, two of the household slaves were at once killed on the threshold of the door, in order to attend their master immediately in his new life, and his grave was afterwards lined with the bodies of more slaves, who were to form his retinue in the next world. It was thought better if, during the burial, one of the attendant mourners could be stunned by a club and dropped, still breathing, into the grave before it was filled in.... Indeed, if the king desired an execution at any time, he did not look far for an excuse. It is even said that on one occasion he preferred a richer colour in the red stucco on the walls of the palace, and that for this purpose the blood of four hundred virgins was used."

The expedition to bring Mr. Prempeh to his senses was under the command of Sir Francis Scott, and Baden-Powell received the pink flimsy bearing the magic words, "You are selected to proceed on active service," with a gush of elation, which, he tells us, a flimsy of another kind and of a more tangible value would fail to evoke. Of course he was keen to go. The expedition suggested romance, and it a.s.sured experience. To plunge into the Gold Coast Hinterland is to find oneself in a world different from anything the imagination can conceive; civilisation is left an infinite number of miles behind, and the Londoner is brought face to face with what Th.o.r.eau calls the wild unhandselled globe. The message was received by Baden-Powell on the 14th of November 1895, and on the 13th of December he was walking through the streets of Cape Coast Castle, and had noted how well trodden was the grave of the writer L.E.L., who lies buried in the courtyard of the castle.

It was the business of B.-P. to raise a force of natives, and to proceed with this little army as soon as possible in front of the expedition, acting as a covering force. That is to say, the work of these undrilled, stupid, and not over-brave natives was scouting, a duty which while it is the most fascinating part of a soldier's life is also one of the most difficult. This then was an undertaking of which many a man might have felt shy, but Baden-Powell (the army is full of Baden-Powells) went at it cheerfully enough. On the arid desert outside the castle, which is called the parade ground, B.-P.

and Captain Graham, D.S.O., taught these negroes, under a blazing sun, the rudiments of soldiering. In one part of their drill a few simple whistle-signals were subst.i.tuted for the usual words of command, such as "Halt" and "Rally," and a red fez was served out to the Levy (which in the end amounted to 860 men) as a British uniform. The glory of this "kit," however, was somewhat obscured by a commissariat load which each warrior carried on his head; but there was no heart under those s.h.i.+ny ebon skins which did not beat quicker for the possession of the red fez. The Levy, of course, had its band--a few men who made a tremendous din on elephant-hide drums, and a few more who produced two heart-breaking notes on elephants' hollowed tusks garnished with human jaw-bones. At the head of this force B.-P. and Captain Graham set out on their journey from Cape Coast to k.u.ma.s.si, a distance of nearly 150 miles, on the 21st of December.

Soon after leaving the coast the little expedition plunged into the bush, and then amid the giant ferns and palms began to appear "the solemn, shady miles of forest giants, whose upper parts gleam far above the dense undergrowth in white pillars against the grey-blue sky." The Levy had now reached the regular forest, the beautiful, awe-inspiring, but, alas, evil-smelling forest. Here it was found by Baden-Powell that, in addition to scouting, his force would have to play the arduous part of road-makers, and, therefore, whenever he came upon a village such tools as felling-axes, hatchets, spades, and picks were requisitioned. But it was no easy task teaching the negroes to perform this labour. The man who was given a felling-axe immediately set about sc.r.a.ping up weeds, while the grinning warrior armed with a spade incontinently hacked at a h.o.a.ry tree with Gladstonian ardour.

"The stupid inertness of the puzzled negro," says B.-P., "is duller than that of an ox; a dog would grasp your meaning in one-half the time." But B.-P. did not despair of his men, neither did he ill-treat them. For three days he worked hard at tree-felling himself, and he only desisted from this labour on the discovery that the sight of his hunting-crop brought more trees to the ground than all his strokes with the axe. This hunting-crop was called "Volapuk," because every tribe understood its meaning, and during the march Baden-Powell found it of inestimable value. "But, though often shown," he says, "it was never used." The men might be stupid, they might be idle, but B.-P.

can get work out of the worst men without bullying and without continual punishments.

It is men like Baden-Powell who exercise the greatest power over the negro's mind. When he condemns them for cruelty or stupidity he is quick to protest against the a.s.sumption that he is "a regular n.i.g.g.e.r hater." Here is the secret: "I have met lots of good friends among them--especially among the Zulus. But, however good they may be, they must, as a people, be ruled with a hand of iron in a velvet glove; and if they writhe under it, and don't understand the force of it, it is of no use to add more padding--you must take off the glove for a moment and show them the hand. They will then understand and obey."

British rule is only imperilled when men in authority discard the velvet glove altogether, or--what is probably worse still--wear only the velvet glove, much padded, over their flaccid hands.

Just as he encourages Tommy Atkins to learn scouting and the more intelligent parts of soldiering, so he encouraged these negroes, duller than oxen, and made them useful pioneers. Here is his own simple record of the way he got to the hearts of the Levy: "How they enjoy the palaver in which I tell them that 'they are the eyes to the body of the snake which is crawling up the bush-path from the coast, and coiling for its spring! The eyes are hungry, but they will soon have meat; and the main body of white men, armed with the best of weapons, will help them win the day, and get their country back again, to enjoy in peace for ever.' Then I show them my own little repeating rifle, and firing one shot after another, slowly at first, then faster and faster, till the fourteen rounds roll off in a roar, I quite bring down the house. They crowd round, jabbering and yelling, every man bent on shaking hands with the performer."

But Baden-Powell, while humane and nothing of a bully, knows the value of strictness, as we have shown, and he admits that sometimes it is even necessary to shoot one's own men in order to maintain discipline.

He is, however, careful to remark that an extreme step of this kind "should be the result only of deliberate and fair consideration of the case." "Strict justice," he adds, "goes a very long way towards bringing natives under discipline."

By these methods B.-P. won the confidence of his troops, and under him these rough tribesmen, half-devil and half-child, manfully fought their way through the jungle of forest, cheered by his encouragement, awed by "Volapuk," and gradually growing to respect the dauntless courage of the white man who managed them so nicely. A description of an average day's work will give you an idea of Baden-Powell's task, and the way in which his negroes worked.