tears stream down their faces, can at the right moment show a serious face, and give ear to the humblest tale of trouble. He makes it his business—and surely it is part of an officer's business—to know all about his men's lives, their families, their favourite sports, their objects in life, and the way in which they spend their leave. When he was in the 13th Hussars he was always a favourite with the children in the married quarters, and if you could pick out an apple-cheeked urchin playing in the dust of the barracks who did not grin from ear to ear when you asked if he knew Baden-Powell, you had stumbled upon a young gentleman the guest of the regiment.
Baden-Powell even got to learn the names men gave their horses. There was in the 13th Hussars some years ago a handsome little black horse whose regimental number was, I think, A18. To the men he was Smut, and no one ever thought of calling him anything else. One day at stables the squad was called to attention, and the young soldier standing at the head of A18 was mightily surprised to hear a civilian walking side by side with the captain of his troop remark, as he passed up the stable, 'Why, there's old Smut!' When the officer and civilian had passed out he turned to the next man, and asked who the deuce the bloke was in the brown hat. 'Why, that's Captain Baden- Powell,' said the man; and then he added with great pride, 'I was his batman once.' The young soldier had heard of Baden-Powell before, and was furious that he had not looked longer at him as he passed. An odd circumstance, by the way, concerning the ex-batman. He was a terrible fellow in many ways, always on the look-out for a fight, and in his cups had disabled more than one policeman in the cities where the 13th sojourned. But he kept in his box a little faded red book of quotations, filled with serious and religious thoughts, and he was particularly fond of two of these apothegms: the one, 'A prayer is merely a wish turned Godward'; and the other, 'A grave wherever found preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.' He would quote them over and over again in his confidential moments, and, though he might pick out others as he turned the well-thumbed pages of that tiny book, it was always to these two that he returned as perfect specimens of great sayings. And that book, unless I am mistaken, was given to him by Baden-Powell. 'If I had been with him right along,' he would say, regretting some escapade, 'I should have been a sergeant by this time.'
Baden-Powell's familiarity with the names of his men's horses reminds one of his difficulty in swallowing horse- flesh during the hungry days with the Shangani Patrol: 'It is one thing to say, 'I'll trouble you to pass the horse, please,' but quite another to say, 'Give me another chunk of D15.'' He is a man who can grow very nearly as fond of his troop's horses as of his own.
A good description of Baden-Powell is that versatile officer's own sketch of a man with whom he soldiered on one of his campaigns: 'He has all the qualifications that go to make an officer above the ruck of them. Endowed with all the dash, pluck, and attractive force that make a born leader of men, he is also steeped in common sense, is careful in arrangement of details, and possesses a temperament that can sing 'Wait till the clouds roll by' in crises where other men are tearing their hair.' The public in the light of recent events will be quick to recognise B.- P. in the latter part of this portrait; I can assure them that the rest is equally accurate. As a regimental officer he exhibits all these good qualities. He can show the men dash and pluck in every sport they care for, his common sense makes him the friend of Tommy Atkins as well as his officer, and the affairs of his regiment are so admirably managed that there is no enervating air of slackness about the barracks from the first monitory note of 'Reveille' to the last wailing sound of 'Lights Out.'
And while Baden-Powell is loved in the barrack-room he is ever the most popular figure in the Officers' Mess. There is nothing of the namby-pamby, I mean, in his solicitude for the soldier's welfare, nothing to make him unpopular with his brother officers, nothing that makes even the youngest subaltern a little contemptuous.
Such then is Baden-Powell's character as a regimental officer. Beloved by the little fashionable world of the Officers' Mess, adored by the men who eat and sleep and clean sword, carbine, and boots in the one room, he presents to the gaze of the schoolboy whose whole thoughts are set upon Sandhurst the beau-ideal of a regimental officer.
To reach that ideal there are five great essentials—keenness, courage, high-mindedness, self-abnegation, humour. Ability to mix freely with private soldiers without loss of dignity is, I take it, the natural gift of a gentleman; and if the officer who devotes himself to his men is high-minded and courageous, always ready to ignore self, with the saving virtue of humour, he will earn not only their respect and admiration, but their loyal and unswerving love.
CHAPTER XIIIToC
GOAL-KEEPER
Baden-Powell was at Henley, preparing to enjoy the festivities of the 1899 Regatta in one of the pleasantest houses on the river, when a telegram arrived calling him to the War Office. This was on Wednesday, and the business the state of things in the Transvaal. On Saturday he was on the sea, sailing away from the coast of England.
As we have said before, Baden-Powell keeps a khaki kit in perfect readiness for emergencies ('he is terribly methodical,' says one of his brothers), and, therefore, when Lord Wolseley asked him how soon it would be before he could start, the delighted B.-P. answered with a very enthusiastic 'Immediately.' But ships are not kept in such easy readiness as kits, and two whole days had to elapse before our hero could set sail for the land where war was brewing. Those two days he spent with his family and in paying farewell visits to his friends. The Old Carthusian naturally bent his steps towards Charterhouse, and sought out Dr. Haig-Brown in the Master's Lodge. 'I hope they'll give me a warm corner,' he said, gripping the Doctor's hand. And then in a few weeks this Old Boy was in his African corner, enjoying its Avernus-like warmth.
The story of the siege of Mafeking is one of the most interesting an Englishman can read about. One may truthfully say that it is the story of a single man—our hero, B.-P. Good men he has had under him, skilful officers and valorous troops; but all the daring, all the gallantry, all the heroism would have been powerless in such a situation without the unlimited resourcefulness of the intrepid Goal-Keeper. With a handful of men he has held at bay in a small and very exposed town as many as 6000 Boers, commanded at one time by the dogged and unscrupulous Cronje. And not only this. With his small force he has kept the enemy on tenterhooks all the weary weeks of the siege, sallying out at night to fling his gallant men upon their trenches, storming them in their lines by day, and actually giving the large army besieging his little garrison a taste of cold steel.
In years to come, I suppose, only the imagination will be able to realise the effect on the stoical British mind of Baden-Powell's brisk and witty telegrams. England at that time, let it be known, was in a state of sullen wonderment. Every dispatch brought consternation to our minds. Here were our troops pouring into South Africa, soldiers of renown at their head, regiments famous throughout the world, representing our courage and prestige, and yet check after check, reverse after reverse—no progress, no sign of progress. In the midst of this national gloom came telegrams full of cheery optimism from little Mafeking—a name hardly known then to the man in the street, now as familiar as Edinburgh and Dublin. Who, for instance, can forget the famous message which ran: 'October 21st. All well. Four hours' bombardment. One dog killed'? In an instant the gloom was dispelled. In 'bus and tram and railway carriage men chuckled over the exquisite humour of that telegram. Leader writers, unbending, referred to it decorously. The funny men on newspaper staffs made jests about it, and the 'Oldest Evening Paper' enshrined it in verse:—
Four long, long hours they pounded hard, Whizz! went the screaming shell— Of reeking tube and iron shard There was an awful smell.
