The Story of Baden-Powell / 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps'

During this expedition Baden-Powell gave brilliant evidence of his capacity as a general. He had drawn up a plan for an attack by his own and another column upon a great chief named Wedza, who lived with his warriors in a mountain consisting of six rocky peaks ranging from eight hundred to a thousand feet high. On the top of these peaks were perched the kraals, while the mountain itself, nearly three miles long, resembled nothing so much as a rabbit-warren, being a network of caves held by the burrowing rebels. Wedza's stronghold was steep, and its sides were strewn with bush and boulders; only by narrow and difficult paths was it accessible, and these paths had been fortified by the Matabele with stockades and breastworks. This important and well-nigh impregnable stronghold was held by something like sixteen hundred Matabele—six or seven hundred of whom were real fighting men. Baden-Powell, nevertheless, drew up his plan for the attack, and sat down to wait for the other column which was to act with him. That column never came; only a letter arrived by runner saying that it would be unable to join in the attack after all. "The only thing we could do," says Baden-Powell, "was to try and bluff the enemy out of the place."

So he arranged to win the battle by cunning of the brain. Sending five-and-twenty men to climb a hill which commanded a part of the stronghold, with instructions to act as if they were two hundred and fifty, and giving small parties of Hussars similar instructions regarding the left flank and rear of the enemy, Baden-Powell got his artillery ready to bombard the central position. Just as the five-and-twenty reached the summit of their hill, however, they were observed by the enemy and instantly fired upon. From hilltop to hilltop rang the call to arms, and B.-P. watched through his telescope the yelling savages rushing with their rifles and assegais to massacre his gallant little force of five-and-twenty men under a lieutenant. To create a diversion, Baden-Powell galloped off with seven men to the left rear of the stronghold, crossing a river on the way, and opened fire upon a village on the side of the mountain. By continually moving about in the grass and using magazine fire, B.-P. with his seven men gave the enemy the impression that he had a large army there, and soon the strain was taken off the five-and-twenty on the hilltop. Then Hussars and Artillery joined the five-and-twenty, while a 7-pounder flung deadly shells at every important point of the mountain. Soon after this the enemy made a backward move, and the lieutenant on the hilltop (with the Field-Marshal's baton already in his hand) incontinently began to harry him effectively from the rear.

The end of it was that Wedza's warriors were completely bluffed by the resourceful B.-P.; they were driven out of their stronghold, and the stronghold itself blown into smithereens. During this attack Baden-Powell narrowly escaped death, a small party he was with being fired upon at close range by a number of the enemy hidden behind a ridge of rocks. "My hat," says B.-P., "was violently struck from my head as if with a stick."

This reminds me of the service rendered by Baden-Powell as a doctor. "Three times in this campaign have I taken out to the field with me a few bandages and dressings in my holster, and on each occasion I have found full use for them." Once he doctored some Matabele women and children who had been hit by stray bullets while lying in the long grass. On this occasion he invented what he calls a perfect form of field syringe: "Take an ordinary native girl, tell her to go and get some lukewarm water, and don't give her anything to get it in. She will go to the stream, kneel, and fill her mouth, and so bring the water; by the time she is back the water is lukewarm. You then tell her to squirt it as you direct into the wound, while you prize around with a feather."

After the breaking of Wedza there was work to be done in Mashonaland, and then, when the rebellion had been crushed and the colonist was able to search fearlessly among the charred beams of his homestead ere setting about building anew, the gallant Baden-Powell turned his face towards Old England. Before leaving South Africa, however, he spent the Christmas Day of that memorable 1896 in Port Elizabeth. "After breakfast," he writes in his diary, "to church. Everything exactly ordered as if at home: the Christmas Day choral service with a good choir and a fine organ. And as the anthem of peace and goodwill rolled forth, it brought home to one the fact that a year of strife in savage wilds had now been weathered to a peaceful close."

Then came the voyage across the 6000 odd miles of ocean with Cecil Rhodes, Sir Frederick Carrington, and other interesting people. After that the English coast, and the train to London. And, after that, "through the roar of the sloppy, lamp-lit streets, to the comfort and warmth—of Home."

CHAPTER XIIToC