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

In the Matabele campaign he was quick to notice the manner in which private soldiers tended some wounded nigger children. "It did one good," he says, "to see one or two of the Hussars, fresh from nigger-fighting, giving their help in binding up the youngsters, and tenderly dabbing the wounded limbs with bits of their own shirts wetted." During that haunting march with the Shangani Patrol, when the rice was cut down to a spoonful, and a horse had been killed to supply the men with food, Baden-Powell found time to note that "the men are singing and chaffing away as cheerfully as possible while they scoop the muddy water from the sand-hole for their tea." And he loves the soldier for all his little oddities. How he laughed over the man who carried skates in his kit through India, and the man in the African desert with a lot of fish-hooks in his wallet! And how he likes to chaff them out of their failings. At Aldershot one of his most popular pieces as an entertainer is that in which he impersonates the barrack-room lawyer. While the audience is waiting for the next singer, there is a noise heard in the wings, and then a loud voice cries, "I tell yer I will go on. It's no use of you a-stoppin' of me, I'm agoin' to tell 'em all about it, I am," and then with a great clatter a private soldier comes bungling on the stage, tunic open, hair all over the place, and cap at the back of his head. "Beg parding, sir," he says to the officer in the front row, "but these here man[oe]uvres has all been conducted wrong, they have, and I warn't to tell the company how they ought to have been managed. Now if I had had the runnin' of this concern, and not the Field-Marshal, I should have first of all"—etc. etc. The audience yells with delight, and if Baden-Powell really should show up, in his own inimitable fashion, the mistakes of a general (which, by the way, he is quite capable of doing), the audience and the general too, if he is there, laugh all the more.

Men go to him with their private cares and troubles. They know that the man who can make them laugh till the 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 bâtman 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-bâtman. 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.