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

  After the palace had been searched and the whole of the fetish village had been burned to the ground, Prempeh, with B.-P. to look after him, set out for Cape Coast Castle. The bitterness to a soldier of that return journey, without a shot having been fired, can hardly be imagined by a civilian, and would certainly be strongly reprehended by those who regard the justest war with horror and aversion. The soldiers had set out on that dreadful march through swamp, and bush, and forest, to fight and bring to the dust a cruel bloodthirsty nation of savages, contemptuously described by Baden-Powell as "the bully tribe" of the Gold Coast Hinterland. Instead of finding the bully as willing to fight as Cuff was willing to face dear old Dobbin, B.-P. found a cowering, cringing enemy, willing to lick the dust and abase himself in any manner the ingenious white man might suggest. So it was with no feelings of elation that the man who had received the pink flimsy ordering him on active service, who had raised and organised the Native Levy, who had cut a road through the bush and forest, draining roads and bridging streams,—turned his back on Kumassi, and marched King Prempeh to the Cape coast. This march of 150 miles was accomplished in seven days. Of this expedition B.-P. recalls "ten minutes' genuine fun,"—that was when a doctor was cutting out from under his toe-nail the eggs of an insect called the jigger, rude enough to make a nest of B.-P.'s big toe. It is such incidents as these that live in the soldier's mind after a hard campaign.

  During the whole of these tiresome operations B.-P. of course was hard at work sketching and keeping his diary. He added to his wonderful store of experiences, and had the rare delight of seeing the King of Bekwai "oblige with a few steps"—specially in his honour. But the story of his work—and it is the same with all the quiet work done by servants of the Queen in every part of the Empire—attracted little public notice, and the man-in-the-street had no more idea of B.-P.'s service than the man-in-the-moon. At that time, indeed, few people outside official circles had ever heard of his name, and certainly no stationer would have been mad enough to stick B.-P.'s photograph in his window. Whether Baden-Powell, when he awakes to it, will prefer his present fame to the happy obscurity of those distant days, is a subject for speculation. I could say definitely, if I chose, which condition is preferred by the proud mother of as gallant a son as ever rode horse into the African desert.

  CHAPTER XToC

  PUTTING OUT FIRE

  A Brevet-Colonelcy was conferred upon Baden-Powell for his work on the Gold Coast,—he was then eight-and-thirty,—and in the same year he was back at regimental work in Ireland. Hardworking as ever, and keen on making his men practical soldiers, B.-P. was settling down to what is called the dull part of soldiering when the gods, in the shape of the heads of the War Office, again interfered with the even tenor of his way. A telegram from Sir Frederick Carrington arrived at Belfast towards the end of April telling our hero that there was to be fighting in Matabeleland, and that there would be room for him on the staff. B.-P. was attending that day the funeral of a man in his squadron who had been killed by a fall from his horse, and after the service he rushed back to barracks, changed his kit, arranged about selling his horses, dogs, and furniture, and just when the English world sits down to its most excellent meal of the day, that oasis of the afternoon desert, he was in a train rushing as fast as an Irish train can rush towards the steamer that sailed for England.

  At twelve o'clock next day B.-P. was saying good-bye to Sir Frederick Carrington, who sailed before him, and that done he spent a few miserable days in constant dread that he would be bowled over by a hansom, or catch scarlet fever, and thus be prevented from sharing in the hardships and glory of a campaign. But nothing contrary happened to him, and after affectionate farewells to his family he embarked for Cape Town on board the Tantallon Castle on 2nd May. One of his first labours was to begin an illustrated diary for his mother's delectation, a diary that was afterwards published by Messrs. Methuen in book form under the title of "The Matabele Campaign—1896." The keeping of this diary had its good uses for B.-P.; in what manner he explains in the preface, addressed to his mother,—"Firstly, because the pleasures of new impressions are doubled if they are shared with some appreciative friend (and you are always more than appreciative). Secondly, because it has served as a kind of short talk with you every day." That is the way in which British soldiers go forth to war.

  The voyage was uneventful. Drill in pyjamas every morning prevented B.-P. from putting on flesh, and that drill, especially "Knees Up!" seems to have been of a pretty severe kind, for it draws from Baden-Powell the exclamation, "I'd like to kill him who invented it—but it does us all a power of good." That is the saying of the old soldier. In the barrack-room it is considered the right thing to grumble, or "grouse" as it is called, while one is working hardest. Thus the man with a jack-boot on his left arm and a polishing brush in his right hand—going like lightning,—the sweat running down his red face, is the man who swears he ain't goin' to bother about his blooming boots any more, dashed if he is; and after the brushing proceeds to "bone" them violently. The first part of B.-P.'s exclamation reminds me of a friend who says that ever since he arrived at years of discretion he has been searching for the man who invented work on purpose to murder him. He is, of course, the hardest of hard workers.

  There were pleasures as well as drill on board: athletic sports, tableaux, concerts, and a grand fancy dress ball. At this ball a lady with a Roman nose appeared as Britannia, but as the peak of the helmet threatened to bore a hole through the bridge of her nose she was obliged to wear her war-hat (as the Hussar calls his busby) the wrong way round. It was probably B.-P. himself who said to the good lady of her helmet, "That is not the rule, Britannia."

  On the 19th May B.-P. looked from his port and saw "the long, flat top of grand old Table Mountain" looming darkly against the glittering stars, its base twinkling with electric lights that glinted on the water. That day was of course a busy one for B.-P. as Chief of the Staff, and the first news received by the Man of Mafeking (how odd it seems now!) was that Sir Frederick Carrington had gone up to Mafeking, and that he was to follow. In three days Baden-Powell was in Mafeking, the guest of Mr. Julius Weil, who gave an anxious England as much important news of the gallant little Mafeking garrison during the Boer war as the universal Reuter himself. Odd, too, it seems that while in Mafeking in 1896 B.-P. should write in his diary that "Plumer's force, specially raised here in the South, had got within touch of Buluwayo." Names how much more familiar in 1900!

  Buluwayo was the town selected by the Matabele for their first blow, and accordingly with Sir Frederick Carrington and two other officers B.-P. set out from Mafeking on the 23rd May in a ramshackle coach, drawn by ten mules, on a drive of ten days and nights to Buluwayo. On this journey the officers encountered the celebrated King Khama, and it interested B.-P. to find that Khama knew him as the brother of Sir George Baden-Powell, and that he inquired after Sir George's little girl, just as a lady in the Park asks if one's baby has got over the measles. This (if we leave out a dinner at a wayside "hotel," where the waiter smoked as he served our officers) was the one picturesque incident of that jolting, clattering drive of nearly 560 miles, and, therefore, while our hero is groaning in the coach or travelling afield after partridges and guinea-fowl for dinner, we will take leave to look hastily for the reason of his presence in South Africa.

  Matabeleland, let us say at the beginning, is included in Rhodesia, a country 750,000 miles in extent, or, so that the size may jump to the eye, let us say as big as France, Italy, and Spain lumped together. This vast country was under the administration of the British Government, but the Matabele, who had been but partially beaten in the taking of their country in 1893, were only waiting their opportunity to throw off the white man's yoke. The opportunity came when the deplorable Jameson raid emptied the country of troops, and left our brave hard-working colonists at the mercy of these savages. But there were other causes contributory to the rebellion. Rinderpest was slaying the cattle of the Matabele by thousand
s, and the white man's order that, to prevent the scourge from spreading, healthy beasts as well as diseased should be killed was, not unnaturally, quite unintelligible to the Matabele. The rumour spread that the hated white man was killing the cattle in order that the tribes should perish of starvation. The fact, too, that raiding weaker tribes for food was punished by the British further aggravated this "offence." The priests encouraged the spirit of rebellion, and the oracle-deity, the M'limo, promised through the priests that if the Matabele would make war upon the white man his bullets in their flight should be changed to water, and his cannon shells become eggs. Horrible murders followed upon this encouragement, too horrible, indeed, to repeat; but a general idea of the blood-lust which now possessed the Matabele may be gathered from the fact of over a hundred and fifty English people (scattered, of course, in outlying districts) being killed within a week of the M'limo's call to battle. Only a swift blow, then, could prevent the loss of civilisation to South Africa for many years; only a terrible lesson could teach the Matabele that the white man was his lord and master.

  Buluwayo, prior to the time of Sir Frederick Carrington's arrival, contained about seven hundred women and children and some eight hundred men. The women and children were accommodated in a laager of waggons built up with sacks full of earth, and further protected from assault by a twenty or thirty yards' entanglement of barbed wire with a sprinkling of broken bottles on the ground. The eight hundred men were organised in troops, and were armed and horsed in an incredibly short space of time.

  Outside the town, on the north, south, and east, lay more than seven thousand Matabele, two thousand of whom were armed with Martini-Henry rifles, while the others possessed Lee-Metfords, elephant guns, Tower muskets, and blunderbusses, besides their own native assegais, knobkerries, and battle-axes. This formidable force was further strengthened by the desertion of a hundred Native Police, who took with them to the enemy their Winchester repeaters. Thus it will be seen that all the odds were in favour of the Matabele, but it is only when the odds are overwhelming against him that the Englishman feels he must buck up, and Buluwayo was fortunate enough to possess men of the true breed. Among these let us make special mention of the Hon. Maurice Gifford, who lost an arm in a gallant dash upon the besiegers[1]—a man "for whom rough miners and impetuous cowboys work like well-broken hounds"; Mr. F.C. Selous, hunter and explorer; Colonel Napier, and Captain MacFarlane. These men gave the enemy no rest, and by repeated attacks at last rid the town of any immediate danger of being rushed by the blacks.

  Baden-Powell's work when he arrived was almost entirely confined to the office; and working at a desk from early morning to late at night, with no prospect of an early closing movement, began to tell upon his spirits. He became convinced that "our force is far too small adequately to cope with so numerous and fairly well-armed an enemy, with well-nigh impregnable strongholds to fall back on.... Our force, bold as it is, is far too small, and yet we cannot increase it by a man, for the simple reason that if we did we could not find the wherewithal to feed it." If this sort of thing had gone on much longer B.-P. might have learned to look glum for an entire five minutes; but one night at ten o'clock, when he and Sir Frederick Carrington were putting up the shutters of office, into the town rode Burnham, the famous American scout, with news of a large impi of the enemy about three miles outside Buluwayo. This necessitated action, and B.-P. was himself again. With a police-trooper as a guide he rode out to find for himself how matters stood, and, after a hard and refreshing ride, in the early dawn he was able to see the enemy. There they were on the opposite bank of the Umgusa river, their fires crackling merrily, and they themselves apparently as happy as bean-feasters in Epping Forest. Not long after he had caught sight of these fires and the Matabele going backwards and forwards from the water, Baden-Powell was at the head of two hundred and fifty men riding towards the Umgusa. Under the impression, conveyed to them by their sorry old humbug of an oracle, that the waters of the Umgusa would open its jaws and swallow up the wicked white man, the Matebele allowed Baden-Powell to get his force across the stream without firing a shot; but when they found that not only did the waters fail to overwhelm their enemies, but that these same enemies were riding hard towards them, the Matabele took to their heels in order to find cover in some thicker bush. Then the air began to scream and whistle. Bullets flew by the ears of the charging English with a phit, phit! and, when they ricocheted off the ground, with a wh-e-e-e-w! Up and down bobbed the black heads in the long rank grass, and bang, bang, bang went the guns. Some of Baden-Powell's force wanted to dismount and return the fire, but B.-P., without a sword among his men, sang out, "Make a cavalry fight of it. Forward! Gallop!" Then, as the horses raced snorting forward, and the English gave a shout of battle, the Matabele, 1200 against 250, poured an irregular volley into their enemies. The next minute the horses were in among them, flashing by with the lather on their necks, while their riders' revolvers barked angrily in every quarter of the field. The Matabele ran. As hard as they could lick, they bolted like rabbits to their holes, but faster behind them came the avenging English with the velvet glove flung aside and the iron hand visible to their terror-stricken eyes. In the general rout, the mere act of punishment, there were many instances of coolness and bravery. One man got detached from the rest, and suddenly found himself confronted by eight of the enemy. In an instant his horse was shot under him, but almost in the same instant he was standing in front of the eight with his rifle to his shoulder. Before they could close on him with their knobkerries and assegais, or before they could shoot him down, he had used his magazine fire with such deadly effect that four of his enemy were dead and the other four were sprinting for dear life. Baden-Powell had two pretty adventures in this engagement. Having emptied his Colt's repeater, he threw it carefully under a peculiar tree, so that he might find it when business was done; then he went to work with his revolver. As he rode forward he came upon an open stretch of ground, and the first object that struck his attention was a well-knit Kaffir on one knee covering his body with a Martini-Henry. The distance was about eighty yards, and Baden-Powell, telling the story, says that he felt so indignant at the fellow's rudeness that he rode at him as hard as he could gallop, calling him every name under the sun. But the Kaffir was not to be moved even by the best-bred abuse, and he remained kneeling with the rifle pointed at B.-P., until that horseman, with locked jaws and gleaming eyes (those who know him will understand), was only ten yards off. Then he fired, and B.-P. says he felt quite relieved "when I realised he had clean missed me." That nigger was shot immediately afterwards by one of Baden-Powell's men, who was riding to his help from behind.

  The other close shave will make the nervous turn cold to think of it. B.-P. had ridden to the help of two men kept at bay by a nigger under a tree, and when the nigger had been killed, he was standing for a moment under the tree, when something moving above him made him look up. It was a gun-barrel taking aim at him. The man behind the gun, standing on a branch, was so jammed against the trunk of the tree as to look part of it, and while B.-P. was making a note of this fact for his next lecture on scouting, bang went the gun, and the ground in front of his toes was as if a small earthquake had struck it. That nigger's knobkerrie and photograph are now in the Baden-Powell museum—a museum which began with butterflies and birds' eggs, and now includes mementos of nearly every tribe and animal on the face of the earth.

  After the fight Baden-Powell got back to Buluwayo in time for late lunch, and—"made up for lost time in the office." From now it was a case of office for many weary weeks, and Baden-Powell could only at rare intervals steal away for exercise, which he took in the form of hard scouting, sometimes by himself, sometimes with Burnham—"a most delightful companion." His rides with the famous American gave him great pleasure, and each man, both born scouts, learned something from the other. While he was enjoying these expeditions as relaxation from the cramping work of office, he was at the same time picking up valuable information c
oncerning the enemy. During this grind at the office B.-P. used to long for the lunch hour; "it sounds greedy," he says, "but it is for the glimpse of sunlight that I look forward, not the lunch." On one occasion his work as Chief of the Staff was so severe that he was unable to leave the office for four days. He was feeling "over-boiled," and got rid of this stuffiness of mind in his own characteristic way. After dinner on the fourth day he saddled up and rode off to the Matopos, spent the night there, and was back in the office by 10.30 on the following day, "all the better for a night out."

  All this time the office work increased, and the anxiety of the General and his staff was doubled by reports of rebellion in Mashonaland. The fire of lawlessness was spreading its evil flames in all directions, till reports of murder and outrage covered an area of one hundred thousand square miles, and about 2000 whites found arrayed against them an army of some 20,000 maddened savages.

  Fortunately for B.-P. he had in Sir Frederick Carrington a chief who never wastes a man. Excellent as Baden-Powell was in the office (and Tim Linkinwater would not have feared, I believe, to hand the precious Cherryble ledgers over to his keeping) he could render much more valuable service in the field. In the middle of July the reward came for all his independent scouting; he was chosen by Sir Frederick Carrington, as a man who knew the Matopos country and the whereabouts of the enemy, to act as guide to Colonel Plumer—the officer chosen for the immediate direction of operations in the Matopos. With joy B.-P. flung down the pen and took up the sword.