A good instance of Baden-Powell’s skill in “piecing things together” is given in the same excellent manual on scouting.  He was scouting one day on an open grass plain in Matabeleland accompanied by a single native.  “Suddenly,” he says, “we noticed the grass had been recently trodden down; following up the track for a short distance, it got on to a patch of sandy ground, and we then saw that it was the spoor of several women and boys walking towards some hills about five miles distant, where we believed the enemy to be hiding.  Then we saw a leaf lying about ten yards off the track—­there were no trees for miles, but there were, we knew, trees of this kind at a village 15 miles distant, in the direction from which the tracks led.  Probably, then, these women had come from that village, bringing the leaf with them, and had gone to the hills.  On picking up the leaf, it was damp and smelled of native beer.  So we guessed that according to the custom of these people they had been carrying pots of native beer on their heads, the mouths of the pots being stopped with bunches of leaves.  One of these leaves had fallen out; but we found it ten yards off the track, which showed that at the time it fell a wind had been blowing.  There was no wind now, but there had been about five A.M., and it was now nearly seven.  So we read from these signs that a party of women had brought beer during the night from the village 15 miles distant, and had taken it to the enemy on the hills, arriving there about six o’clock.  The men would probably start to drink the beer at once (as it goes sour if kept for long), and would, by the time we could get there, be getting sleepy from it, so we should have a favourable chance of reconnoitring their position.  We accordingly followed the women’s tracks, found the enemy, made our observations, and got away with our information without any difficulty.”

In the chapters referring to his work as Sir Frederick Carrington’s Chief of the Staff in the Matabele campaign of 1896, we shall see what great service Baden-Powell has rendered the army by his tireless scouting.  Here I can hardly do better than quote from his Aids, for in this book he unlocks his heart as a scout, and in order to encourage non-commissioned officers and men to interest themselves in the more intelligent side of soldiering (not for self-advertisement) tells us innumerable instances of his own interesting experiences.  The chief charm of scouting, of course, is in actual warfare, when a man goes out, sometimes alone and unattended, to find out what a well-armed enemy is doing and how many fighting men are to be expected in the morrow’s battle.  But just as Cervantes could “engender” the ingenious Don Quixote in a miserable prison, so Baden-Powell in the arid times of peace finds means of enjoying the fascinations of scouting.  When out in India he used to spend many an early morning in practising, and he gives the result of one of these mornings in his little book on Scouting, which I would have you read in its entirety.  It is a book which has many of the virtues of a novel, and is written in plain English.