It is Baden-Powell’s habit to keep in perfect readiness at his London house an entire kit for service abroad.  The most methodical of men, he has made a study of this important branch of a wanderer’s service, and when he sets out on his journeys he carries with him everything that is essential both for himself and his horse, and packed in such a way as would be the despair of the deftest valet.  When the War Office asks him how long he will be before starting on a commission abroad, B.-P. answers, “I am ready now.”  Everything is there in a room in his mother’s house, and Baden-Powell is never so happy as when that khaki kit leaves its resting-place and is packed away in a ship’s cabin.  And what journeys he has been on Queen’s service!  Before he was twenty-three he had travelled over the greater part of Afghanistan, and then after seeing most of India, he was in South Africa at twenty-seven, and did there a wonderful reconnaissance, unaccompanied, of six hundred miles of the Natal Frontier in twenty days.  He has travelled through Europe, knows the Gold Coast Hinterland as well as any European, and has almost as good a notion as the Great Powers themselves concerning their frontier defences.

This reminds me that Baden-Powell sometimes spends his holidays in visiting historical battlefields and travelling through various countries to see how their defences and their guns are getting along.  He is an excellent linguist, and can make his way in any country without arousing suspicions.  During some military manoeuvres one autumn (we need not enter into special details) Baden-Powell was wandering at the back of the troops, seeing things not intended for the accredited representatives of Great Britain, who had the front row of the stalls, and saw beautifully what they were meant to see.  What he noted on this occasion is regarded by military authorities as very valuable information.

But exciting as these adventures are, they possess no such fascination for Baden-Powell as the life in breeches, gaiters, flannel-shirt, and cowboy’s hat—­when the mountains infested with murderous natives are blurred by the night, and he is free to steal in among their shadows at his will, and creep noiselessly through the enemy’s lines.  The Matabele, of whom we shall speak later on, soon got to distinguish Baden-Powell from the rest of Sir Frederick Carrington’s troops in 1896.  They christened him “Impessa” then, and to this day he is spoken of by the Kaffirs with awe and admiration as the “Wolf that never Sleeps.”  Silent in his movements, with eyes that can detect and distinguish suspicious objects where the ordinary man sees nothing at all, with ears as quick as a hare’s to catch the swish of grass or the cracking of a twig, he goes alone in and out of the mountains where the savages who have marked him down are asleep by the side of their assegais, or repeating stories of the dreadful Wolf over their bivouac fires.  This is the life which has most attractions for Baden-Powell, and if he had not been locked up in Mafeking all through those precious months at the beginning of the war, it is no idle guesswork to say that we should have lost fewer men and fewer guns by surprise and ambuscade.