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 XII

THE REGIMENTAL OFFICER

I hear you say that Baden-Powell has had glorious chances, that the lot of most officers is humdrum, and that with so much talk about Arbitration and Universal Millennium, you cannot go up for Sandhurst with any certainty that your career will contain a single opportunity for gaining honour and renown.  My dear Smith major, believe me, a man may distinguish himself in a barrack square as well as in African mountains or a besieged township.  General popularity, it is true, does not come that way; but the opportunity for honour is there all the same, and the distinction one earns on that field has its appreciation in the right quarter.  Long before the world of London paraded its streets with portrait badges of Baden-Powell on its heart, or thereabouts, he was a marked and famous man, and before he had drawn sword on a field of battle, or fired a revolver into the yellow grass of the veldt, he was known throughout the British Cavalry as a first-rate, if not the ideal, soldier.  It is not a bad ambition, I promise you, to try and be a perfect regimental officer.

A party of sergeants in Baden-Powell’s old regiment were once asked by a civilian whether the men liked him.  There was a silence for a minute or two, and at last one of the sergeants replied, hesitatingly, “Well, no, I shouldn’t say they like him”; then in a burst—­“why, they worship him!” Let me tell you how Baden-Powell has earned their love.

In the first place, he entered the Army with no mischievous ideas about the manliness and dash of a fast, raking life.  That is a great start, for if the soldier despises one type of officer more than another it is the young sprig who affects to consider soldiering a bore, and comes on parade with the evidence of last night’s folly and dissipation in his drawn face and dull eyes.  Baden-Powell was keen about his work from the first, and never posed as a drawling Silenus in gold lace.  In the second place, Baden-Powell, who always possessed a great deal of sound common sense, took an interest in his men, treated them as intelligent beings, and never for once mistook the drunken, devil-may-care Private of fiction for the soldier who goes anywhere and does anything.  It is a literary “dodge” to reach the reader’s sympathies by drawing the blackguard in order to find the hero; one good deed in that world of unreality wipes out all the unworthiness of a lifetime, and the reader puts down the tale with a longing to fall on the neck and wring the hand of the very next hiccupping Tommy he encounters.  As Bishop Blougram says:—­