but to one who has himself wearily tramped that interminable path, heart-sick and foot-sore, the sight of those dogged British ‘Tommies,’ heavily accoutred as they were, still defying fever in the sweltering heat, and ever pressing on, was one which opened one’s eyes and one’s heart as well.  There was no malingering there; each man went on until he dropped.  It showed more than any fight could have done, more than any investment in a fort, or surprise in camp, what stern and sterling stuff our men are made of, notwithstanding all that cavillers will say against our modern army system and its soldiers.”  During that bitter march Baden-Powell asked a young soldier, gripped by fever but manfully plodding on with the rest, whether his kit was not too heavy for him, whereat, says Baden-Powell, he replied, with tight-drawn smile and quavering voice, “It ain’t the kit, sir; it’s only these extra rounds that I feel the weight of.”  “These extra rounds” being those intended for the fight which never came.

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 manoeuvres 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.