THE FLANNEL-SHIRT LIFE
In _The Story of My Heart_ Richard Jefferies begins his enchanting
pages with the expression of that desire which every son of Adam feels
at times--the longing for wild, unartificial life. "My heart," he
says, "was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my
mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as
well as that which falls on a ledge.... A species of thick clothing
slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked, little habits
become part of existence, and by degrees the mind is inclosed in a
husk." Then he goes on to tell of a hill to which he resorted at such
moments of intellectual depression, and of the sensations that
thrilled him as he moved up the sweet short turf. The very light of
the sun, he says, was whiter and more brilliant there, and standing on
the summit his jaded heart revived, and "obtained a wider horizon of
feeling." Thoreau, too, went to the woods because he wanted to live
deliberately, and front only the essential facts of life. "I wanted to
live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad
swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to
its lowest terms."
This longing for a return to nature in minds less imaginative than
Thoreau's and Jefferies' results in globe-trotting or
colonisation--according to circumstances,--it wakes the gipsy in our
blood, be we gentle or simple, and sends us wandering over the waste
places of the earth in quest of glory, adventure, or a gold
mine--anything so long as it entails wandering. When it stirs in the
mind of the disciplined soldier it turns him into a scout, and drives
him out of the orderly-room, out of the barrack square, to wander in
Himalayan passes and ride across the deserts of Africa. Baden-Powell
is a nomad. The smart cavalry officer who can play any musical
instrument, draw amusing pictures, tell delightfully droll stories,
sing a good song, stage-manage theatricals--do everything, in short,
that qualifies a man to take his ease in country houses, loves more
than any other form of existence the loneliness and the wildness of
the scout's. Often, he tells us, when he is about the serious business
of handing teacups in London drawing-rooms, his mind flies off to some
African waste, to some lonely Indian hill, and straightway he longs
with all his soul to fling off the trappings of civilised society, and
be back again with nature, back again in the dear old flannel-shirt
life, living hard, with his life in his hand.
Once, after two months of wandering, he got into a hotel and, after
dinner, into a bed. But it would not do, he says; in a twinkling he
had whipped the blankets off the bed and was lying outside on mother
earth, with the rain beating upon his face, and deep in refreshing
slumber. The best of beds, according to B.-P., is "the veldt tempered
with a blanket and a saddle." When he is on his lonely wanderings he
always sleeps with his pistol under the "pillow" and the lanyard round
his neck. However soundly he sleeps, if any one comes within ten yards
of him, tread he never so softly, Baden-Powell wakes up without fail,
and with a brain cleared for action.
One of the sayings of Baden-Powell which I most like is that which
most reveals this side of his character. "A smile and a stick," says
he, "will carry you through any difficulty in the world." And he lives
in accordance with this principle; and it is typical of the man. Over
the world he goes on his solitary expeditions, hunting animals,
hunting men, making notes of what foreign armies are doing, what are
the chief thoughts occupying the minds of distant and dangerous
tribesmen, and he never goes about it blusteringly or with the Byronic
mystery of the stage detective. He trusts to his sense of humour--to
his smile--first; after that, and only when there is no hope for it,
do those hard jaws of his lock with a snap, the eyes light up with
resistless determination, and _whir-r-r_ goes the stick, and--well, it
requires a tough head to bear what follows.
[Illustration: The Family on Board the _Pearl_]
Baden-Powell's friends were amused during the early days of the siege
of Mafeking by the complaint of some fellow in the town who had
incurred the Colonel's wrath. I forget the exact words of the silly
creature's complaint, as, indeed, I forget his offence, but it was
something after this fashion: "The Colonel called me before him
and, in a dictatorial manner, told me that if I did it again he would
have me shot. He then most insolently whistled a tune." The last words
I believe to be quite correctly quoted: "He then most insolently
whistled a tune." How they suggest laughter! One of Baden-Powell's
choicest epigrams refers expressly to this very trick of whistling:
"There is nothing like whistling an air when you feel exasperated
beyond reclaim." Uncle Toby whistling "Lillabullero" when muddled by
his scarps and counter-scarps, and Baden-Powell whistling a scrap from
_Patience_ to prevent himself from kicking a dangerous idiot out of
his presence! "He then most insolently whistled a tune." I recall
those words sometimes when I am dropping off to sleep, and they wake
me up to laugh. I tell this story not only for its own dear sake, but
because it is necessary to remember, when considering Baden-Powell's
character, that though he meets you with a smile on his face he
carries a stick in his hand to prevent you from taking liberties with
his good nature. The best-tempered fellow in the world, and blessed
with the keenest sense of humour, he can be as uncompromising a
martinet as the sternest fire-eater of old days--_when there is real
necessity for it_.
In this flannel-shirt life of his, Baden-Powell has had many
adventures, but few, I think, are more interesting in a subdued way
than one he records in his diary of the Matabele campaign. I give it
in his own words: "To-day, when out scouting by myself, being at some
distance from my boy and the horses, I lay for a short rest and a
quiet look-out among some rocks and grass overlooking a little stream,
and I saw a charming picture. Presently there was a slight rattle of
trinkets, and a swish of the tall yellow grass, followed by the
apparition of a naked Matabele warrior standing glistening among the
rocks of the streamlet, within thirty yards of me. His white war
ornaments--the ball of clipped feathers on his brow, and the long
white cow's-tail plume which depended from his arms and
knees--contrasted strongly with his rich brown skin. His kilt of wild
cat-skins and monkeys' tails swayed round his loins. His left hand
bore his assegais and knobkerrie beneath the great dappled ox-hide
shield; and in his right a yellow walking-staff. He stood for almost a
minute perfectly motionless, like a statue cast in bronze, his head
turned from me, listening for any suspicious sound. Then, with a swift
and easy movement, he laid his arms and shield noiselessly upon the
rocks, and, dropping on all fours beside a pool, he dipped his muzzle
down and drank just like an animal. I could hear the thirsty sucking
of his lips from where I lay. He drank and drank as though he never
meant to stop, and when at last his frame could hold no more, he rose
with evident reluctance. He picked his weapons up, and then stood
again to listen. Hearing nothing, he turned and sharply moved away. In
three swift strides he disappeared within the grass as silently as he
had come. I had been so taken with the spectacle that I felt no desire
to shoot at him--especially as he was carrying no gun himself." It is
little adventures of this kind, I think, which most impress one with
the romance and fascination of a scout's life.
On his solitary wanderings over the earth Baden-Powell has had many
narrow escapes of death, but none so near, perhaps, as that of an
excited native who, after an action, told B.-P. with bubbling
enthusiasm that a bullet had passed between his ear and his head!
Once Baden-Powell came unexpectedly upon a lion prepared to receive
him with open jaws, and but for perfectly steady nerves, which enabled
him at that critical moment to fire deliberately, he had never brought
home another lion's skin to decorate his mother's drawing-room in
London. Another narrow escape occurred during the Matabele campaign,
when Baden-Powell was quietly and peacefully marching by the side of a
mule battery. One of the mules had a carbine strapped on to its
pack-saddle, and by some extraordinary act of carelessness the weapon
had been left loaded, and at full-cock. Of course the first bush
passed by the battery fired the carbine, and Baden-Powell remarks of
the incident, "Many a man has nearly been shot by an ass, but I claim
to have been nearly shot by a mule."
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.
In this flannel-shirt life, however, Baden-Powell is not always on the
serious emprise of soldiering. Most of his holidays, at any rate while
he is abroad, are spent in shirt-sleeves. His periods of rest from the
duties of soldiering are given over to expeditions which carry him far
away from the smooth fields and trim hedges of civilisation; he is for
ever trying to get face to face with nature, living the untrammelled
romantic life of a hunter, independent of slaughterman,
market-gardener, and tax-collector. In his boyhood, as we saw, he
loved few things more than "exploring," and now he has but exchanged
the woods of Tunbridge Wells for the Indian Jungle and the Welsh
mountains for the Matopos.
Happy the man who carries with him into middle-age the zest and aims
of a clean boyhood. There is something invigorating, almost inspiring,
in the contemplation of Baden-Powell's meridian of life. The fifties
which gave him birth seem now to belong to a remote and benighted era;
and the blindest of his unknown adorers, if she has bought a hatless
photograph, cannot deny that Time's effacing fingers have something
roughly swept the brow where she could wish his hair still
lingered,--and yet at forty-three, Baden-Powell, Colonel of Dragoons,
goes wandering into bush and prairie, striding by stream and striking
up mountain, with all the eagerness, all the keenness, all the
abandonment of the gummy-fingered boy seeking butterflies and birds'
eggs. For him life is as good now as it was with big brother
Warington. He is up with the lark, his senses clear and awake from the
moment the cold water goes streaming over his head; there is no
"lazing" with him, no beefy-mindedness, no affectation and effeminacy.
And I cannot help thinking that if the decadents of our day--for
whose distress of soul only the stony-hearted could express
contempt--would but for a week or two lay aside their fine linen,
donning in its place the magic flannel shirt of Baden-Powell, they
would find not only a happy issue to their jaundice, but even discover
that the world is a good place for a man to spend his days in--if he
but live like a man.
Hear Baden-Powell on this subject, and get a glimpse of his serious
side, which so seldom peeps out for the world to see: "Old Oliver
Wendell Holmes," he says, "is only too true when he says that most of
us are 'boys all our lives'; we have our toys, and will play with them
with as much zest at eighty as at eight, that in their company we can
never grow old. I can't help it if my toys take the form of all that
has to do with veldt life, and if they remain my toys till I drop.
"Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its grey,
The stars of its winter, the dews of its May;
And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
Dear Father, take care of Thy children, the boys.
"May it not be that our toys are the various media adapted to
individual tastes through which men may know their God? As
Ramakrishna Paramahansa writes: 'Many are the names of God, and
infinite the forms that lead us to know of Him. In whatsoever name or
form you desire to know Him, in that very name and form you will know
Him.'"