ign. Sir Frederick
and Baden-Powell, by the bye, are probably the two Imperial officers
who know most about South Africa.

During his illness Major Ridley had started off with a column to make
war upon the Somabula, and when B.-P. got about again he was ordered
to go in search of this force, with three troopers as an escort, and
to take command of it. "I could picture nothing more to my taste," he
says, "than a ride of from eighty to one hundred miles in a wild
country, with three good men, and plenty of excitement in having to
keep a good look-out for the enemy, enjoying splendid weather,
shirt-sleeves, and a reviving feeling of health and freedom." So the
man who had only just got off a sick-bed started for a ride into the
forest after Ridley's column, and during the ride the twentieth
anniversary of his joining Her Majesty's Service came round and
brought its reflections for the diary. "I always think more of this
anniversary than of that of my birth, and I could not picture a more
enjoyable way of spending it. I am here, out in the wilds, with three
troopers.... We are nearly eighty miles from Buluwayo and thirty from
the nearest troops. I have rigged up a shelter from the sun with my
blanket, a rock, and a thorn-bush; thirteen thousand flies are,
unfortunately, staying with me, and are awfully attentive.... I am
looking out on the yellow veldt and the blue sky; the veldt with its
grey hazy clumps of thorn-bush is shimmering in the heat, and its vast
expanse is only broken by the gleaming white sand of the river-bed and
the green reeds and bushes which fringe its banks." How could a man
feel unhappy with the whole of his wardrobe packed away in one wallet
of the saddle, and his larder in the other? Be sure that Lucullus
never enjoyed a banquet with the same sharpness of delight as
Baden-Powell squatting amid the yellow grass of the veldt with his
cocoa and rice.

But there were anxious moments coming for the man who kept on the open
veldt the twentieth anniversary of his joining Her Majesty's army with
gladness in his heart. After he had found the column and had got into
the Lilliputian forest with its stunted, bushy trees and its sandy
soil, he was brought face to face with the greatest enemy that can
harass, fret, and wear down nerves of steel--absence of water. A
commander whose mind is racked by the difficulty, perhaps the
impossibility, of finding water for his troops is like the man haunted
day and night, w