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 Tom