The Matabele Campaign. Baden-Powell of Gilwell Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell

efficient scouting in rocky ground, in the dry season, indiarubber–soled shoes are essential; with these you can move in absolute silence, and over rocks which, from their smoothness or inclination, would be impassable with boots.

      It is almost impossible to obliterate your spoor, as, even if you brush over your footprints, the practised eye of the native tracker will read your doings by other signs; still, it is a point not to be lost sight of for a minute when getting into position for scouting, and a little walking backwards, doubling on one’s tracks over rocky ground, lighting a fire where you are not going to cook your food, or one of an hundred similar subterfuges may often relieve you from the attentions of a too–inquisitive enemy.

      When they have found you watching them, they will not, as a rule, come boldly at you, fearing that you are merely a lure to draw them on into some ambuscade or trap, – for that is one of their own pet games to play, – but they will work round to get on to the track you have made in getting to your positions. Having found this, and satisfied themselves that you are practically alone, their general rule is to lie in ambush near the track, ready to catch you on your return. Naturally one never returns by the same path. (P.S.– Once I had to do it, later on, at Wedzas, when there was no other way, and nearly paid the penalty.)

      Sometimes they try to shoot or to catch one; but so long as one keeps moving about, they do not seem to trust much to their marksmanship; and I have heard them shouting to each other, “Don’t shoot at the beast, catch him by the hands, catch him by the hands!” Then they would come clambering over the rocks, but clambering awkwardly – for, lithe, and active though they be, the Matabele are not good mountaineers, especially in that part of it which Montenegrins say is the most difficult (possibly because they themselves shine pre–eminently at it), namely, in getting rapidly downhill. Consequently, if one is wearing indiarubber–soled shoes (not hobnailed boots, for with them you merely skate about the slippery boulders), it is not a difficult matter to outpace them, provided you have the natural gift or requisite training for “placing” your feet. I am a fair blunderer in most things, but I was taken in hand in the days of my youth by a devotee of the art of skirt–dancing, and never, till I was forced by dark–brown two–legged circumstances to skip from rock to rock in the Matopos, did I fully realise the value of what I then learned, namely, the command of the feet.

      The enemy are also full of tricks and ruses for catching us by luring us into ambuscades. Thus they will show scouts, cattle, women, and, at night, fires, in the hope of our coming close to capture or investigate, and so putting ourselves in their hands. But even if we were so simple as to be tempted, we should probably see something of their spoor which would put us on our guard. And in this respect the stupidity of the native is almost incredible; he gathers his information almost entirely by spooring, and yet it is only occasionally that he seems to remember that his own feet are all the time writing their message to his enemies. Now and again he thinks of it, and leaps across a path or sandy patch; but I suppose that, knowing the hopelessness of trying effectually to conceal his trail, he has acquired the habit of disregarding its importance.

      There is naturally a strong attraction in reconnoitring, for, apart from the fun of besting the enemy, the art of scouting is in itself as interesting as any detective work.

      It is almost impossible to describe all the little signs that go to make up information for one when scouting. It is like reading the page of a book. You can tell your companion – say a man who cannot read – that such and such a thing is the case.

      “How do you know?” he asks.

      “Because it is written here on this page.”

      “Oh! How do you make that out?”

      Then you proceed to spell it out to him, letters that make words, words that make sentences sentences that make sense. In the same way, in scouting, the tiniest indications, such as a few grains of displaced sand here, some bent blades of grass there, a leaf foreign to this bit of country, a buck startled from a distant thicket, the impress of a raindrop on a spoor, a single flash on the mountain–side, a far–off yelp of a dog, – all are letters in the page of information you are reading, and whose sequence and aggregate meaning, if you are a practised reader, you grasp at once without considering them as separate letters and spelling them out – except where the print happens to be particularly faint. And that is what goes to make scouting the interesting, the absorbing game that it is.

      A small instance will show my meaning as to what information can be read from trifling signs.

      The other day, when out with my native scout, we came on a few downtrodden blades of common grass; this led us on to footprints in a sandy patch of ground. They were those of women or boys (judging from the size) on a long journey (they wore sandals), going towards the Matopos. Suddenly my boy gave a “How!” of surprise, and ten yards off the track he picked up a leaf – it was the leaf of a tree that did not grow about here, but some ten or fifteen miles away; it was damp, and smelt of Kaffir beer. From these signs it was evident that women had been carrying beer from the place where the trees grew towards the Matopos (they stuff up the mouth of the beer–pots with leaves), and they had passed this way at four in the morning (a strong breeze had been blowing about that hour, and the leaf had evidently been blown ten yards away). This would bring them to the Matopos about five o’clock. The men would not delay to drink up the fresh beer, and would by this time be very comfortable, not to say half–stupid, and the reverse of on the qui vive; so that we were able to go and reconnoitre more nearly with impunity – all on the strength of information given by bruised grass and a leaf.

      There should have been no reason for my going out to get information in this way had we had reliable native spies or fully trained white scouts. But we find that these friendly natives are especially useless, as they have neither the pluck nor the energy for the work, and at best are given to exaggerating and lying; and our white scouts, though keen and plucky as lions, have never been trained in the necessary intricacies of mapping and reporting. Thus, it has now fallen to my lot to be employed on these most interesting little expeditions.

      Under present conditions we, staff and special service officers, have to turn our hand to every kind of job as occasion demands, and one man has to do the ordinary work of half a dozen different offices. It is as though, the personnel of a railway having been suddenly reduced by influenza or other plague just when the bank holiday traffic was on, a few trained staff were got from another company temporarily to work it. We find a number of porters, station–masters, cleaners, firemen, etc. available, but we have to put in a lot of odd work ourselves to make the thing run; at one minute doing the traffic management, at the next driving an engine, here superintending clearing–house business, then acting as pointsmen, and so on.

      It makes it all the more interesting, and in this way I have dropped in for the scouting work.

      The net result of our scouting to date is that we have got to know the nature of the country and the exact positions of the six different rebel impis in it, and of their three refuges of women and cattle. Maps have been lithographed accordingly, and issued to all officers for their guidance. These maps have sketches of the principal mountains to guide the officers in finding the positions of the enemy.

      The Matopo district is a tract of intricate broken country, containing a jumble of granite–boulder mountains and bush–grown gorges, extending for some sixty miles by twenty. It lies to the south of Buluwayo, its nearest point being about twenty miles from that town. Along its northern edge, in a distance of about twenty–five miles, the six separate impis of the enemy have taken up their positions, with their women and cattle bestowed in neighbouring gorges.

      On the principle “Gutta cavat lapidem non vi sed saepe cadendo,” we have taken innumerable little peeps at them, and have now “marked down” these impis and their belongings in their separate strongholds, a result that we could never have gained had we gone in strong parties.

      Commencing at the western end, near the Mangwe road is the stronghold of the Inugu Mountain (see A in map), a very difficult place to tackle, with its cliffs, caves, and narrow gorges. The impi occupies the mountain, while the women and cattle are in the neighbouring Famona valley.

      Five miles N.E. of this is the Chilili valley (B), in which are women and cattle