Books: Background for a Boy Scout

MAFEKING by Brian Gardner. 246 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.75.

Even at this distance in time, to say anything less than laudatory about the founder of the Boy Scout movement may seem like sneering at motherhood, or burning draft cards. But now that historians are forwarding overdue accounts to the once-Empire, it probably had to happen. Brian Gardner, a young Englishman who has given up journalism for history, deserves a merit badge for his neat hatchet job on Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell.

The world’s first Boy Scout, who won his original fame for his defense of Mafeking during the Boer War, turns out to have been a very shrewd operator indeed. At a time when one bemedaled British generalissimo after another was getting his cavalry pants shot oft by those hairy, puritan Dutch farmers in South Africa, Colonel Baden-Powell turned himself into just the sort of hero his country was yearning for. His own reports about his stand at Mafeking gave the folks at home a rare excuse to dance in the streets, get patriotically drunk, and sing God Save the Queen round the pub piano.

There was not really all that much to shout about. In October 1899, by his own inept leadership, Robert Baden-Powell, commander of two regiments of a mobile “frontier force,” succeeded in getting himself bottled up by Boer Commandant-General Piet Cronje. But if he was no military genius, Baden-Powell was an unquestioned success at public relations. During 217 days of siege, the dispatches from Mafeking were masterpieces of jocose understatement. Baden-Powell wrote some himself and censored those written by war correspondents. Either way, the adoring British public swallowed the stories avidly. They read of the jaunty commander braving the “inconveniences” of the siege, and they imagined horrors worse than the siege of Lucknow. Over the long weeks, as 2,000 shells fell among the widely dispersed and well-dug-in defenders, Baden-Powell thoughtfully changed the figure to 20,000, and his admirers at home worried all the more.

Extravagant for Alexander. Now and then, Baden-Powell ventured into the Boer lines to reconnoiter their positions. Much of the time he engaged in games, sketching and composing his fanciful reports to London. It seemed almost a pity when a column under Colonel Bryan (“The Mahout”) Mahon rode into town to effect the celebrated relief. The whole Empire went gaga. In London, “Mafeking Night” lasted five days. It was, writes Gardner, “a vast and apparently uncontrollable upsurge of joy, nationalism, and mended pride.”

Thanks partly to Baden-Powell’s own gift for projecting a heroic image and partly to the ineffectual tactics of Boer General Cronje, Baden-Powell was made the youngest major general in the British army. His military prowess was acclaimed in terms that would have been extravagant for Alexander of Macedon. He retired in 1910 after an otherwise uneventful military career. But no matter, he made a swell founder of the Boy Scouts.