THE REGIMENTAL OFFICER I hear you say that Baden-Powell has had glorious 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.