Baden-Powell of Mafeking by J.S. Fletcher

On the afternoon of Friday, April 24th, 1896, Baden-Powell was in Belfast, attending the funeral of one of the men of his squadron who had been killed by a fall from his horse. During the ceremony a telegram from General Sir Frederick Carrington was put into his hands, warning him that he might be summoned to take part in the operations against the rebellious Matabele. Close upon this came the official notification from Sir Evelyn Wood, Quartermaster-General, directing him to proceed to Southampton and to embark on the s.s. _Tantallon Castle_ on May 2nd. By May 6th he was at Madeira, well on his way to the beginning of the most important military affair he had yet engaged in. At 4 a.m. on May 19th he woke to find the screw stopped, the ship motionless, and to see "looming dark against the stars, the long, flat top of grand old Table Mountain. " He was once more in South Africa -- little dreaming, perhaps, of what lay before him in the immediate future, or of what he was to do there ere another five years had gone by.

He found Cape Town "just the same as ever. " A brief stay there, a hearty God-speed from a crowd of well-remembered faces at the station, and he was off for Mafeking. One wonders if he knew, if he had any premonitions that almost exactly three years later he would be bound for Mafeking again, charged to fight a much superior enemy to the savage Matabele. He says nothing of that -- all he records in his journal of the first night in the train is that the beds were hard and the night cold. He reached Mafeking on May 22nd. It then consisted of a little corrugated tin house and goods shed, serving as railway station, hundreds of waggons and mounds of stores, and a street and market square also composed of tin houses. He found Sir Frederick Carrington -- to whom he was to act as Chief Staff Officer -- here, and with the other officers of his Staff took up his quarters in a railway carriage. This, however, was to be but a short stay in Mafeking; on May 23rd, he, General Carrington, Captain Vyvyan, and Lieutenant Ferguson set off for Buluwayo by coach -- "a regular Buffalo-Bill-Wild-West-Deadwood affair, hung by huge leather springs on a heavy, strongly-built under-carriage, drawn by ten mules. " They were ten days and nights in this vehicle, which laboured along at a slow rate through the heavy sand, and rocked and pitched until Baden-Powell described its motion as "exactly like being in the cabin of a small yacht in bad weather," but at last they came to Buluwayo, and found themselves in sight of war.