Interesting examples of the great value of scouting have, of course, occurred many times. Here are a few—unavoidably omitted from a previous part of "Scouting for Boys."
Captain Stigand in "Scouting and Reconnaissance in Savage Countries" gives the following instances of scouts reading important meaning from small signs.
When he was going round outside his camp one morning he noticed fresh spoor of a horse which had been walking. He knew that all his horses only went at a jog-trot, so it must have been a stranger's horse.
So he recognised that a mounted scout of the enemy had been quietly looking at his camp in the night.
Coming to a village in Central Africa from which the inhabitants had fled, he could not tell what tribe it belonged to till he found a crocodile's foot in one of the huts, which showed that the village belonged to the Awisa tribe, as they eat crocodiles, and the neighbouring tribes do not.
A man was seen riding a camel over half a mile away. A native who was watching him said, "It is a man of slave blood." "How can you tell at this distance." "Because he is swinging his leg. A true Arab rides with his leg close to the camel's side."
General Joubert, who was Commander-in-Chief of the Boer Army in the Boer War, 1900, told me (some years before that) that in the previous Boer War, 1881, it was his wife who first noticed the British troops were occupying Majuba Mountain. The Boers were at that time camped near the foot of the mountain, and they generally had a small party of men on the top as a look-out. On this particular day they had intended moving away early in the morning so the usual picquet had not been sent up on to the mountain.
While they were getting ready to start, Mrs. Joubert, who evidently had the eyes of a scout, looked up and said, "Why, there is an Englishman on the top of Majuba!" The Boers said "No—it must be our own men who have gone up there, after all." But Mrs. Joubert stuck to it and said, "Look at the way he walks, that is no Boer—it is an Englishman." And so it was; she was right. An English force had climbed the mountain during the night, but by the stupidity of this man showing himself up on the sky-line their presence was immediately detected by the Boers who, instead of being surprised by them, climbed up the mountain unseen under the steep crags and surprised the British, and drove them off with heavy loss.
An officer lost his field-glasses during some manoeuvres on the desert five miles from Cairo and he sent for the native trackers to look for them.
They came and asked to see the tracks of his horse; so the horse was brought out and led about so that they could see his footprints. These they carried in their minds and went out to where the manoeuvres had been: there, among the hundreds of hoof marks of the cavalry and artillery, they very soon found those of the officer's horse, and followed them up wherever he had ridden, till they found the field-glasses lying where they had dropped out of their case on the desert.