Sometimes when we had mixed classes, it was very difficult indeed, as all lectures had to be repeated in Portuguese, and the ordinary daily morning talks on the care and cleaning of the rifle, the stalking telescope, or on the work of snipers in attack and defence, which usually took from thirty to forty minutes, used to tail out, as each sentence was translated, into a matter of an hour and a half and even two hours.

But I think that, on the whole, the Portuguese troops really enjoyed their time at the school, and I remember our taking the field at Association football with a good sprinkling of them in our team.

CHAPTER XI
THE MODERN SCOUT

In all previous wars, the scouts and patrols have had their own special place. In this, the greatest of all wars, although there was much scouting done—far more than in any previous war—yet in many respects it was of so different a nature that a new era in these practices may fairly be said to have set in.

In former wars, the individual scout had far more chance. In the Boer War, for instance, Major F.R. Burnham, D.S.O., an American who held a commission in the British Army, made a wonderful name for himself, as did Dan Theron on the Boer side.

First and last, I suppose that Burnham was the greatest scout of our time. Physically a small man, he was amazingly well knit, and very strong, and his many feats of hardihood owed much to his compact and untiring build. His name will live on account of two feats—the first, his passing through the entire Matabele Army and shooting the M’limo, the witch doctor, who was responsible for the Matabele War; and the second, his dash through the Boer lines, when he blew up the railway on the far side of Pretoria.

The first article of Burnham’s faith was absolute physical fitness, and his idea of physical fitness was much more rigorous than that of most athletes. It was not with him a matter of merely keeping his muscles of speed and endurance in good fettle, but—what is a much harder thing—the keeping of all his senses at their highest pitch of efficiency. Thus, apart from his hearing and eyesight, which were very keen, I have never met anyone else, except one Indian, who possessed anything like his sense of smell. He could smell a small fire in the open at an extraordinary distance, and he told me that this power had often been of the greatest value to him.

But Burnham was essentially, as a scout, the product of what may be called a savage, or extra-European War, and in this war there was no one on either side who had anything like the same opportunities of hand-to-hand work. Whereas it would perhaps be too much to say that the day of Burnham has passed for ever, yet it is true enough that a new generation of scouts has arisen, whose work, or much of it, has been of a very different nature. In open or semi-open warfare a scout may still be ordered to go by day or night, and find out if this or that village is occupied by the enemy, but once trench warfare sets in, and the battle fronts of the opposing armies stretch from the sea to Switzerland, the work of the scout undergoes great changes. His theatre of action is No Man’s Land, which comprises all the area between the two armies which are drawn up one against the other.

The Corps Commander of the 11th Corps, Sir R. Haking, would never allow the use of the word “No Man’s Land.” “There is no such place opposite my Corps,” he would say. “All the land right up to the edge of the enemy’s parapet is our land, and we have got to have control of it.”

I believe I am right in stating that about seven out of every ten raids undertaken on the First Army Front in 1916 were the work of the 11th Corps, and they had long held the record in the number of prisoners taken in a single raid.