Robert Robert - Scouting for Boys

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Introduce at odd moments such practices as: improvised stretchers, four—handed seat, artificial respiration, making splints for an injured limb.

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GAMES IN FIRST AID

Missionaries

Each Scout in turn acts as an explorer or missionary, with a few simple remedies. Three patients are brought to him in succession to be treated, each having a different disease or injury. He has to advise or show what treatment should be carried out.

Wounded Prisoners

Placed at various points, each fifty yards from camp, are prisoners one for each competitor in the game. These prisoners have a tag, describing an injury, attached to their shirts.

At a signal each of the competitors has to make for a prisoner, give him first aid for his injury and bring him home. The one who reaches camp first with a prisoner properly cared for, wins.

Displays

Life-saving displays are very popular both with performers and with the audience.

Bicycle Accident—Boys returning from camp. A rash cyclist. Misfortune. Injuries attended to and patients carried away to hospital on improvised stretchers.

Gas Explosion—Mrs. Coddles and family take a walk. On her way home, Mrs. Coddles meets a friend. Maria is sent on to light the gas stove and prepare father’s tea. Father gets back from work and finds the house full of gas. Ambulance squad comes to the rescue. Maria is dragged out and given artificial respiration. Constable Ado arrives on the scene. How not to look for a gas escape. Sad end of a gallant but thoughtless policeman.

Fire Display—Evening at No. 5 Suburbi Villas. Fire alarm. Inmates aroused. Fence formed to keep back the crowd. Arrival of fire section with jumping-sheet. Life-lines and ladders. Rescue of remaining occupants.

Factory Fire—The workmen are engaged in their daily occupation when an explosion occurs, causing a fire inside the building and an exterior wall to collapse, which injures a man who happens to be passing at the time. The uninjured workmen attend to their unfortunate comrades, while others rush off for help and return with the ambulance and fire apparatus. Some of the men are rescued from the burning building by jumping from the tower into carpet.

CHAPTER IX

OUR DUTIES AS CITIZENS

CAMP FIRE YARN NO. 26

CITIZENSHIP

Duties of Scouts as Citizens - Citizens of the World

Every scout ought to prepare himself to be a good citizen of his country and of the World.

For this you must begin, as boys, to look on all boys as your friends. Remember, whether rich or poor, from town or from country, you have to stand shoulder to shoulder for your country. If you are divided among yourselves you are doing harm to your country. You must sink your differences.

If you despise other boys because they belong to a poorer home than yourself you are a snob. If you hate other boys because they happen to be born richer than you, you are a fool.

We must, each one of us, take our place as we find it in this world and make the best of it, and pull together with the others around us.

We are very much like bricks in a wall, we each have our place, though it may seem a small one in so big a wall. But if one brick crumbles or slips out of place, it begins to throw an undue strain on others, cracks appear, and the wall totters.

Don’t be too anxious to push yourself on. You will get disappointments without end if you start that way.

Work for the good of your country, or of the business in which you are employed, and you will find that as you do this you will be getting all the promotion and all the success that you want.

Try and prepare yourself for this by seriously taking up the subjects they teach you at school, not because it amuses you, but because it is your duty to your country to improve yourself. Take up your mathematics, your history, and your language learning in that spirit, and you’ll get on.

Don’t think of yourself, but think of your country and the good that your work is going to do to other people.

When You Grow Up

Then, when you grow up, you will become a voter and have a share in governing your country.

And you will, many of you, be inclined to belong automatically to the political party your father or friends belong to. I should not, if I were you. I should hear what each party has to say. If you listen to one party you will certainly agree that that is the only right one, the rest must all be wrong. But if you go and listen to another you may find that after all that one is quite right, and the first one wrong.

The elephants of Burma can teach a lesson to the nations of the world. By working together they can carry their heaviest load.

The thing is to listen to them all, and don’t be persuaded by any particular one. And then be a man, make up your mind and decide for yourself which you think is best for the whole country—not for some little local question— and vote for that one so long as it works the right way, namely, for the good of the country.

Many people get led away by some new politician with some new extreme idea. Never believe in one man’s idea till it has been well considered from all points of view. Extreme ideas are seldom much good; if you look them up in history you will see almost always that they have been tried before somewhere and have failed.

Your forefathers worked hard, fought hard, and died hard, to make your country for you. Don’t let them look down from heaven and see you loafing about with your hands in your pockets, doing nothing to keep it up.

Play up! Each man in his place, and play the game!

“A Friend of All the World”

Remember, too, that a Scout is not only a friend to the people round him, but “a friend of all the world.” Friends don’t fight each other. If we make friends with our neighbours across the sea in foreign countries, and if they keep friends with us, we shan’t want to fight. And that is by far the best way of preventing future wars and of making sure of lasting peace.

One thing which brings about wars is the fact that people of the different countries know very little about each other personally, but are told by their governments that the right thing is to fight. So they fight and are all jolly sorry for it afterwards.

If they had been good friends in peace time they would have understood each other better and would never have come to blows.

Nowadays travelling has become so much easier and distances have become so much smaller through motor transport, aeroplanes, and radio that people of different countries have a better chance of getting to know each other more closely.

Then the Boy Scout and Girl Guide (Girl Scout) Movements have spread among the nations. As Scouts we can visit about fifty different countries about the world and find Brother Scouts in each of them, all acting under the same Law and Promise and doing the same Scout work as ourselves. Already thousands of Scouts of different nations are making trips to each other’s countries regularly to interchange visits. In this way they have the fun of seeing what other countries are like, and what is more important, they are getting to know one another as friends and not as mere “foreigners.”