On November 14th, 1895, Baden-Powell received orders to proceed on active service, and a month later he was at Cape Coast Castle, charged with the onerous duties of getting the punitive force through from that point to Kumassi. What a task it was that lay before him few people can imagine. Between Cape Coast Castle and Kumassi the road was nothing but a narrow pathway, leading for the greater part of its 150 miles through primeval forest, dark, pestilential, and infested by the tsetse fly. To plunge an army of white troops into such a district was to court immediate trouble in the way of sickness, if not of death; accordingly it was necessary that many things should be thought of, and thought of with a thoroughness and care which the stay-at-home man can scarcely conceive. The details relating to transport, commissariat, reserve stores, engineering and telegraphic work, hospital provision, equipment for making roads and building bridges, had all to be considered and debated. Before he reached Cape Coast Castle, Baden-Powell had considered them all, and had put his ideas about them on paper. When he landed there innumerable difficulties lay before him, such difficulties that, as he says, "One could sit down and laugh to tears at the absurdity of the thing," but going on the old West Coast proverb, "Softly, softly, catchee monkey," he gradually reduced chaos into order, and at last found himself in command of "a jabbering, laughing mob," whose only uniform was--a red fez! All the way to Prahsu, seventy miles off, did Baden-Powell and his assistant, Captain Graham, lead and drive this motley assemblage. There they handed over to the Commissariat Department the loads they had brought up, and then set to work with their levies at clearing the bush, making roads, and doing general pioneer work. What sort of life he and Graham spent at that time is shown in a characteristic passage of Baden-Powell's diary:--