The Fall of the Asante Empire (33 page)

Ignoring Davidson-Houston’s sanguine appraisal of the situation, Captain Aplin continued to press on as rapidly as he could along the rain-sloshed path, his men fording flooded rivers with great difficulty, making use of the bridges erected by Scott’s expedition.
On the morning of what he thought would be his last day’s march of seventeen miles into Kumase, a sudden glare from unexpected sunlight saved Aplin’s life by causing him to tilt his helmet to shade his eyes.
As he did, his helmet flew off his head, and he felt pain in his throat.
An Asante sniper in a tree had fired a rifle shot that had nicked Aplin before it was deflected through his orderly’s calf and then into the ground.
It signaled the start of a tremendous fusillade of Asante fire from both sides of the path.
Thanks to heavy machine-gun and cannon fire, the Hausa soldiers were eventually able to move forward.
After a spirited bayonet charge the Asante troops withdrew into the forest.
It was only 2
P.M.
, but Kumase was still miles away, so Aplin decided to halt to tend to his twenty wounded men, including all six officers.
Three men had been killed.
As usual it rained that night, and the Asante did not attack.

It was nine the following morning before enough hammocks could be improvised to carry the wounded and Aplin could resume the march.
The column crossed the Ordah Biver without opposition,
but three miles from Kumase they once again came under such heavy fire that Aplin later said that if the Asante had not fired high, no one would have survived.
Even so, there were many casualties and progress was very slow, until finally the troops saw looming ahead a large, horseshoe-shaped stockade blocking the only path through the jungle.
Machine-gun and artillery fire had no effect on it, and a frontal bayonet charge only resulted in heavy casualties.
After continual firing their machine gun overheated and jammed, and ammunition for their only cannon was exhausted.
Just as a disastrous retreat seemed unavoidable, a small path was found that led through the jungle toward the flank of the stockade.
When twenty-five bayonet-wielding Hausas unexpectedly charged around the end of the stockade, the startled Asante defenders fled, leaving the path to Kumase open.
Abandoning their dead and their only artillery piece but carrying their wounded as well as they could, Aplin’s men dashed for Kumase before the Asante commander could rally his men.
The defenders of the fort welcomed the bloody and grimy men, but they were privately horrified to learn that all six officers and 139 of the 250 men were wounded and that the column had lost its food, ammunition, and cannon.
Aplin’s men had fought splendidly, but they could do nothing to relieve the garrison; and if the siege were a long one, the additional mouths to feed would be a burden.

In addition to the thirty Europeans now in the fort, there were hundreds of Hausa soldiers, many wounded men, and half a dozen Asante chiefs and kings, some of whom were being held against their will.
To maintain morale as well as to search for food, the British launched a number of raids, including one at night.
All were driven back with losses, even one in which the venerable Chief Kwatchie N’ketia sat calmly on his chair, both arms raised, as Asante bullets flew by.
In his left hand he held a gold-hiked sword, while the two forefingers of his right hand were upheld as if in benediction.
Since the firing lasted for three hours, the chief’s attendants had to hold his arms in place.
Food was being rationed ever more tighdy, and many of the troops were feeling weak.
To keep up their spirits, the fort’s garrison played “God Save the Queen” at full volume on their gramophone at night to counter the incessant singing and drumming of the Asante.
The spirits of
the men in the fort were never high, and they were dampened even more on May 6, when the popular Captain Middlemist died of internal injuries suffered when he was crushed against the fort’s gate.

On May 10, some of the ostensibly loyal Asante kings detained in the fort proposed peace talks with the “rebels,” as the British insisted on calling the Asante who had taken up arms.
Hodgson agreed, and under a flag of truce, talks among the Asante factions began.
The British had no reason for optimism.
On April 14, before the stockades had been completed, the Asante leaders had presented five peace terms to Hodgson.
In addition to demanding the restoration of slavery and the cessation of government demands for forced labor, they insisted that King Prempe be returned from exile and the British, along with all other foreigners, leave.
Not surprisingly, these terms were not agreeable to the British.
It is also no surprise that, now that the Asante held the upper hand, they did not lessen their demands.
Nevertheless, Hodgson allowed the talks to continue because while the truce was in effect, the Asante commanders allowed women to sell food in the Kumase market, to the great relief of the hungry refugees outside the fort as well as the garrison.

On the afternoon of May 15, as the peace talks dragged on, 170 African soldiers and three British officers commanded by Major Morris marched into Kumase past a stockade that was undefended because of the truce.
Despite terrific heat each day, rain each night, and several small battles (in one of which Morris had been painfully wounded in the groin) the column had covered 238 miles from the north in only thirteen days.
Unlike Aplin’s, most of these men were unwounded, and they had with them a fair amount of food and ammunition.
Their machine gun and cannon were welcome, too.
They also had some ponies, which soon made good eating for the Hausas.
Morris knew nothing about a truce, and Hodgson may have known nothing about Morris being on the march, although there were rumors that troops were on the way.
Still, the timing of Morris’s arrival was suspicious, to say the least, and the Asante were furious.
They abruptly canceled the truce and resumed the war.

On May 10, the same day the truce was proposed, forty-oneyear-old Colonel James Willcocks, second-in-command of the recently
raised West African Frontier Force of northern Nigeria, received orders from London to take command of all the forces preparing to relieve Kumase.
Willcocks was only three days away from the exhilarating prospect of launching an attack against a hostile emir in northern Nigeria, but pleased by the chance for his first independent command, he left immediately, pushing himself and his lame pony to their limits in a nightmarish walk and ride toward Lagos where he hoped to board a ship for the Gold Coast.
Willcocks suffered acutely from bouts of temporary blindness and from severe gastric pain as a result of food poisoning, and he had badly blistered feet from walking and a sprained knee from a fall, yet he somehow reached Lagos only fourteen days later, a distance of over three hundred miles.
Lucky to find a waiting ship, he limped ashore two days later at Cape Coast in a drenching rain.
To his dismay he found no staff officers, no troops, no supplies, and no carriers.

During twenty-two years of army service fighting Britain’s batdes in India and Afghanistan, Willcocks had proven to be a distinguished and aggressive officer who adored action.
But he had learned to be prudent, too, and he would not make the mistake of trying to relieve Kumase without adequate force.
He was well aware that a premature attack with an inadequate force might inflate Asante morale so much that relief would prove impossible.
He resigned himself to wait.
Unfortunately, other officers already operating in the Gold Coast outside his command also had orders to relieve Kumase, and they were not at all cautious.

Captain Wynyard Montagu Hall, who had marched to Kumase as an officer with the West Yorks in 1896, had landed at the Cape Coast two days before Willcocks in command of 450 men of the West African Frontier Force from Nigeria.
The Fante were so alarmed by the prospect of yet another Asante war that nothing Hall could do would induce them to carry relief supplies to Kumase.
Disgusted, he loaded up his soldiers with ammunition and boxes of food and set off through the rain and mud toward Kumase.
On the fifteenth of May, he reached the base camp at Prahsu where he found a cable from the colonial secretary in Accra, telling him that the fort’s garrison only had food enough to last to the end of the month and urging him to hurry.
Hall wasted no time; pausing only long enough to sign a treaty of friendship with the king of
Adansi, he arrived at Fomena on May 20.
Fomena was the place where Wolseley had set up his supply base twenty-six years earlier and the principal city of the kingdom of Bekwai, whose King had so far reftised to join other Asante states in the war.
The king urged Hall to occupy a town named Esumeja, a strategic hamlet on the main road just one day’s march from Kumase, and Hall did so on the twenty-second.

The next day he led two hundred of his men toward Kumase, but Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa’s large and formidable army was encamped in his path at Kokofu, the site of one of Wolseley’s great batdes.
Hall’s force was stopped in its tracks and was lucky to succeed in retreating before being surrounded.
No sooner had Hall returned to Esumeja than the king of Adansi thought better of his pledge of unbounded loyalty and joined in the war against the British, leaving Hall with all he could do to keep the king of Bekwae out of the Asante alliance.
Any idea of relieving the fort at Kumase had to be set aside.
Hall was barely able to defend his hastily fortified camp at Esumeja.

The next attempt to move toward Kumase was made a few days later, in early June, when Lieutenant Colonel Carter, who had been camped near Hall with 380 men and several machine guns and cannon, tried to join Hall’s beleaguered force and together dash to Kumase.
Before he could reach Hall, he was ambushed by a large Asante force.
Though his men returned fire, the Asante fire was so heavy that all the officers went down, including Carter with a serious wound over his left eye.
There was no lack of courage on the British side.
A Lieutenant named Edwards was shot down while ramming shells into a cannon with his walking stick.
One officer was shot through both wrists but continued to carry ammunition to his men by holding it between his forearms.
Another officer went down while firing a machine gun that jammed.
All the while Hausas were falling in alarming numbers.

After about two full hours of intense fighting, enough of the vegetation had been cut away that the British could finally see what they were up against.
To their amazement they discovered that the Asante troops were firing at them through loopholes in a six-foothigh, six-foot-thick stockade that extended parallel to the road for about a quarter of a mile.
It became immediately obvious that the
Asante were completely protected against any fire the British could throw at them.
The only unwounded senior officer, a colonel named Wilkinson, could see no hope of victory and tried to organize the battered British force for an orderly retreat.
But while he was pondering how to manage this without having it turn into a rout, a Scottish colour sergeant named John Mackenzie, on detached duty from the Seaforth Highlanders, asked permission to lead a bayonet charge against the stockade with his company of Yoruba troops from Nigeria.
The colonel reluctandy agreed, and one hundred men with fixed bayonets followed Mackenzie, charging direcriy at the stockade.
Improbable as it may seem, before the Nigerians even reached the stockade, the Asantes abandoned it and ran.
For this remarkable feat Mackenzie was awarded the Victoria Cross and was given a commission in the Black Watch.
⁶
Although the Asante had gone, Wilkinson had too many wounded to continue the advance.
He withdrew toward the relative safety of the camp at Prahsu.
The first two battles went to the Asante.

When Willcocks was notified that Carter’s well-armed force of four hundred men had been driven back with nearly one hundred casualties and that Hall’s even larger force was besieged at Esumeja, he telegraphed London, asking for more soldiers, special-service officers, and supplies.
While he waited for the troops and supplies to arrive, British forces in the Bekwai district continued to run into difficulties.
Captain Wilson and 114 Nigerians were ordered to reinforce the survivors of Colonel Carter’s defeat.
Wilson was killed in an Asante ambush, while twenty-five soldiers and sixteen carriers were wounded.
Led by a British sergeant, the surviving troops fought their way through to Carter’s position only to find that he had left the village and his whereabouts were unknown.
In great danger of encirclement, the small force somehow survived a thirtythree-mile march through the rain to safety.
They left their wounded behind but loyally carried the dead body of Captain Wilson all the way.
Six days later a Nigerian soldier crawled into camp.
Despite nineteen wounds, some of which were serious, he had covered twenty miles by dragging himself through the jungle at night and hiding from Asante scouts during the day.
⁷

While the isolated British columns that had gone up-country before Willcocks assumed effective command did their best to avoid annihilation and to keep the king of Bekwai out of the war, the situation in Kumase was growing desperate.
Water was not a problem because the Asante chivalrously allowed parties from the fort, as well as the refugees outside of it, to go to and from a nearby stream without harm (the Asante later said that thirst was not a legitimate weapon of war).
But by the end of May, the supply of food had dwindled alarmingly.
Major Morris’s five ponies had long since been slaughtered, and the last of the four milk cows and all but one sheep in the fort had now been eaten.
All birds, cats, snakes, lizards, and rats in Kumase had been eaten as well.
The twenty-nine Europeans still in the fort were on a very limited ration of tinned beef and biscuit; the Hausas were on an even more limited diet, and the native carriers received nothing but biscuit.
Morris’s men boiled their leather belts and sandals for hours to produce a horrid-tasting, pallid broth.
They also chewed the softened leather.