The Fall of the Asante Empire (35 page)

The second night was more painful to endure than the first.
It was still pouring rain and was quite cold.
Because so many loads had been lost, there was virtually no food, and nearly three thousand people were forced to spend the night in an area so small that it was only 120 yards in circumference.
Governor Hodgson spent the night sitting in a camp chair; Lady Hodgson’s devoted carrier managed to find her a camp bed, which enabled her to sleep a little.
Armitage was so exhausted that he slept on the floor of one of the huts, all of which had been reserved for Europeans.
The next day there was little firing by the Asante, and by early afternoon the column reached the fort of the friendly village of Inkwanta, where they were welcomed by a British flag, much cheering, and ample
food.
To everyone’s surprise and alarm Hodgson promptly passed out, though he soon revived.
Not everyone had died, as Hodgson had prophesied, but slim, handsome Captain Leggett and balding Captain Marshall both died of their wounds.
No one would ever know how many of the carriers or the hapless civilians that followed the fleeing column had been killed, but their deaths were not important to the overjoyed public in England, where church bells tolled in gratitude.
Only two officers and twenty-three soldiers had been killed, with only thirty-seven wounded and thirty-nine missing.
That anyone escaped was remarkable; that so many did was amazing.
But the British public did not realize that the fighting had just begun.

Not long after Captain Bishop ordered his men to fire the fort’s cannon in support of the fleeing column, he watched in disbelief as several score armed Asante walked casually toward the fort, obviously believing that it had been abandoned.
Bishop waited until they were well within range before ordering his machine guns to open fire.
The approaching Asante quickly scattered, leaving several dead on the ground.
After that, the Asante kept their distance, and the terribly weakened garrison settled down to await the relief that Governor Hodgson had solemnly promised would arrive in five days at the latest.
¹⁶
Hodgson clearly had no confidence in his prediction, and it is hardly to his credit that he said it.
The first day after Hodgson’s escape, three men in the fort died.
After five days passed, the feeble garrison admittedly lost heart; after ten days Bishop said that even he had given up all hope, although he continued to do what little he could to encourage the garrison.

Bishop’s Hausas were so sick and emaciated that he ordered them to sleep on the ramparts next to their loopholes, believing with good reason that if they were to sleep below they would be too weak to climb up to their posts should there be an attack.
His soldiers were little more than skeletons covered with running sores.
Each soldier received only a cup of linseed meal and a two-inch square of tinned meat as a daily ration.
It is no surprise that one or two Hausas died each day.
Smallpox also broke out among the starving men, and Dr.
Hay had no choice but to have the infected men carried outside the fort where they were left to die.
They lay next to some 150 refugees who had been too weak to join the escape
column and were slowly starving to death.
There began to arise a stench of death so appalling that people in the fort were quite literally nauseated by it.
Too weak to dig graves, the fort’s Hausas marched out each day to drag the night’s victims into one of the abandoned trenches.
This action so little alleviated the smell of death that Dr.
Hay, himself ill with malaria, and Captain Bishop decided to burn all the huts and bodies around the fort.
As they did their horrible work, they found only one living person, a starving woman whose dead child was still held to her flaccid breast.
What became of this tragic person is not recorded.

On June 1, Colonel Willcocks was delighted by the arrival of three hundred men of his own West African Frontier Force from Nigeria under the command of Major Charles Melliss, whose sword-wielding exploits at the head of his forces would soon make him famous.
Willcocks was so pleased to see “their honest faces” and hear their welcoming salutations that he warmly shook their hands and sat down to listen to their tales of travel across what they called “the big, black sea.”
¹⁷
On the fifth he led the men (figuratively, that is: his sprained knee was so painful he had to be carried) north on a seventy-one-mile march to the base camp at Prahsu.
Despite terrible weather, they arrived there four days later to find the once grand camp now badly neglected and in need of repair.
It was here that Willcocks learned that Captain Hall was still pinned down at Esumeja and that Colonel Carter’s force of eleven Europeans and 380 Hausas had been defeated near a scenically beautiful place called Dompoase with six killed and seven officers and eighty-six men wounded.

Willcocks immediately sent Melliss with a company of Nigerians to reinforce Carter at the fortified village of Fumasa.
Melliss’s men had great difficulty crossing flooded rivers, and at one point Melliss had to dive in to save two Nigerian nonswimmers from drowning.
He also saved Willcocks’s typewriter, which had fallen in as well.
(When it dried out, the machine worked surprisingly well.)
¹⁸
Once they managed to find a ford over a chest-deep river, Melliss’s men marched into an Asante ambush.
Never one to be satisfied by exchanging fire with an unseen enemy, Melliss drew his sword and led his men in a wild bayonet charge into the jungle.
The Asante fled, but Melliss’s boy bugler was killed and thirteen men were
wounded, including a British sergeant.
Melliss reached Carter without further trouble and delivered the badly needed ammunition his men had carried.

Reinforcements and supplies, now arriving at Cape Coast, began the long trek to Prahsu through torrents of rain that made the road a quagmire.
On June 25 a colonel named Burroughs and a battalion of the West African Regiment from Sierra Leone passed through Prahsu on the way to reinforce Hall and hopefully keep the king of Bekwai and his large army on the side of the British.
The Bekwai fighting men still wanted to join the Asante rebellion, and their king was only barely able to control them.
When Burroughs first arrived at Cape Coast, he did not make a favorable impression.
One of Willcocks’s staff officers described him as “an extraordinary little colonel called Burroughs who has gout and can’t wear a boot and has never been on [active] service in his life….” The same officer reported of Burroughs’s officers, “They also brought all their mess plate and many cases of champagne, all of which our transport officer left behind at Cape Coast by mistake.”
¹⁹

To reach Hall, Burroughs had to drive the Asante out of Dompoase, the village where Carter had been so badly defeated.
Arriving at nightfall in a pouring rain, Burroughs’s men caught the Asante troops with wet powder and easily drove them away, destroying their stockade and burning the village.
Burroughs was able to join Hall without further opposition.
Thanks to this victory, Willcocks on July 1 decided to move his newly arrived forces north of the Pra River.
The next day he received what appeared to be authentic news of the governor’s escape, and on the fourth a telegraph message confirming the breakout came from the governor himself at Cape Coast.
The telegram also reported that the fort could not be held beyond July 15.
Willcocks promptly sent a telegram to the colonial secretary promising to relieve the fort by the fifteenth, and he moved north with all the force he had.

Burroughs’s orders were to tie down Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa’s large army of Kokofu by consolidating Hall’s troops with his own at Esumeja; but the “gouty little colonel” had ideas of his own.
Though Hall warned him that Yaa Asantewaa’s army held a strong position behind stockades, Burroughs, puffed up by his easy victory at Dompoase, decided to drive through Kokofu and relieve
Kumase himself.
The day before Willcock’s men marched north toward Kumase, Burroughs’s West African Regiment led the attack, with Hall’s men relegated to duties as a rear guard.
After maneuvering his men through relatively open terrain on a broad front, Burroughs ordered them to advance.
Protected by their stockades, the Asante troops poured tremendous fire from Dane guns and a considerable number of Sniders into Burroughs’s men, who began to go down.
Burroughs himself was painfully wounded and his second-in-command killed.
When Asante troops began to work their way around his flanks, the wounded colonel ordered a retreat.
A panicky staff officer ran back to Hall, telling him that the attack was hopeless-and that Hall had been ordered to use his machine guns and 75-mm cannon to cover the retreat.
He also apologized for the ignominy of it all but made it plain that there was no alternative.
²⁰

Hall’s rapid fire slowed the Asante soldiers who had come out from behind their stockades in pursuit, and after a hard fight the British force was able to withdraw to its fortified position at Esumeja.
Happy to escape at all, Burroughs quickly decamped for the safety of Bekwai with his regiment and some eighty wounded men, leaving Hall to defend Esumeja.
Hall’s men had barely taken up their former positions around the town when the queen mother’s troops launched an impetuous attack.
They were shot down in large numbers but came on again and again against rifles and machine guns being fired by Hall’s men, who were protected by trenches and log barriers.
Despite their losses, the Asante refused to break off the battle, and for the first time they continued to fire against Hall’s men well into the night before finally withdrawing to their stockades.

Willcocks was in Kwissa when he learned of Burroughs’s defeat on the morning of July 8.
Furious that Burroughs had disobeyed his orders and disturbed by his defeat, he marched to Bekwai, arriving the next day.
Even though Burroughs was wounded, Willcocks did not hesitate to berate him for making the attack and, once having made it, for not ordering a bayonet charge, which Willcocks was sure would have succeeded.
Burroughs defended his actions, and Willcocks let the matter drop.
He had to get his own force ready to continue the march on Kumase, and Yaa Asantewaa’s army at Kokofu stood across his path.

Willcocks would make the march with one thousand troops—seven hundred of his own men from the West African Frontier Force, two hundred men from the West African Regiment, fifty Sierra Leone Frontier Police, and fifty gunners to handle his six cannon and six machine guns.
He also had about three thousand supply carriers, one thousand five hundred of whom had come all the way from East Africa by ship.
The day after Willcocks arrived in Bekwai, a starving, exhausted Hausa soldier from the fort at Kumase crawled into Hall’s camp at Esumeja on his hands and knees.
He took a crumpled, sweat-soaked piece of paper out of his loincloth.
It read: “From O.C.
[officer in command] Kumassi to O.C.
troops Esumeja.
His Excellency and main troops left for the coast seventeen days ago; relief most urgently wanted here.
Remaining small garrison diminishing: disease, etc.
Reduced rations for only a few days more.” 53 It was signed by Captain F.
E.
Bishop.
The messenger was carried to Bekwai in a hammock where Willcocks promoted him to sergeant on the spot and gave him some money.
Willcocks later regretted that he had not recommended the unnamed man for a Victoria Cross.
²¹

Always concerned about the threat that Yaa Asantewaa’s army at Kokofu posed to him, the king of Bekwai urged Willcocks to attack her before moving on to Kumase.
Willcocks agreed to do so; he even asked the king to send word to the Asante troops at Kokofu that Willcocks would attack them the next day.
As soon as this threat was received, two thousand Asante troops left their stockades around Kumase, seventeen miles to the north, to reinforce Kokofu.
On July 11, four hundred of Willcocks’s men moved out toward the Asante position, laboriously widening the road as they went as if in preparation for a larger force to follow.
After several hours they withdrew.
Willcocks explained to the king of Bekwai that this maneuver was simply a reconnaissance for the real attack, which would come soon enough.
In fact, Willcocks only wanted to tie down the Asante troops at Kokofu.
He had no intention of repeating Burroughs’s attack against them.

The twelfth of July was spent making preparations for a do-or-die dash to Kumase.
To make the one thousand man fighting force more mobile, only one thousand seven hundred carriers would be taken, but these men would have to carry large amounts of ammunition
in addition to the food and hospital supplies the starving garrison was waiting for.
After a long day of checking weapons and packing loads, the carriers tried to sleep on the muddy ground as a steady drizzle fell.
At the extraordinary hour of 2
A.M.
, Willcocks called for the king of Bekwai and explained that he would not attack Kokofu after all but would move directly on Kumase.
The king angrily accused Willcocks of deceiving him, something the colonel freely owned up to, saying that in war a commander had to deceive even friends, an admission that the old king accepted with surprising good humor, especially considering the hour.
Willcocks also meant to deceive the Asante, who did not know that a European gold miner named Behne, one of fifty who were working at nearby mines, had offered to lead Willcocks to Kumase on a little used path that bypassed Kokofu.
By taking this path through the Bekwai village of Pekki, the column would not encounter any stockades until they were just outside Kumase.
²²