The Fall of the Asante Empire (36 page)

British-paid spies were sent to Kokofu to spread the word that the delayed British attack would begin on the morning of the thirteenth.
Early that morning Willcocks sent a force toward Kokofu as a feint while the main body began its march through the jungle toward Pekki.
The path was only barely passable at best, and the bare feet of the advance guard soon turned it into a quagmire for the rest of the troops and carriers.
Several neck-deep rivers also had to be forded.
Exhausted, the advance guard did not cover the fifteen miles to Pekki until after dark, and the rear guard was not settled in until 2
A.M.
While his men were trickling in, Willcocks conferred with the chief of Pekki, who told him that a large force of Asante held the religious center of Treda, only two miles away across the Bekwae frontier into Kumase district.

As Willcocks was digesting the information that these men had many modern rifles, two terrified Asante prisoners were brought to him.
Expecting to be killed, the men were clearly amazed when Willcocks told them they were free to return to Treda, where they should tell their commander that the British would camp the next day at Pekki, but if the Asante persisted in their rebellion, Willcocks would attack them the following day.
Waiting until eight the following morning, to give the appearance of being true to his word and also to give his men a chance for some rest, Willcocks attacked
Treda without warning, taking the Asante by surprise and driving them away after little resistance.
Pausing only to burn the Asante village, including its temple, Willcocks’s men rapidly pressed on.
In one small village they found a Hausa who had been captured when Hodgson’s column escaped from the fort.
He was very hungry but had not been mistreated.
In another village Willcocks himself found a two-year-old child all alone in a hut, shrieking in terror.
He left some bread and a cup of tinned milk for the child, and the column again pressed on.
Some days later, when Willcocks’s troops passed through the village again, the child was found dead in exactly the same place, the food untouched.
²³

That night was spent in the village of Ekwanta, five miles south of Kumase.
Three rounds were fired from a 75-mm cannon in the hope that they would be heard in the fort, but they were not.
At daybreak on the fifteenth, Willcocks’s last day to relieve the fort, the advance guard under Major Melliss set off for the fort.
Soon after, the Asante fired on the long column from its left flank, and the Asante commander, who survived to be questioned after the war, then ordered an attack on the carriers, hoping to create panic and disrupt the march.
He very nearly succeeded, but the rear guard’s machine guns finally drove the Asante back after the loss of many loads that the carriers dropped.
During this action the rest of the column continued its march.
Before Willcocks realized it, a gap a mile long had opened up between the main body and the rear guard fighting to save the carriers.
At just this point in the battle, Asante reinforcements from Kokofii were hurrying north parallel to Willcocks’s column.
Unaware that the huge gap in the British column existed, they attacked the rear guard and were driven off.
Had they moved into the gap, Willcocks later wrote, they would have caused “much trouble, if no worse.”
²⁴
In fact, they might well have stopped the advance.

At 4:15
P.M.
the advance guard reached the stockade that blocked the Pekki road.
It was small, nothing like the huge stockades that had given the British such problems earlier, but the men who were behind it and hidden around it in the forest opened fire with everything they had.
Willcocks called the roar “the best moment of my life” because it meant that he was engaged in the last great battle that would, he was sure, lead to the relief of the fort.
The British gunners were ordered to fire as rapidly as possible at the stockade in order to keep the Asante busy while the infantry formed up on each side of the road along a front of about six hundred yards.
Still uncertain whether his African soldiers would obey his order to charge, Willcocks hesitated, then ordered his massed buglers to sound cease-fire.
His troops obeyed, and as their fire ceased, so did that of the Asante.
After a moment of eerie silence, Willcocks ordered his buglers to sound the charge, and his troops instantly obeyed.
Led by sword-waving British officers, Melliss in front as usual, they rushed forward with bayonets fixed.
The charge was so infectious that all of Willcocks’s staff officers joined in, leaving the colonel alone with an African sergeant.
Turning to this French-speaking man, Willcocks asked in all seriousness where his staff was.
“Voila, c’est moi,” was the answer.
²⁵

As Willcocks had expected, only a few Asante stood against the bayonet charge.
Asante officers tried to rally their men, but the flight could not be halted, and those Asante officers who fought back quickly fell to swords and bayonets.
After Willcocks paused to examine the shattered Asante bodies that lay behind the stockade, he wrote that “it was impossible not to admire the gallantry of these savages, who could stand up against the modern guns and rifles”
²⁶
Willcocks also understood that without bayonets of their own and unable to reload their cumbersome Dane guns in time to defend themselves, the Asante soldiers, so brave in withstanding artillery and machine-gun fire, would have to yield to a bayonet charge.
Captain Harold Biss was shocked by what he called the “very gruesome sight” of the dead Asante behind the stockade.
“A shell from one of the guns had penetrated and done terrible execution, bespattering the timbers with blood and shreds of human flesh.
Its defenders themselves presented a loathsome spectacle.
A pile of mangled forms, some still breathing, lay in confusion, many having fallen across one another, some disembowelled, another with the whole face blown off—all variously mutilated.
Limbs had been carried yards away into the bush beyond, and the ground was slippery with blood.”
²⁷

With dark coming on, Willcocks hurried his troops toward Kumase, but his men were so exhausted by their march and the excitement of the charge that he called a brief halt.
One of his officers lay
down in a pool of mud and water and instantly fell asleep.
When Willcocks woke him a few minutes later to continue the advance, the man commented, “I don’t see much difference between this and other beds in Ashanti.”
²⁸
On the march again, they passed burned-out houses, litter of all sorts, and headless bodies, but everyone’s mind was on the fort.
When it finally came into sight, the British flag was still flying, and at the sound of a bugle from the fort playing “general salute,” everyone began to run through the long grass, often stumbling over unburied bodies but cheering at the top of their lungs.

The garrison of the fort had known that relief was close at hand since 4:15, when they had heard the heavy firing close to Kumase.
Captain Bishop opened fire with a machine gun to let the rescuers know the garrison was still alive, but no one with Willcocks heard it over the sounds of battle.
The three Europeans in the fort then searched anxiously with their field glasses for the first sign of rescue.
It came at 6
P.M.
, only shortly before dark.
Incredibly, the first thing they saw was, not a conquering army, but Major Melliss’s fox terrier, who had somehow survived the entire campaign with the troops and was now dashing toward the fort.
In those singular times it was so commonplace for British officers to take their dogs into battle with them that no one thought to record the terrier’s name.
Not far behind the fox terrier came dozens of running British officers, their faces filthy under their white helmets, and many African soldiers wearing fezzes.
When they heard the forts’s two buglers playing welcome, they ran even faster, cheering even louder.

Bishop and his feeble men tottered out of the fort, “cheering to the best of our ability.”
²⁹
Bishop ordered his emaciated Hausas to stand at attention, and these gallant men somehow managed to do so with great dignity, even as the rescuers threw their helmets in the air and gave three cheers for the queen.
Willcocks, who had run ahead despite his bad knee, was so overcome with emotion that he could scarcely speak.
He thought the Hausas seemed to be near death and the Europeans were gaunt and sallow-faced, but other British officers, while agreeing that the Hausas were terribly thin and covered with open sores, thought that the Europeans looked quite fit, in marked contrast to their own appearance, which one of
Willcocks’s staff officers likened to “scarecrows.”
³⁰
They were indeed ragged soldiers, their boots falling apart, their uniforms in tatters.
But before the men lay down for the first decent sleep they had had for three days, Captain Bishop opened his last bottle of champagne and shared it with his rescuers.
Later, British cannon fired starshells, like giant fireworks, high above Kumase.

T
HAT NIGHT PASSED QUIETLY, AND EARLY MORNING PATROLS RE
ported no Asante activity near the fort.
The stench of decaying human flesh was overwhelming in the still morning air, and while four hundred men began to tear down the stockade they had attacked yesterday, the rest of Willcocks’s men hurriedly attempted to bury the bodies that lay in the long grass around the fort.
But there were so many hundreds of dead that the idea of burial had to be abandoned.
Tearing down the nearby huts, the men set huge fires and cremated the bodies.
The job of tossing the decomposing bodies onto these pyres was given to the African troops, but everyone was assailed all that night by the unbearable smell of burning flesh.
An officer found some fragrant roses in bloom at the Ramseyers’ abandoned mission station, but their sweet scent seemed to make the stench of burning flesh even more terrible.
Despite their exhaustion, few of Willcocks’s men were able to sleep that night.

The following morning, July 17, the air was fresh, and there was still no sign of Asante forces.
The fort’s new garrison would consist of 150 African troops, some British sergeants, a doctor, and three officers including the commander, Captain Eden.
Willcocks left them enough food for almost two months plus large stores of ammunition
and other supplies, but he gave himself barely enough food to sustain his column on the return march to the relative safety of Bekwai.
In addition to the fort’s old garrison, many of whom would have to be carried, he had over thirty wounded of his own to tend to.
Willcocks could not afford to delay his return march to Bekwai, so that morning, without ceremony, he wished Captain Eden and the others well and marched away, fervently hoping that his vulnerable force would not be attacked.
Soon after Willcocks’s column moved off, a large group of Asante troops left their stockades and casually walked toward the fort, obviously believing that it had been abandoned.
Captain Eden waited for them to near the fort before cutting down many of them with machine-gun fire.
Remarkably, this was the second time the Asante had made this grim mistake.
Willcocks’s men heard the firing and picked up the pace of their march.
They need not have worried; the Asante commanders were too dispirited and divided to organize an attack.

There were many reasons why Asante morale was low.
The successful relief of the fort’s garrison had shown once again that British weapons and tactics were difficult to overcome.
Also, the lack of overall leadership was increasingly a problem.
Opoku Mensa was a political leader, not a military man, and he had none of the Asante king’s cachet as commander in chief.
Yaa Asantewaa was a vital force, but her powers were largely symbolic.
Kofi Kofia was a regional commander from the Atchuma district to the north of Kumase, and he soon left the capital to rejoin his own people.
Most difficult of all to overcome, the Asante were trapped by their defensive role.
They had built nearly impregnable stockades complete with comfortable war camps (as the French were to build the Maginot Line some thirty years later), and it was difficult to motivate them to take offensive action.
Finally, because the war camps were in such close proximity to one another, when a stockade’s garrison was defeated—as happened at Kumase—other garrisons shared their sense of demoralization.

Without their king and without an overall military commander, Asante forces were more like the private armies of rebellious warlords than the unified national army that had opposed Wolseley.
Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa was an inspirational voice, but even she could not bring the various leaders into common cause.
For
the most part, each leader’s troops remained in war camps in their own district, ready to defend themselves against a British attack should one come but unwilling to unite in a large force to attack either the British troops or their long and temptingly vulnerable supply lines.
And when a district army like the one in Kumase suffered defeat, the survivors’ memories of British machine-gun and cannon fire followed by a bayonet charge were long and painful.
Although the Asante troops in their war camps around Kumase had not given up—they would fight again when attacked—they had seen too much of British firepower to think of an attack against Willcocks just then.
The greatest danger to the British column as it marched away from Kumase was posed by an occasional booby trap on the path, like the one that almost killed Captain Hall.
As Hall bent down to remove a wooden “idol” that had been placed in the middle of the path, two African sergeants quickly pulled him back.
As Hall watched, they carefully disconnected the figure from a cord that led to the trigger of a loaded Dane gun buried in the ground.
It would have blown him to pieces.

By the nineteenth Willcocks’s column was safely camped in Bekwai, much to the relief of the old king, who had lived in dread of an attack by the Asante army at Kokofu.
Wilkocks was relieved, too.
His troops and carriers were exhausted, and all had coughs, sore throats, and fever.
They needed a rest, and Willcocks ordered no new operations for some days.
After sending the wounded and the worst of the sick to the coast, he began to plan the next stage of his campaign—the destruction of several large Asante armies that were still prepared to oppose British rule and the punishment of those villagers who continued to support the insurrection.
To achieve success in what promised to be an arduous campaign during the rainy season, he needed more troops and carriers.
These men arrived in frustratingly small numbers, partly due to Governor Hodgson’s infuriating refusal to use any of the now healthy and mostly idle Hausa soldiers that had escaped from the fort with him to guard the road from Cape Coast to Bekwai.
Hodgson’s widespread local reputation as a selfish boor was confirmed once again.
Willcocks had to use his own troops to guard the road.
He also had to suffer in silence as accusations flew that he could have relieved the fort much earlier if he had only chosen to do so.
It was said and
written that his dramatic arrival on the last possible day was a crass attempt at self-aggrandizement.
(No less a figure than Lady Hodgson made this claim, doing nothing to improve relations between Willcocks and the governor.) These accusations were unfair.
Willcocks had faced enormous difficulties, and if he had not been lucky enough to find an undefended path, he probably would not have made it to Kumase by the fifteenth.
With no staff and few troops when he arrived, he had made it to Kumase in fifty days during the height of the rainy season.
It took Wolseley 120 days during the dry season to do the same thing.

Willcocks’s plan for the defeat and punishment of the rebels called for British officers to recruit large numbers of untrained and undisciplined Africans, officially referred to as “levies.” Some of these men would be armed with old muskets, but they were not expected to serve in combat.
Unofficially called “locusts,” they would straggle along behind Willcocks’s troops, burning Asante villages and destroying their crops.
Given the opportunity, they would also murder, rape, and with the knowledge of British officers, enslave any Asante women and children they were able to capture.
Colonel A.
E Montanaro wrote approvingly of this policy of allowing traditional enemies of the Asante to enslave their women and children, noting that it was especially “galling” to them.
¹
(One wonders what the British public would have thought of this practice had word of it leaked out.
Unlike Wolseley, Willcocks was fortunate to have no newspaper correspondents with him to spread the news of unsavory forms of warfare; hence, there was no public furor.) To distinguish the locusts from Asante, they were made to wear a red-and-white-cloth sash draped over the right shoulder and tied under the left armpit.
As Willcocks candidly put it, the job of these men was to make themselves “as unpleasant as possible,” and they did so with a vengeance.
²

While Willcocks was recruiting his locusts to wage a war of terror and waiting for more troops to arrive, several senior officers recently arrived from England made themselves thoroughly unpopular by trying to impose parade-ground discipline on the sick and battle-weary troops and junior officers.
The veterans’ annoyance about this unnecessary drilling and button polishing was temporarily suspended by the seemingly miraculous arrival in
camp of a Hausa soldier who had marched out of the fort with Hodgson.
Left behind after being wounded, the man had hidden in the bush for six weeks, slowly crawling south by night.
He survived, although just barely, by eating roots.
It had taken the poor man all that time to cover just eleven miles.

Willcocks’s first target would be Kokofu, the stronghold that had twice before beaten off British attacks.
Close to eight hundred men with five artillery pieces would be led by a newly arrived officer, Lieutenant Colonel Morland.
Morland knew nothing about forest warfare and was quite ill with fever to boot, but Willcocks believed that every senior officer should be given the opportunity to command.
Fortunately for Morland, he had the good sense to consult Captain Hall, whose men at Esumeja had been faced off against nearby Kokofu for months.
Hall recommended that Morland’s troops make a long halt at Esumeja to convince the Asante scouts—who watched all military movements from treetop perches—that the force was meant only as a reinforcement or replacement for Hall’s men.
Arriving at Esumeja in mid-morning, Morland’s men stacked their weapons and appeared to make themselves comfortable.
Hall’s men began to pack their gear as if they were being relieved.
At midday the Asante sentries returned to their war camp for a meal, convinced that there was no immediate threat.
As they did so, the British troops, led by Melliss, moved unseen toward the main stockade.
When they reached it still unseen, bugles sounded attack, and Melliss clambered over the unmanned stockade followed by his company.

The Asante army leapt up from its meal almost as one man, and seeing only a small force advancing, the troops formed up to charge, just as several hundred soldiers hurtled over the stockade, firing as they came.
At the sight of so many swords and bayonets, most of the Asante fled in disorder, leaving many of their weapons behind.
One of the Asante turned to fight and was clubbed over the head with a rifle butt.
Several were bayoneted in the back as they ran, and Captain Biss recalled seeing one man turn a complete somersault when he was shot through the back as he tried to escape.
³
Once again, Major Melliss killed several Asante with his sword.

In addition to two hundred Dane guns and large amounts of powder, the British troops found several British rifles and carbines,
fourteen kegs of gunpowder, dumdum bullets, and some .303-caliber ammunition, intended for modern British rifles, that had been cleverly wrapped with tow to make it fit the older, larger, .470-caliber Martini-Henry rifles that some of the Asante had.
There were also hundreds of large wooden bowls filled with steaming hot food, and many of the Hausas began to help themselves.
While the camp was being searched, some of the triumphant Hausas danced ecstatically to the beat of captured Asante war drums.
One man put on an Asante war-dance costume that looked like a straw kilt with a straw cock’s comb headdress.
He led the others in the dance as they pirouetted, waved their carbines overhead, and slashed at the air with their bayonets.
They worked themselves into such a frenzy that the British officers finally had to intervene to prevent them from injuring themselves.
⁴

There were five separate war camps at Kokofu, each capable of housing at least three thousand men.
From the amount of unconsumed food left behind, it appeared that the camps had been fully manned.
While the troops systematically looted the huts before burning them, Captain Biss inspected the stockade.
It was three hundred yards long, six feet high, and six feet thick with entrenchments on each flank.
Behind the stockade there were numerous small grass-roofed huts to protect the Asante troops manning it from the sun and rain.
The Asante had also hidden kegs of gun-powder in the roofs of the huts so that anyone setting fire to them would be killed, and in fact, when the British did set fire to them, several men and one officer were injured.
Sharpened stakes planted in the ground protected the center portion of the stockade.
The British officers were surprised to discover that there was an inviting gap near the center of stockade, but any man who had attempted to run through it would have fallen into a deep pit and impaled himself on sharpened stakes in the pit’s bottom.
⁵

After burning the camp and destroying the stockade, Morland’s men gleefully marched back through Esumeja to Bekwae carrying incredible amounts of booty.
When they arrived, they were delighted to find the entire garrison standing at attention under torchlight to honor them.
Willcocks was so elated by their victory that he ordered a sizable issue of “medical comforts”—rum, champagne, and whiskey—and spent hours listening to accounts of this unbelievably
easy victory over the previously impregnable Kokofu.
Morland’s men had captured one Asante prisoner, a well-built young man in apparently fine health.
However, when his hands were bound that night to prevent him from escaping, he fell dead.
Fear of the torture he had expected was apparently too much for him.