The Fall of the Asante Empire (24 page)

Lord Gifford’s advance guard once again came under Asante fire at the village of Egginassie, but reinforced by two companies of the Black Watch, he pressed forward until he ran into the main Asante line.
By 8:15
A.M.
the entire front was engulfed in pungent sulfurous smoke from thousands of Asante muskets.
There was no wind, and the smoke hugged the ground, obscuring everyone’s vision.
Under the command of Colonel Cluny MacPherson, whose name left no doubt about his Scottish ancestry, the Highlanders did everything men could to press forward against the Asante fire.
The sound of the weapons was so intense—the Dane guns booming, the Sniders much sharper—that the Scots could not hear the skirl of the bagpipes that always accompanied them into battle.
The Highlanders came under tremendous fire before they could see anyone to fire at, and they began to take heavy casualties.
Lying down, they returned fire in the general direction of the Asante
smoke, but they could not advance.
Sir Archibald Alison, who had campaigned in India and the Crimea, wrote, “The Ashantis stood admirably, and kept up one of the heaviest fires I ever was under.”
¹⁵
Wolseley’s written assurance that the Asante would never dare to stand against white men must have caused a few dark thoughts among the troops.

After an hour the battlefield resembled a scene from the Western front in World War I.
All the bark and leaves had been stripped off the trees, but as usual the Asante fired high, sparing most of the men who were lying down.
¹⁶
The Asante also launched a series of attacks against the Highlanders’ flanks, forcing Alison to move up his reserve companies.
Others climbed trees to fire down on the British, most of whom, except for officers, were now returning fire while lying down.
At 9:30
A.M.
, after an hour and fifteen minutes of intense fighting, Alison sent a messenger to Wolseley, reporting that his reserves had been committed and he was heavily engaged: “The enemy is holding his ground stoutly in the front and left flank; some relief to my men would be advantageous, if possible, from the Rifle Brigade, as they are getting tired from this continuous fighting.
Our loss in wounded is pretty severe.”
¹⁷
If the king of Dwaben had allowed his ten thousand Asante troops to add their fire at this point, it might well have changed the course of the battle.
The British infantry had been stopped cold, and they were beginning to waver.

The Royal Engineers were also under heavy fire, and unlike the soldiers, they had to remain standing to cut brush and command the African laborers, most of whom had either thrown themselves down or left the front altogether.
Captain Buckle was killed while trying to rouse these men.
At the same time the advancing left flank of the Naval Brigade came under such heavy fire that it was forced to lie down and return fire.
Wolseley sent a company of the Royal Welch Fusiliers to aid Alison at the front just as Alison’s dispatch arrived asking for surgeons to treat wounded Highlanders.
The Asante now opened fire up and down both flanks.
At 10:30
A.M.
General Alison again reported that he could not advance and asked for half a battalion of the rifles.
At the same time Colonel MacPherson was carried back to Wolseley’s headquarters with three wounds, the one in his ankle being incapacitating.
He confirmed Alison’s report that the infantry could not advance.

Hard pressed on all sides and with virtually no reserves remaining, General Wolseley was faced with a difficult choice.
His men had been stopped in their tracks, casualties were mounting, and Asante fire showed no sign of slackening.
He could have fallen back on a nearby village and formed a strong defensive position, but he refused even to consider such an action for fear that it would encourage the Asante to fight even harder.
The sound of Asante musketry continued to be deafening, as Wolseley later wrote, but he calmly ordered Major Rait, his favorite artillery officer, to have his Hausa gunners manhandle their cannon across the swamp and fire at point-blank range into the Asante front line.
With great effort and many casualties they managed to bring their guns to bear at close range, and their fire of rockets exploded against tree trunks with deafening crashes while their canister and explosive shells caused such appalling casualties that Asante fire began to slacken.

Seizing the opportunity, Alison ordered the Highlanders to charge with fixed bayonets.
Unable to defend themselves against bayonets because it took them so long to reload, a portion of the Asante line retreated, drawing other Asante on their flanks back with them to a nearby ridge where they took up another strong position.
Rait’s artillery pursued, and once again the Asante front was driven back with great losses.
As the Highlanders and Royal Welch moved forward, they passed by hundreds of Asante dead, all so terribly mutilated by the cannon fire that the correspondents who saw them were moved to comment on their horrible wounds.
The huge .57-caliber Snider bullets had torn fist-sized holes through the dead, while the rockets and shells had left arms, heads, torsos, legs, and entrails in piles on the ground with blood and chunks of flesh scattered through the brush and trees.

By midday, after four hours of fierce combat, General Alison had pushed his men into the town of Amoafo.
Hearing heavy fire on both flanks and knowing that his men were done in, General Alison halted his advance and took a defensive position while he awaited orders from Wolseley.
The Asante strategy had always called for allowing the head of Wolseley’s column to advance, although obviously not without stiff resistance, while the crucial attacks would be made on the flanks and the rear of the British army.
The Asante flanking armies, especially the one led by Amankwatia,
who was desperate to salvage his reputation, continued these attacks without letup, probing for weak spots that they could exploit.
At one point earlier in the day, Colonel Wood, on the right flank, had been so annoyed by the inability of his men to advance or even to see the enemy that he rushed ahead and began to push the brush away with his hands.
Fortunately for Wood, Lieutenant Eyre, his adjutant, almost tackled him to hold him back because an Asante soldier was in the brush only a few yards away.
The man fired and somehow missed as Wood was pulled down.
Later, as the Asante fire increased, Wood was hit above the heart with a nail head and fell heavily.
The surgeons could do nothing and were so certain Wood would not live that they sent word to Wolseley that Wood was dying.
Wolseley adamantly refused to believe them, but the doctor in charge, Surgeon Major Mackinnon insisted, “No, Sir, you never yet saw a man live with a shot in his pericardium.”
¹⁸
Dosed with brandy, Wood lay on a stretcher guarded by his Sierra Leone servant, who sat beside him armed with a Snider.
To the astonishment of the surgeons, Wood recovered and rejoined his command the next day.

At the peak of the fighting, Wolseley strolled about without apparent concern, smoking a cigar, appearing to be wholly fearless.
¹⁹
Asante slugs were cutting the air all around him, but he shrugged them off, telling his staff that nearly everyone had been hit by a slug or a pebble, usually without harm.
However, he later wrote that it was a strange sensation to realize that there were thousands of people trying to kill him and his men, yet none of them could be seen.
He also added that if the Asante had been armed with Sniders, the British force would have been annihilated.
²⁰
The General was quite impressed by newsman Winwood Reade, who rushed to the front to join the Highlanders’ attack, and by the veteran African explorer Henry Stanley, who was cool under fire and shot back like a veteran, which for all practical purposes he was.
But Wolseley called one unnamed newsman a craven coward.
²¹
By 2
P.M.
the firing in front stopped, but the Asante now enveloped the British rear and overwhelmed a supply column led by Colonel Colley.
The unarmed carriers threw down their loads and stampeded, trampling Colley as they ran for their lives.
Troops from the Rifle Brigade and the 2nd West India Regiment arrived just in time
to save Colley, but many of the supplies were lost.
The West Indians fought gallantly, but Wolseley never praised them, perhaps because his prejudice blinded him to their courage.
²²
There was no more heavy fighting that afternoon, but bursts of fire continued at various places along the British flanks until sunset.

British officers and newsmen generally agreed that between two and three thousand Asante must have been killed, but to everyone’s amazement, after twelve hours of fighting by over one thousand five hundred British troops and seven hundred Africans against endless Asante fire, they had suffered only four dead, three of them British.
However, there were at least two hundred wounded, many of them in serious condition.
Surgeons worked throughout the day and into the night extracting slugs, nails, and a few Snider bullets (usually the unintended result of British troops being unable to see one another’s positions) and bandaging wounds as best they could.
The British doctors had morphine and used it liberally, but many of the wounded were nevertheless in great pain.
Observers were struck by how well they endured their suffering.
When one young lieutenant was carried in with a severe shoulder wound, a surgeon left a wounded Hausa soldier whom he had been treating to attend to the British officer.
The officer refused to be treated until the doctor had done his best for the wounded African.
²³

Even before rations were handed out, rum was served to the troops and brandy to the officers.
The general’s sense of victory overcame his insistence on a dry campaign, but class distinctions were, of course, maintained.
Soon after, torrents of rain and tornadic winds struck, the first serious storm since the British force had invaded Asante land.
The troops had no tents or cover of any kind, no fires could be made to burn, and the ground soon became a morass of mud.
The wounded lay uncovered on their stretchers all night in misery that it would be difficult to exaggerate.
The engineers were equally miserable as they worked throughout the night to bridge a rapidly rising stream that the army would have to cross the next day.
Everyone in camp went without sleep, and few men even bothered to lie down in the mud.
Wolseley called the rain the heaviest he had ever been under.
²⁴
He was greatly concerned about his exhausted men but still determined to march on Kumase in the morning.

The Asante army spent an equally miserable night, although not for quite the same reasons.
Many were able to find shelter from the rain, and the old campaigners were accustomed to rain, mud, and the lack of cooking fires.
They were dispirited more by the knowledge that British firepower was too destructive to stand against than they were by the elements.
Their greatest concern about the rain was keeping their powder dry.
If the rain continued into the next day and the British advanced as they were expected to do, their ancient flintlocks would be extremely difficult to fire.
The Asante were also disturbed by the heavy losses they had suffered.
Many were seriously wounded, including the king of Mampon, and General Amankwatia had been killed.
To inspire his men to fight harder, the general had stood on his stool, an act that was intended to make his men fight more fiercely.
As he exhorted his men, he was shot through the back and died on the battlefield.
²⁵
Their morale did not improve when it was rumored that King Kofi Kakari had left the battlefield early in the day.
²⁶
When the decision for war was made in 1873, King Kakari had ordered his retainers to recite praise songs for his martial valor.
His favorite was, “Kakari the hero, the champion who will fight at the cannon’s mouth.” Although far in the rear during the fighting, actual cannon fire did not please him.
He fled with a few slaves whom he then had executed in a vain attempt to prevent word of his cowardice from spreading.
His actions were widely considered to bring disgrace to the Asante nation.
²⁷

In Kumase a fearful populace was making ready to flee, and they were not pleased when the severed head of a Highlander was triumphantly displayed.
Many worried that this was a bad omen.
This Scottish soldier, whose name is unknown, resisted his death so resolutely that the fingers on his hands were found to be almost entirely severed as he tried in vain to prevent the Asante from taking his head by fending off their knives.

After the terrible night of deluge, the British were not able to organize themselves to advance until one the next afternoon, giving the Asante time to fortify the next town along the road to Kumase and dry their powder.
Houses were loopholed, and a huge tree trunk was dragged across the road.
When the British advanced, fire from the houses and the tree wounded seventeen of
Gifford’s scouts, and he was forced to withdraw.
With the help of artillery fire, men of the Naval Brigade were able to drive the Asante back, but one sailor was killed and several wounded.
At the same time, supply convoys in the rear of Wolseley’s army were harried by a series of attacks.
Many of these carriers had been ordered to carry wounded back to Cape Coast, but when they were fired on by the Asante, they dropped their charges and fended for themselves, to the great suffering of the wounded men.
One large group of African carriers refused to carry even their own wounded, insisting that it was customary for them to leave wounded men behind to die.
Colonel Wood who had argued and pleaded with them to no avail, finally had their leader flogged “until I was nearly sick from the sight.”
²⁸
It was not until he had given a second man twenty-five lashes, a terrible, back-scourging punishment, that the African carriers finally agreed to carry their own wounded away.