The Fall of the Asante Empire (37 page)

A few days later a force half the size of Morland’s was sent to find and destroy the Adansi army that was thought to be located to the east of Dompoase.
Thanks to the cooperation of a prisoner who agreed to show them the way in return for his life, the column knew where the Asante war camp was, but after a march of several days through largely open and beautifully scenic terrain, it nevertheless walked into an ambush, and its commander, Major Beddoes, was wounded.
Captain Greer continued to lead the British forces forward until heavy fire from hills on both flanks stopped them.
Only a well-led bayonet counterattack drove the Asante back.
After two hours of heavy fighting, the British force tried to advance to destroy the war camp they knew lay ahead.
But the Asante troops from Adansi district formed into lines and, urged on by a priest dressed in leopard skin, charged at the British troops, yelling and firing their Dane guns and rifles from the hip as they ran forward.

Greer was amazed by the audacity of the Asante attack because it came across open ground into the teeth of British artillery, machine-gun, and massed rifle fire.
Despite the deadly British fire, some of the Asante troops came to within ten yards of the British line before they were shot down.
As more and more men were killed at close range, the Asante slowly withdrew until another British bayonet charge, led by sword-waving officers including Captain Hall, finally forced them to run.
Greer ordered his artillery to shell the war camp as the Asante retreated through it, and these explosive shells devastated the retreating Asante, tearing men to pieces.
Greer’s men counted three hundred dead Asante, including the leopard-skin priest; blood stains indicated that other bodies had been carried away.

This was yet another striking victory.
With a force of only four hundred men, the British had routed an Asante force that numbered over three thousand.
Led by Opoku Mensa, the surrogate king, the Asante had fought gallantly beyond anything that rational
men could have expected, but as usual, once they began to run they did not stop.
The camp was burned, and Greer returned to Bekwai with only one dead and forty wounded.
One of the invalids was Hall, who had collapsed from exhaustion after running into the war camp, brandishing his sword at the fleeing Asante.
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After the unexpected victories at Kokofu and Dompoase, the southern portion of Asante was relatively quiet; so early in August, after learning that he had been both promoted and knighted, Willcocks decided to clear away the forces defending stockades at Kumase.
He had received reports that the Asante might attempt to capture the fort, and while that prospect did not worry the colonel, he wanted to break Asante power around Kumase and move his headquarters there.
He sent close to one thousand men, three cannon, several machine guns, and thousands of carriers to Kumase under the command of the same Colonel Burroughs of whom so little had been expected when he first arrived and who had annoyed Willcocks when he retreated from Kokofu.
Willcocks was a forgiving commander, and this time Burroughs would repay his kindness.
On the march Burroughs’s column was joined by Major Melliss and his Nigerians.
The Asante sniped at the long column as it meandered through the jungle, sometimes panicking the carriers, but little damage was done.
The Asante had cut paths parallel to the main path taken by Burroughs’s men, and every few hundred yards they had cut the brush away to allow them to fire into the unarmed carriers.
Once the British began to spray machine-gun fire into the jungle on each side of the path, this practice ended.
Burroughs’s men reached the fort without a serious fight and found the garrison well and delighted to have visitors to enliven their boring confinement.

The next morning two armed columns left the fort to begin the job of stockade smashing around Kumase.
The Asante had made no attempt to consolidate their forces.
They still remained in their war camps behind the same large stockades.
Melliss led the first column toward the stockade at Bantama, where they came under rapid fire from loopholes in the stockade and nearby trees.
There was also heavy fire from both flanks.
The British answered with volleys of rifle fire, machine guns, and cannon, but the Asante fire only grew heavier.
Every officer in the leading company was hit,
and so were many of the soldiers.
With more men falling all the time and his cannon fire having no effect, Melliss tried to outflank the stockade, but the brush was so thick around the position that Melliss’s three companies of Nigerians could not cut their way through it.
A machine gun eventually killed the Asante who were firing from the trees, but shells from the 75-mm cannon did little damage to the heavy stockade.

Although a frontal charge seemed suicidal, Melliss nevertheless ordered his badly wounded teenaged bugler to sound charge, and despite blood in his eyes, the boy not only sounded the call but joined the charge himself.
Melliss led his men directly into the teeth of the Asante fire.
Barely ahead of his men, Melliss climbed over the wall, but this time many of the Asante stood to fight.
After a few minutes of hand-to-hand fighting, bayonets and swords were again too much for the Asante, who began to run.
Once again Melliss killed a man, this time by running him down and driving his sword through his back.
Many others fell to bayonets.
After destroying that stockade and another undefended one nearby, Melliss returned his column to the fort.
Many of his men—including a British sergeant, Captain Biss, as well as Melliss himself—had been wounded.
The bugler survived his wounds to receive a medal.

That same morning a column of troops from the Central African Regiment, joined by fifty veteran Sikhs and a company of the West African Regiment, encountered heavy fire from the Kintampo stockade near the Wesleyan mission.
The stockade was over three hundred yards long and so well defended on its flanks that it took two hours for the British troops finally to outflank it and rout the defenders.
The war camp was burned and the stockade destroyed, but not without cost.
The British commander, Major Cobbe, was badly wounded, as was his colour sergeant.
One Sikh was killed and seventeen wounded, seven of them seriously.
Another twentysix African soldiers were also wounded.
Burroughs had a right to be proud of these attacks, but they were far more costly than he had expected.
Willcocks had expected the Asante opposition to be so weak that he ordered Burroughs’s men to carry only three hundred rounds per man.
The two long battles had used up most of that, but several important and heavily defended stockades remained.
The most important of these blocked the direct road from
Kumase to Kokofu.
Anticipating correctly that this would be the next British target, the Asante reinforced it.

Burroughs was already concerned about his losses, and he knew that a conventional attack on this stockade would cost him many more casualties.
He also needed to conserve ammunition in case he was attacked on the march back to Kokofu.
Anyone who had seen the “gouty little colonel” when he first arrived in the Gold Coast would have been amazed at what he ordered done next.
Audaciously deciding to test the willingness of the Asante troops to stand up to a bayonet attack at night, he sent a company out in daylight to scout their position.
Based on the information obtained, Burroughs decided to attack at around nine that same night.
He would take only five hundred men, plus some two thousand unarmed carriers to help with the stockade’s destruction.
No shots would be fired; the men would rely entirely on bayonets and swords.
After the colonel’s orders were explained, all the men had a meal, Biss and Melliss sharing a pint bottle of champagne with their dinner on the very good grounds that they might not live to have another.
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They moved out after dinner as planned under a clear, moonlit sky.
As the troops approached the stockade, officers whispered orders that were passed quietly back down the column: “No smoking, no talking, no noise, no firing, bayonet only, follow me.”
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Everything possible had been done to silence the men’s equipment, and it appeared that everything was now ready for a stealthy approach to the stockade.
But as the tense soldiers crept silently toward the stockade, the Mende carriers from Sierra Leone burst forth into a wild crescendo of song meant to encourage the troops to victory.
Horrified, the troops froze, expecting an answering volley from the Asante, while the British officers rushed back to whack the Mende carriers with the flats of their swords.
Eventually, but by no means easily, the officers succeeded in quieting them.
Hoping to cover up the racket, the fort bugler played “last post” as if it were just another ordinary night.

The troops crept closer to the stockade, hoping against all reason for a complete surprise until, in what sounded like a thunder-clap, two sentry signal guns exploded with seemingly deafening roars.
Immediately, a volley came out of the stockade’s loopholes,
and a British lieutenant fell mortally wounded.
The African troops were stunned and began to waver, but as the young officer lay dying, he waved his sword, indicating the charge, and all the British officers shouted the word “charge.” Everyone went forward, scaling the stockade with an ease they later could not understand.
The Asante troops were caught so unaware that they rushed out of their huts in the war camp just in time to be impaled by a bayonet or sword.
One officer was so tired by his exertions with his sword that he had to put it down and disobey orders by firing away with his pistol.
Captain Biss recalled that only exhaustion on the part of the British officers and men allowed most of the Asante to escape.
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As the war camp was being set fire and the stockade pulled down, a child was found and taken back to the fort.
Remarkably, the entire force was back in bed by 11
P.M.

The next day, after leaving reinforcements behind in the fort, Burroughs marched his men back toward Bekwai, picking up on the way a young Asante woman who reported that the night attack had so distressed Yaa Asantewaa that she had called various commanders together to discuss this new tactic.
While the Asante were considering their options, the British wounded were being conveyed to the coast, and those who remained in Bekwai were delighting in listening to news of the world, which the newly strung telegraph brought them.
For a week the troops at Bekwai enjoyed a badly needed rest, and the officers had time to shave with hot water, drink cocoa and tea (which, unfortunately, often contained a dead fly or two), and read mail from home.

No one needed rest more than Willcocks, who suffered from a severe sore throat, a badly abscessed ear, a sprained knee that refused to improve, and bouts of nausea and diarrhea.
His chief surgeon strongly advised him to return to England, but he refused, saying that he could not honorably leave until the Asante war had ended.
He also believed that the climate at Kumase was much healthier and that once his headquarters was moved there, he would improve.
This was a forlorn hope because neither Willcocks nor his surgeon understood malaria.
Although both British and Italian pioneers in tropical medicine had shown several years earlier that malaria was transmitted by anopheles mosquitos, British officers on this campaign continued to believe that fever, as they still
called it, was a product of the vile vapors of swamp land.
They recommended five grains of quinine per day as a preventive dose and ten if fever actually struck.
Whiskey, too, was still thought to be helpful, but not until evening.

During this period of rest, several Asante prisoners were brought in charged with murder, mutilation, or both.
Willcocks convened a military court, but because he was concerned that these men might have behaved in ways that were permitted by their own laws, he asked the king of Bekwai to join the court, an offer the elderly monarch gladly accepted.
Before the trial began, Willcocks gave the king’s interpreter a copy of the charges against the two men so that the king could prepare for the trial.
Willcocks was surprised when, half an hour later, the interpreter “returned, beaming with smiles, and said, ‘I am glad to inform you that the King has already found both prisoners entirely guilty.’ Considering that he had never seen either of them, nor heard a single word of evidence, I came to the conclusion that future prisoners under trial would stand a rather better chance without the presence of one of their own Chiefs on the tribunal.”
¹⁰

About this time, Lieutenant Colonel R.
A.
Brake, a highly decorated officer, arrived in Bekwai with a battalion of the Central African Regiment, a well-disciplined unit fresh from fighting in Somaliland (now Somalia).
Brake’s troops quickly proved that their reputation was well earned by carrying out several successful small-scale attacks.
In one raid, in the direction of Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa’s headquarters at Edweso, his men surprised a force of Asante, killing their leader and driving them out of their war camp, where they found a remarkable collection of valuables including £100 in bank notes, bags of gold dust, books, parts of machine guns, and sundry flags, chairs, and umbrellas.