The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  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

  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.

  9

  “An Inaudible Murmur of Admiration”

  THAT NIGHT PASSED QUIETLY, AND EARLY MORNING PATROLS REported 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.