Miss Cheyne of Essilmont, Volume 3 (of 3)

THE BATTLE OF AMOAFUL.

The firing proved a mistake--the result of a false alarm--so the night passed without any other alerte or disturbance, and all remained quiet during the temporary halt at Prahsu; but the troops heard of many strange things as occurring at Coomassie, all deemed by the natives portentous of its coming fate.

In its market-place--that scene of daily blood and murder--where the predecessor of King Koffee devoted three thousand victims 'to water the grave' of his mother--an aërolite fell, to the terror of the people; but there came still a greater prodigy. A child was born which instantly began to converse, and, to prevent it having intercourse with supernatural visitors, it was placed alone in a room under guards, who in the morning found that it had vanished, and that nothing lay in its place but a bundle of withered bones; and on this the fetish men argued 'that Coomassie itself would pass away, and nothing remain thereof but dead leaves;' and on the same day and hour that Lieutenant Grant of the 6th--the first white man--crossed the Prah, there sprang up a mighty tornado, that levelled the great tree under which the king used to sit, surrounded by his warriors. This caused a profound sensation among the Ashantees, who gathered by thousands around it in the market-place, which at that time was described by one who saw it as 'a den of reeking corpses, shrieking and tortured victims--men and women butchered by hundreds--where skulls and human bones lay about as oyster-shells do at home!'

By order of the king's fetishmen two prisoners had knives run through their cheeks, and were tied up in the woods to die, as a test of whether our invasion would be successful. The idea of the fetishmen was that, if the victims died soon, all would be well with Ashantee; but they lived, one for four and the other for nine days--so the nation gave itself over for lost.

On the 6th of January--the day the fetish-tree fell--we shed the first blood in that land of horrors, when Lord Gifford, at the head of fifty men, captured a village occupied by an Ashantee outpost, and killed many of its defenders.

And so, till the forward movement began, the troops were impatient during the halt at Prahsu, the soldiers making wry faces at their daily doses of quinine, and still more so at their weak ration of grog--only half a gill per man, or a gallon of rum to sixty-four men--and the officers missing sorely the pleasures of the long, glittering, flower-laden mess-table, and the charms of the girls they had left behind them, and of whom they were reminded by Du Maurier in some old stray numbers of our friend Mr. Punch.

After the troops advanced, the 25th of January saw our posts pushed as far forward as the Bahrien river, and a slight brush which they had there with the Ashantees showed that they were making vigorous efforts to concentrate their forces for a fierce resistance; and on the 31st was fought the battle of Amoaful, which took place in the morning, and by eight o'clock the white smoke of the musketry and the red flashes of the latter, were spouting in every direction, amid the dark green and wondrous leafy luxuriance of the bushy jungles.

The Rifles were in the reserve, 580 strong, under Colonel Warren. Thus Dalton, Jerry, and others were for a time almost spectators while the fight went on, and the leading column--consisting of the Black Watch, eighty of the Welsh Fusiliers, and two rifled guns, led by Sir Archibald Alison (son of the historian), extending as it advanced with loud cheers at a quick run--attacked, before the rest of the troops came up, the village of Egginassie, upon the slope of the hill that rises to Amoaful.

Prominent amid the greenery could be seen the red tufts on their tropical helmets, then the representation of their famous historical scarlet plumes.

The firing here was tremendous, so much so that all sound of individual reports was lost, and the din of the conflict became one hoarse roar. The enemy used slugs, not bullets. Had it been otherwise, not a man of the Black Watch--many of whom were severely hit--would have remained to tell the tale. Major Macpherson (young Cluny) was wounded in several places, but remained under fire, propped upon a stick.

In five minutes a hundred and five Highlanders, nine being officers, had blood pouring from their wounds; but 'Onward' was the cry, and as the Rifles came up in support, amid the ceaseless clatter of the breechloaders, 'for three hours after the Scottish and Welsh infantry had carried the village,' says the Daily Telegraph, 'the contest was obstinately maintained in the jungle, where it was difficult to see or reach the enemy, and quite as hard for him to know how the fight went upon other points. Assailed in their own wilderness, followed up foot by foot, the Ashantees fought well, but never gave a fair opportunity for the shock of a real charge.'

As the Rifles advanced through the jungle in extended order, over ground which the fire of the 42nd had strewed with killed and wounded Ashantees, one of the latter, a colossal black savage, clad only with a middle cloth and string of beads, propping himself upon his elbow, shot Jerry's servant O'Farrel, in the back and killed him on the spot, as the ball passed through his heart.

It was, perhaps, the last effort of expiring nature; but Jerry responded promptly with his revolver, and sent a bullet whistling through the brain of the Ashantee, who, as he was a man of fine proportions, was soon after eaten by the Kossos or wild cannibals of Colonel Wood's regiment, who, as Jerry said, 'felt peckish' after the fight.

A Highlander lost himself in the bush, and came suddenly upon a cluster of retiring Ashantees, who shot him down by a volley and instantly cut off his head, which they carried away, as no trophy is more prized by this people than human heads, which formed the chief ornaments of the king's palace, and even of his bed-chamber in Coomassie.

In the first days of February the passage of the Ordah followed, and on the night the troops bivouacked by its shore they were without tents, and the rain fell in merciless torrents, as if the windows of the sky had opened again, while thunder bellowed in the echoing woods, and green forked lightning lit up incessantly the bosom of the foaming river; yet more than ever were our troops anxious when day broke to begin the weary march--to reach Coomassie and grapple with the dusky enemy.

The first human blood Jerry Wilmot had ever shed was when he pistolled the Ashantee who murdered--for murder it was--poor O'Farrel. He had handled his revolver then promptly, if mechanically, and thought afterwards--strange to say--with a little sense of disgust over the episode, and the aspect of the dead negro, his yellow eye-balls turned back within their sockets, his fallen jaw, and oozing brain, had actually haunted him.

But since then, in skirmishing, both in the bush and open, Jerry had, as he phrased it, 'potted three or four more of the beggars,' as coolly as if they had been black-cocks on a Highland moor.

While the Naval Brigade halted at Ordashu, the Black Watch, with half a battalion of the Rifles, pushed on towards Coomassie.

Soon tidings came from Sir Archibald Alison, saying briefly,

'We have taken all the villages, but the last, before entering Coomassie; support me with the Rifles, and I hope to enter it to-night.'

Fortunately he had been anticipated: the half battalion was close upon his own, and with it were Dalton and Wilmot.

The slugs were coming out of the bush as thick as hail, and the advance of the Highlanders and Rifles along the road that led to Coomassie was in a form never before seen in war. Colonel M'Leod led the former.

Along the well-ambushed road they proceeded quietly and steadily, as if upon parade, but by two abreast in file, so narrow was the forest path.

'Forty-Second, fire by successive companies--front rank to the right, rear rank to the left,' shouted Colonel M'Leod.

'A company--front rank, present! rear rank, present!'

'So on,' says the correspondent of the New York Herald, 'and thus vomiting bullets two score to the right and two score to the left, the companies volleyed and thundered as they marched past the ambuscades, the bag-pipes playing, the cheers rising from the throats of the lusty Scots, till the forest rung again with the discordant medley of musketry, bag-pipe music, and vocal sounds. Rait's artillery now and then gave tongue with an emphasis and result which must have recalled to the Ashantees memories of the bloody field of Amoaful, where Captain Rait and his subalterns, Knox and Saunders, signalised themselves so conspicuously. But it was the audacious spirit and true military bearing on the part of the Highlanders, as they moved down the road to Coomassie, which challenged admiration this day.'

So great was the roar of musketry in the echoing woods that, scared by the terrible and unusual sound, the very birds of the air--and brightly plumaged birds they were--grovelled in terror, with outspread wings over the dying and the dead.

Many were borne rearward disfigured for life and frightfully wounded by the missiles of their hidden antagonists; but the regiment never halted--the Rifles following close--nor wavered, but moved steadily on with its national music playing, until the Ashantees, conceiving it to be useless to continue against men who advanced thus, heedless of all ambuscades, rose from their coverts and fled in yelling hordes towards Coomassie.

'The cool, calm commands of Colonel M'Leod,' says Mr. Stanley, whom we cannot help quoting, 'had a marvellous effect on the Highland battalion--so much so that the conduct of all other white regiments pales before that of the 42nd.' Frequently during the hot and rapid march to Coomassie the Highlanders saw emerging from the bushes several scores of fugitives, who found their movements accelerated by the volleys they received on such occasions. Village after village along the road heard the disastrous tidings which the fugitives conveyed, and long before the Highlanders approached the place where the king remained during the battle, he had decamped because of these reports.

King Koffee never for a moment anticipated a complete defeat, and believed that he would only fall back in good order to give us battle at the head of all his warriors in front of Coomassie itself, and thus obtain a peace which would at least spare his palace--on which he set a great store--from destruction.

When Sir Garnet Wolseley, with the main body, was drawing near that place, he received another despatch from the front. Sir Archibald Alison wrote to say that he had given some time to treat.

Thus a delay occurred in consequence, and of this delay the circumstances are not very clear to the outer world. It does not appear from some accounts to have been Sir Garnet's wish, yet it undoubtedly took place, and put the troops to some inconvenience by allowing night to fall before they entered the place.

'Coomassie at last!' exclaimed Dalton, as he threw himself, panting with heat, among the luxuriant grass that bordered the now bloody and corpse-strewn pathway. 'Let us but take it, lay it in ashes, and then hey for home!' he added, hopefully. Yet he had had two narrow escapes; one ball had knocked off his helmet, and another had scarred his left cheek.