By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War

by G. A. Henty

  CHAPTER XXI: THE ADVANCE TO THE PRAH

  A large body of natives were now kept at work on the road up to thePrah. The swamps were made passable by bundles of brushwood thrown intothem, the streams were bridged and huts erected for the reception of thewhite troops. These huts were constructed of bamboo, the beds being madeof lattice work of the same material, and were light and cool.

  On the 9th of December the Himalaya and Tamar arrived, having onboard the 23d Regiment, a battalion of the Rifle Brigade, a batteryof artillery, and a company of engineers. On the 18th, the Surmatianarrived with the 42d. All these ships were sent off for a cruise, withorders to return on the 1st of January, when the troops were to belanded. A large number of officers arrived a few days later to assist inthe organization of the transport corps.

  Colonel Wood and Major Russell were by this time on the Prah with theirnative regiments. These were formed principally of Houssas, Cossoos,and men of other fighting Mahomedan tribes who had been brought down thecoast, together with companies from Bonny and some of the best ofthe Fantis. The rest of the Fanti forces had been disbanded, asbeing utterly useless for fighting purposes, and had been turned intocarriers.

  On the 26th of December Frank started with the General's staff for thefront. The journey to the Prah was a pleasant one. The stations had beenarranged at easy marches from each other. At each of these, six hutsfor the troops, each capable of holding seventy men, had been built,together with some smaller huts for officers. Great filters formedof iron tanks with sand and charcoal at the bottom, the invention ofCaptain Crease, R.M.A., stood before the huts, with tubs at which thenative bearers could quench their thirst. Along by the side of the roada single telegraph wire was supported on bamboos fifteen feet long.

  Passing through Assaiboo they entered the thick bush. The giant cottontrees had now shed their light feathery foliage, resembling that of anacacia, and the straight, round, even trunks looked like the skeletonsof some giant or primeval vegetation rising above the sea of foliagebelow. White lilies, pink flowers of a bulbous plant, clusters of yellowacacia blossoms, occasionally brightened the roadside, and some of theold village clearings were covered with a low bush bearing a yellowblossom, and convolvuli white, buff, and pink. The second night theparty slept at Accroful, and the next day marched through Dunquah. Thiswas a great store station, but the white troops were not to halt there.It had been a large town, but the Ashantis had entirely destroyed it, aswell as every other village between the Prah and the coast. Every fruittree in the clearing had also been destroyed, and at Dunquah they hadeven cut down a great cotton tree which was looked upon as a fetish bythe Fantis. It had taken them seven days' incessant work to overthrowthis giant of the forest.

  The next halting place was Yancoomassie. When approaching Mansue thecharacter of the forest changed. The undergrowth disappeared and thehigh trees grew thick and close. The plantain, which furnishes anabundant supply of fruit to the natives and had sustained the Ashantiarmy during its stay south of the Prah, before abundant, extended nofurther. Mansue stood, like other native villages, on rising ground, butthe heavy rains which still fell every day and the deep swamps aroundrendered it a most unhealthy station.

  Beyond Mansue the forest was thick and gloomy. There was littleundergrowth, but a perfect wilderness of climbers clustered round thetrees, twisting in a thousand fantastic windings, and finally runningdown to the ground, where they took fresh root and formed props to thedead tree their embrace had killed. Not a flower was to be seen, butferns grew by the roadside in luxuriance. Butterflies were scarce, butdragonflies darted along like sparks of fire. The road had the advantageof being shady and cool, but the heavy rain and traffic had made iteverywhere slippery, and in many places inches deep in mud, while allthe efforts of the engineers and working parties had failed to overcomethe swamps.

  It was a relief to the party when they emerged from the forests into thelittle clearings where villages had once stood, for the gloom and quietof the great forest weighed upon the spirits. The monotonous too too ofthe doves--not a slow dreamy cooing like that of the English variety,but a sharp quick note repeated in endless succession--alone broke thehush. The silence, the apparently never ending forest, the monotony ofrank vegetation, the absence of a breath of wind to rustle a leaf, weremost oppressive, and the feeling was not lessened by the dampness andheaviness of the air, and the malarious exhalation and smell of decayingvegetation arising from the swamps.

  Sootah was the station beyond Mansue, beyond this Assin and Barracoo.Beyond Sootah the odors of the forest became much more unpleasant, forat Fazoo they passed the scene of the conflict between Colonel Wood'sregiment and the retiring Ashantis. In the forest beyond this were theremains of a great camp of the enemy's, which extended for miles, andhence to the Prah large numbers of Ashantis had dropped by the way orhad crawled into the forest to die, smitten by disease or rifle balls.

  There was a general feeling of pleasure as the party emerged from theforest into the large open camp at Prahsue. This clearing was twentyacres in extent, and occupied an isthmus formed by a loop of the river.The 2d West Indians were encamped here, and huts had been erected underthe shade of some lofty trees for the naval brigade. In the center was agreat square. On one side were the range of huts for the general andhis staff. Two sides of the square were formed by the huts for the whitetroops. On the fourth was the hospital, the huts for the brigadier andhis staff, and the post office. Upon the river bank beyond the squarewere the tents of the engineers and Rait's battery of artillery, and thecamps of Wood's and Russell's regiments. The river, some seventy yardswide, ran round three sides of the camp thirty feet below its level.

  The work which the engineers had accomplished was little less thanmarvelous. Eighty miles of road had been cut and cleared, every stream,however insignificant, had been bridged, and attempts made to corduroyevery swamp. This would have been no great feat through a soft woodforest with the aid of good workmen. Here, however, the trees were forthe most part of extremely hard wood, teak and mahogany forming themajority. The natives had no idea of using an axe. Their only notion offelling a tree was to squat down beside it and give it little hackingchops with a large knife or a sabre.

  With such means and such men as these the mere work of cutting andmaking the roads and bridging the streams was enormous. But not only wasthis done but the stations were all stockaded, and huts erected forthe reception of four hundred and fifty men and officers, and immensequantities of stores, at each post. Major Home, commanding theengineers, was the life and soul of the work, and to him more than anyother man was the expedition indebted for its success. He was noblyseconded by Buckle, Bell, Mann, Cotton, Skinner, Bates and Jeykyll,officers of his own corps, and by Hearle of the marines, and Hare of the22d, attached to them. Long before daylight his men were off to theirwork, long after nightfall they returned utterly exhausted to camp.

  Upon the 1st of January, 1874, Sir Garnet Wolseley, with his staff,among whom Frank was now reckoned, reached the Prah. During the eightdays which elapsed before the white troops came up Frank found much toamuse him. The engineers were at work, aided by the sailors of the navalbrigade, which arrived two days after the general, in erecting a bridgeacross the Prah. The sailors worked, stripped to the waist, in the muddywater of the river, which was about seven feet deep in the middle. Whentired of watching these he would wander into the camp of the nativeregiments, and chat with the men, whose astonishment at finding a youngEnglishman able to converse in their language, for the Fanti and Ashantidialects differ but little, was unbounded. Sometimes he would be sentfor to headquarters to translate to Captain Buller, the head of theintelligence department, the statements of prisoners brought in by thescouts, who, under Lord Gifford, had penetrated many miles beyond thePrah.

  Everywhere these found dead bodies by the side of the road, showingthe state to which the Ashanti army was reduced in its retreat. Theprisoners brought in were unanimous in saying that great uneasiness hadbeen produced at Coomassie by th
e news of the advance of the British tothe Prah. The king had written to Ammon Quatia, severely blaming him forhis conduct of the campaign, and for the great loss of life among hisarmy.

  All sorts of portents were happening at Coomassie, to the greatdisturbance of the mind of the people. Some of those related singularlyresembled those said to have occurred before the capture of Rome bythe Goths. An aerolite had fallen in the marketplace of Coomassie, and,still more strange, a child was born which was at once able to conversefluently. This youthful prodigy was placed in a room by itself, withguards around it to prevent anyone having converse with the supernaturalvisitant. In the morning, however, it was gone, and in its place wasfound a bundle of dead leaves. The fetish men having been consulteddeclared that this signified that Coomassie itself would disappear,and would become nothing but a bundle of dead leaves. This had greatlyexercised the credulous there.

  Two days after his arrival Frank went down at sunset to bathe in theriver. He had just reached the bank when he heard a cry among some whitesoldiers bathing there, and was just in time to see one of them pulledunder water by an alligator, which had seized him by the leg. Frank hadso often heard what was the best thing to do that he at once threw offhis Norfolk jacket, plunged into the stream, and swam to the spot wherethe eddy on the surface showed that a struggle was going on beneath. Thewater was too muddy to see far through it, but Frank speedily came uponthe alligator, and finding its eyes, shoved his thumbs into them. Inan instant the creature relaxed his hold of his prey and made off, andFrank, seizing the wounded man, swam with him to shore amid the loudcheers of the sailors. The soldier, who proved to be a marine, wasinsensible, and his leg was nearly severed above the ankle. He soonrecovered consciousness, and, being carried to the camp, his leg wasamputated below the knee, and he was soon afterwards taken down to thecoast.

  It had been known that there were alligators in the river, a young oneabout a yard long having been captured and tied up like a dog in thecamp, with a string round its neck. But it was thought that the noiseof building the bridge, and the movement on the banks, would have driventhem away. After this incident bathing was for the most part abandoned.

  The affair made Frank a great favorite in the naval brigade, and of anight he would, after dinner, generally repair there, and sit bythe great bonfires, which the tars kept up, and listen to the jovialchoruses which they raised around them.

  Two days after the arrival of Sir Garnet, an ambassador came downfrom the king with a letter, inquiring indignantly why the English hadattacked the Ashanti troops, and why they had advanced to the Prah.An opportunity was taken to impress him with the nature of the Englisharms. A Gatling gun was placed on the river bank, and its fire directedupon the surface, and the fountain of water which rose as the steadystream of bullets struck its surface astonished, and evidently filledwith awe, the Ashanti ambassador. On the following day this emissarytook his departure for Coomassie with a letter to the king.

  On the 12th the messengers returned with an unsatisfactory answer toSir Garnet's letter; they brought with them Mr. Kuhne, one of the Germanmissionaries. He said that it was reported in Coomassie that twentythousand out of the forty thousand Ashantis who had crossed the Prahhad died. It is probable that this was exaggerated, but Mr. Kuhne hadcounted two hundred and seventy-six men carrying boxes containing thebones of chiefs and leading men. As these would have fared better thanthe common herd they would have suffered less from famine and dysentery.The army had for the most part broken up into small parties and gone totheir villages. The wrath of the king was great, and all the chiefs whoaccompanied the army had been fined and otherwise punished. Mr. Kuhnesaid that when Sir Garnet's letter arrived, the question of peace or warhad been hotly contested at a council. The chiefs who had been in thelate expedition were unanimous in deprecating any further attempt tocontend with the white man. Those who had remained at home, and whoknew nothing of the white man's arms, or white man's valor, were for warrather than surrender.

  Mr. Kuhne was unable to form any opinion what the final determinationwould be. The German missionary had no doubt been restored as a sort ofpeace offering. He was in a bad state of health, and as his brotherand his brother's wife were among the captives, the Ashanti monarchcalculated that anxiety for the fate of his relatives would induce himto argue as strongly as possible in favor of peace.

  Frank left the camp on the Prah some days before the arrival of thewhite troops, having moved forward with the scouts under Lord Gifford,to whom his knowledge of the country and language proved very valuable.The scouts did their work well. The Ashantis were in considerablenumbers, but fell back gradually without fighting. Russell's regimentwere in support, and they pressed forward until they neared the foot ofthe Adansee Hills. On the 16th Rait's artillery and Wood's regimentwere to advance with two hundred men of the 2d West Indians. The NavalBrigade, the Rifle Brigade, the 42d, and a hundred men of the 23d wouldbe up on the Prah on the 17th.

  News came down that fresh portents had happened at Coomassie. The wordsignifies the town under the tree, the town being so called because itsfounder sat under a broad tree, surrounded by his warriors, while helaid out the plan of the future town. The marketplace was situated roundthe tree, which became the great fetish tree of the town, under whichhuman sacrifices were offered. On the 6th, the day upon which Sir Garnetsent his ultimatum to the king, a bird of ill omen was seen to perchupon it, and half an hour afterwards a tornado sprang up and the fetishtree was levelled to the ground. This caused an immense sensation inCoomassie, which was heightened when Sir Garnet's letter arrived, andproved to be dated upon the day upon which the fetish tree had fallen.

  The Adansee Hills are very steep and covered with trees, but withoutundergrowth. It had been supposed that the Ashantis would make theirfirst stand here. Lord Gifford led the way up with the scouts, Russell'sregiment following behind. Frank accompanied Major Russell. When Giffordneared the crest a priest came forward with five or six supporters andshouted to him to go back, for that five thousand men were waiting thereto destroy them. Gifford paused for a moment to allow Russell with hisregiment to come within supporting distance, and then made a rush withhis scouts for the crest. It was found deserted, the priest and hisfollowers having fled hastily, when they found that neither curses northe imaginary force availed to prevent the British from advancing.

  The Adansee Hills are about six hundred feet high. Between them and thePrah the country was once thick with towns and villages inhabited bythe Assins. These people, however, were so harassed by the Ashantisthat they were forced to abandon their country and settle in the Britishprotectorate south of the Prah.

  Had the Adansee Hills been held by European troops the position wouldhave been extremely strong. A hill if clear of trees is of immenseadvantage to men armed with rifles and supported by artillery, but tomen armed only with guns carrying slugs a distance of fifty yards,the advantage is not marked, especially when, as is the case with theAshantis, they always fire high. The crest of the hill was very narrow,indeed a mere saddle, with some eight or ten yards only of level groundbetween the steep descents on either side. From this point the scoutsperceived the first town in the territory of the King of Adansee, oneof the five great kings of Ashanti. The scouts and Russell's regimenthalted on the top of the hill, and the next morning the scouts went outskirmishing towards Queesa. The war drum could be heard beating in thetown, but no opposition was offered. It was not, however, consideredprudent to push beyond the foot of the hill until more troops came up.The scouts therefore contented themselves with keeping guard, while forthe next four days Russell's men and the engineers labored incessantly,as they had done all the way from the Prah, in making the road over thehill practicable.

  During this time the scouts often pushed up close to Queesa, andreported that the soldiers and population were fast deserting the town.On the fifth day it was found to be totally deserted, and Major Russellmoved the headquarters of his regiment down into it. The white officerswere much surprised with th
e structure of the huts of this place, whichwas exactly similar to that of those of Coomassie, with their red clay,their alcoved bed places, and their little courts one behind the other.Major Russell established himself in the chief's palace, which wasexactly like the other houses except that the alcoves were very lofty,and their roofs supported by pillars. These, with their red paint, theirarabesque adornments, and their quaint character, gave the courtyard theprecise appearance of an Egyptian temple.

  The question whether the Ashantis would or would not fight was stilleagerly debated. Upon the one hand it was urged that if the Ashantis hadmeant to attack us they would have disputed every foot of the passagethrough the woods after we had once crossed the Prah. Had they doneso it may be confidently affirmed that we could never have got toCoomassie. Their policy should have been to avoid any pitched battle,but to throng the woods on either side, continually harassing the troopson their march, preventing the men working on the roads, and renderingit impossible for the carriers to go along unless protected on eitherside by lines of troops. Even when unopposed it was difficult enoughto keep the carriers, who were constantly deserting, but had they beenexposed to continuous attacks there would have been no possibility ofkeeping them together.

  It was then a strong argument in favor of peace that we had beenpermitted to advance thirty miles into their country without a shotbeing fired. Upon the other hand no messengers had been sent down tomeet us, no ambassadors had brought messages from the king. This silencewas ominous; nor were other signs wanting. At one place a fetish,consisting of a wooden gun and several wooden daggers all pointingtowards us, was placed in the middle of the road. Several kids had beenfound buried in calabashes in the path pierced through and through withstakes; while a short distance outside Queesa the dead body of a slavekilled and mutilated but a few hours before we entered it was hangingfrom a tree. Other fetishes of a more common sort were to be met atevery step, lines of worsted and cotton stretched across the road, ragshung upon bushes, and other negro trumperies of the same kind.

  Five days later the Naval Brigade, with Wood's regiment and Rait'sbattery, marched into Queesa, and the same afternoon the whole marchedforward to Fomana, the capital of Adansee, situated half a mile onlyfrom Queesa. This was a large town capable of containing some sevenor eight thousand inhabitants. The architecture was similar to thatof Queesa, but the king's palace was a large structure covering aconsiderable extent of ground. Here were the apartments of the kinghimself, of his wives, the fetish room, and the room for execution,still smelling horribly of the blood with which the floor and wallswere sprinkled. The first and largest court of the palace had reallyan imposing effect. It was some thirty feet square with an apartmentor alcove on each side. The roofs of these alcoves were supported bycolumns about twenty-five feet high. As in all the buildings the lowerparts were of red clay, the upper of white, all being covered with deeparabesque patterns.

  Fomana was one of the most pleasant stations which the troops hadreached since leaving the coast. It lay high above the sea, and thetemperature was considerably lower than that of the stations south ofthe hills. A nice breeze sprung up each day about noon. The nightswere comparatively free from fog, and the town itself stood upon risingground resembling in form an inverted saucer. The streets were verywide, with large trees at intervals every twenty or thirty yards alongthe middle of the road.