and long-continued defence, and for the vigour with which, when
their centre was penetrated, they strove to redeem the day by their
flank attack upon us; to the British for their long endurance of a
terrific fire from unseen foes, by the manner in which they fought
under conditions so absolutely novel to them, and for the unwavering
resolution with which they won their way through the bush and finally
defeated a foe of ten times their own numerical force. The victory of
Amoaful virtually decided the result of the campaign, for although the
Ashantis fought again on the other side of the river Dah, the terrible
punishment inflicted upon them at Amoaful had greatly reduced their
spirit; nevertheless, they fought stoutly.
On this occasion the Bonny men led the advance up the path beyond
the river, and before they had gone half a mile were hotly engaged.
Lieutenant Saunders, with one of Rait’s guns, endeavoured to clear the
bushes, but little progress was made for two hours, and Lieutenant
Eyre, the adjutant of Wood’s regiment, fell mortally wounded when
standing near the gun. The Rifles now relieved the Bonny men, and led
the advance, and made their way slowly forward until within fifty yards
of a large clearing, surrounding a village; then with a cheer they
rushed forward, drove the enemy from the clearing, and occupied the
village. But behind them the combat raged for another two hours. The
troops lined the sides of the path, and repulsed all the efforts of the
Ashantis to break through them, holding the position while the native
carriers took the stores, spare ammunition, and medical comforts along
the path and up to the village. As soon as the last of these had passed
along, the troops followed, until the whole force were gathered in and
round the village.
The loss of the Ashantis can have been but little inferior to that
which they suffered at Amoaful, for they several times approached
in such masses that the whole bush swayed and moved as they pushed
forward. On the other hand, our casualties were very slight, for as
the road was, like all the paths in the country, hollowed out by the
traffic fully two feet below the general level, the troops lying there
were protected as by a breastwork of that height. When the whole
force were assembled in the village, the enemy still kept up serious
and desperate attacks upon the rear, but were always repulsed by the
Rifles, who lined the edge of the clearing. Mingled with the continued
din of musketry was the lugubrious roar of the great war-horns
throughout the woods, and the wild war-cry of the Ashantis.
The halt was a short one; Coomassie was still six miles distant, and
soon after the force were gathered round the village the Highlanders,
with Rait’s guns, moved forward along the path. For the first twenty
minutes the fire of the enemy was very heavy, but when the Black Watch
gained the crest of the rise beyond the village, the resistance became
more feeble, and they dashed forward at the double, sweeping all
opposition aside. The resistance of the Ashantis at once ceased; they
had done all that was possible for them to do to oppose our advance,
and had failed. Their main body was still in the rear of the village,
engaged in unavailing attacks upon the force there. Probably their best
and bravest troops were with this force, and at the rapid advance of
the 42nd a panic seized the defenders of the path; those in the bush
could not hope to move forward as rapidly as did the troops in the
open, while those in the villages along the path, warned by flying
fugitives of the rapid approach of the foe, joined in their flight. The
road was strewn with articles of clothing, the stools of state of the
chiefs, weapons, and food.
From this time no single shot was fired. The warriors in the bush,
seeing that they could not hope to get ahead of the advancing force and
make another effort to defend the capital, either went off at once to
their villages, or made a wide circuit and came down behind Coomassie
upon the road between that town and a spot, five miles away, where the
kings of Ashanti were buried, and where, doubtless, another battle
would have been fought had the troops advanced to the sacred spot. The
42nd halted at the last village before arriving at Coomassie, until
they were there joined by the rest of the force; then, after crossing
a deep and fetid marsh surrounding the town, they entered the capital
of the enemy. It was not, as might have been expected, deserted: a good
many of the inhabitants remained, some of the men being still armed,
and watched with curiosity rather than with alarm, the entry of the
white warriors who had broken the strength of their nation. Orders were
given to disarm them at once; but as soon as they perceived that this
was the case, they gradually withdrew, and in half an hour the whole of
the natives of Coomassie had disappeared in the bush.
Several fires broke out in various parts of the town. Some of these may
have been the work of the Ashantis themselves, but most of them were
caused unquestionably by the native camp-followers, who, in spite of
the stringent orders against looting, stole away in the darkness to
gather plunder. Some of them were flogged, and one was hung, and then,
after posting pickets thickly outside the town, the troops went off to
sleep.
The next morning the captured town could be fairly seen. The streets
were very wide; trees grew in them; and from the irregularity with
which the houses were scattered about, it resembled a great straggling
village rather than a town. The houses were of the kind with which the
troops had already become familiar, and resembled the architecture of
a Chinese temple rather than that of any other known building. Outside
was an alcove with red steps, high raised floor, and white pillars
supporting the roof. This formed the front of the house, and as there
was no entrance from it into the interior, it was, in fact, a sort of
summer-house and balcony, where the master must have sat to look at the
passing world and chat with his acquaintances. Inside, the houses were
all of the same character, comprising a number of little courts with
alcoves on one or more sides. Everything in Coomassie bore signs of
the superstitious belief of the inhabitants in fetish. Over every door
was suspended a variety of charms--old stone weapons, nuts, gourds,
amulets, beads, bits of china, bones, and odds-and-ends of all kinds.
The principal apartments of the larger houses were lumbered up with
drums, great umbrellas, and other paraphernalia of processions; but
there were no real valuables of any kind.
The great objects of interest to the troops in the town were the
palace and the great fetish-tree from which Coomassie took its name.
In a large clump of bushes adjoining the latter were found the remains
of some thousands of victims sacrificed in the bloody festivals. The
majority were, of course, but skeletons; but there were hundreds that
could have lain there but a few weeks, many which must have been
sacrificed within a few days. The stench from this charnel-place was
horrible, and pervaded the whole town. The palace occupied a very large
extent of ground. It consisted of a central stone building of European
architecture, which was used as a storehouse and was crowded with
articles of furniture, silver plate, gold masks, clocks, glass, china,
guns, cloth, and caskets, resembling in its confusion and the variety
of its contents a succession of auction-rooms. The rest of the palace
was of native work--similar, but on a much larger scale, to the houses
of the great chiefs.
A horrible smell of blood pervaded the whole place--for many of the
executions were held in the palace itself. During the day the rain
fell in torrents; and as it became known that the king had gone right
away into the interior of the country, as provisions were running very
short, the troops were already feeling much the effects of the climate,
and as the rains would swell every stream and fill every swamp, it was
decided to make a start for the coast the next morning, after burning
down the place that had been the scene of such countless horrors and
atrocities. This was done as the column marched out of the town. The
Engineers fired the houses and blew up the king’s palace; and a vast
cloud of smoke rising high into the air must have told the Ashantis,
scattered far and wide through the forests, that vengeance had at last
fallen on the city that had for so many years been regarded by them as
sacred, and had been the object of superstitious terror and hate to the
tribes for hundreds of miles round.
[Illustration: COOMASSIE.]
[Illustration:
THE REDOUBTS OF DÜPPEL
BY CHARLES LOWE]
Schleswig-Holstein, the cradle of the Anglo-Saxon race, was the
beautiful and interesting province which formed the bone of bloody
contention between the Prussians and the Danes in the year 1864, just
a year after the Prince of Wales had wedded the Danish “sea-king’s
daughter from over the sea,” and made all Englishmen take the very
deepest interest in the hopeless struggle of her undaunted countrymen
against an overwhelming foe.
The cause of quarrel was one of the most complicated questions which
ever vexed the minds of statesmen, and seemed so incapable of solution
that an irreverent Frenchman once declared it would remain after the
heavens and the earth had passed away. But on the death of Frederick
VII. of Denmark, in November, 1863, Herr von Bismarck, who had the
year before become Prussian Premier, determined that the difficulty
should now be settled by “blood and iron.” Briefly put, the new King of
Denmark, Christian IX., father of the Princess of Wales, wanted to rule
over the Elbe Duchies, as Schleswig-Holstein was called, in a way, as
was thought at Berlin, unfavourable to the rights and aspirations of
their German population; while, on the other hand, the Germanic Diet,
or Council of German Sovereigns at Frankfort, was resolved that this
should not be so. And rather than that this should be so, it decreed
“execution” on the King of Denmark, who had a seat in the Diet as for
the Duchies, and selected two of its members, Hanover and Saxony, to
enforce its decision.
But not content with this, Austria and Prussia, the leading members of
the Diet, also resolved to take the field, as executive bailiffs, so to
speak, of the judgment of the German Court; and this they did at the
beginning of 1864 with a united force of about 45,000 men. That was
not so very large a force, considering the size of modern armies, but
it was much larger than that opposed to it by the valiant Danes, about
36,000 in number, who were commanded by General de Meza. The Austrians
were commanded by Field-Marshal von Gablenz, and the Prussians by their
own Prince Frederick Charles, surnamed the “Red Prince,” from the
scarlet uniform of his favourite regiment, the Zieten Hussars.
The Commander of the combined Austro-Prussian army was the Prussian
Field-Marshal von Wrangel--“old Papa Wrangel,” as he was fondly
called--who looked, and spoke, and acted like a survival from the time
of the Thirty Years’ or the Seven Years’ War. He was a grim old _beau
sabreur_, who, in his later days, used to grind his teeth (what of
them were left) and scatter groschen among the street arabs of Berlin,
under the impression that he was sowing a crop of bullets that would
yet spring up and prove the death of all democrats and other nefarious
characters dangerous to military monarchy and the rule of the sword in
the civil state.
“_In Gottes Namen drauf!_”--“Forward in God’s name”--“Papa”
Wrangel had wired to the various contingents of his forces on the 1st
February, when at last the Danes had replied to his demands with an
emphatic “No!” and then the combined Austro-Prussian army swept over
the Eider amid a blinding storm of snow.
The Prussians took the right, the Austrians the left of the advance
into the Duchies; and after one or two preliminary actions of no
great moment, the invaders reached the Danewerk, a very strong line
of earthworks which had taken the place of the bulwark thrown up by
the Danes in ancient times against the incursions of the Germans. Here
the Prussians prepared for a stubborn resistance, but what was their
surprise and their delight, on the morning of the 6th February, to
find that the Danes had evacuated overnight this first bulwark line of
theirs, leaving 154 guns and large quantities of stores and ammunition
a prey to their enemies! Caution, not cowardice, had been the motive
of this retreat of theirs, for they saw that, if they had remained,
they would have run the risk of being outflanked and outnumbered; so
they determined, from reasons of military policy, to retire further
northward and take up their dogged stand behind their second line
of entrenchments at Düppel, there to await the assault of their
overwhelming foes.
[Illustration: FIELD-MARSHAL VON WRANGEL.]
Sending on the Austrians on the left into Jutland to dispose of the
Danes in that quarter, “Papa” Wrangel selected the “Red Prince” and
his Prussians to crack the nuts which had been thrown in their way
in the shape of the redoubts of Düppel. Prince Frederick Charles was
one of the best and bravest soldiers that had been produced by the
fighting family of the Hohenzollerns since the time of Frederick the
Great. A man about the middle height, strongly built, broad-shouldered,
florid-faced, sandy-bearded, bull-necked, rough in manner and speech,
and homely in all his ways--he was just the sort of leader to command
the affections and stimulate the courage of the Prussian soldier. There
was much of the bulldog in the “Red Prince,” so he was the very man to
entrust with such a task as that of hanging on to the Danes at Düppel.
Yet this task was one of exceeding difficulty, for the redoubts of
Düppel formed such a formidable line of defence as had rarely, if ever,
before opposed the advance of an invading army in the open field. All
the natural advantages of ground, with its happy configuration of
land and water, were on the side of the Danes, whose main object it
was to prevent their foes from setting foot on the Schleswig island
of Alsen, forming a stepping-stone, so to speak, to Denmark itself,
much in the same way as the island of Anglesey does to Ireland. To
continue the comparison, the Menai Strait corresponds to the Alsen-Sund
which separates the mainland of Schleswig from the island of Alsen.
Of this island the chief town is Sonderburg, which was connected by
the mainland, into which it looks over, by two pontoon bridges, at the
end of which the Danes threw up a _tête-du-pont_, or bridge-head
entrenchment, to defend the approach and passage; while about a couple
of miles further inland they had constructed a chain of no fewer than
ten heavy forts, or redoubts, all connected by lesser earthworks and
entrenchments.
This line of redoubts, about three miles long, ran right across the
neck of a peninsula of the mainland, called the Sundewitt, one end
resting on the Alsen-Sund and the other on a gulf, or bay, of the
Baltic, called the Wenningbund. The redoubts were placed along the
brow of a ridge which overlooked and commanded all the undulating
country for miles in front, while in the rear again the ground dipped
away gently down towards the Alsen-Sund and its bridge-head, affording
fine shelter and camping-ground to the Danes. A lovelier or more
romantic-looking region, with its winding bays and silver-glancing
straits, its picturesque blending of wood and water, could scarcely be
imagined.
Such a position as that which the Danes had taken up would have been
of no value whatever against foes like the English, seeing that the
latter might have gone with their warships and shelled the Danes clean
out of their line of redoubts without ever so much as landing a single
man, for, as already explained, the line of forts rested on the sea at
both ends. But at this time, fortunately for the Danes, the Prussians
had little or nothing of a navy, so that they must needs essay on land
what they could not attempt by sea; while the Danes, on the other hand,
though weaker on land, were decidedly superior to their foes on water.
In particular, they had one warship, or monitor, the _Rolf Krake_,
which gained immortal fame by the bold and devil-may-care manner in
which it worried, and harassed, and damaged, and kept the Prussians
perpetually awake. It lurked like a corsair in the corners of the bays,
and creeks, and winding sea-arms of that amphibious region, and darted
out upon occasion to shell and molest the Prussians in their trenches
before the Düppel lines.
For the Prussians had soon come to see that it would be quite
impossible for them to capture the Düppel redoubts save by regular
process of sap and siege. The redoubts proved to be far more formidable
than they ever fancied; and it would have involved an enormous
sacrifice of life on the part of the Prussians to rush for them at
once. The pretty certain result of such impetuosity would have been
that not a soul almost of the stormers would have lived to tell the
tale. For three whole years the Danes had been at work on these
redoubts, and what it takes three years to construct cannot by any
possibility be captured in as many days. Much had to be done by the
Prussians, then, before sitting down before the redoubts. If a simile
may be borrowed from the game of football, the “forwards” of the Danes
had first to be disposed of. For not only did they occupy the redoubts,
but likewise all the strong points in the country for two or three
miles in front of them, just as modern ironclads hang out nets to guard
their hulls from the impact of torpedoes. In a similar manner the Danes
had thrown out a network of men to fend off all hostile approach to
their forts and prevent the Prussians from settling down near enough to
them for the purposes of sap and siege.
While, therefore, the Prussians were busy bringing to the front their
heavy guns and other siege-material, others of them were set to the
work of sweeping clean, as with a broom of bayonets, the open positions
in front of the redoubts held by their defenders. But this sweeping
process was by no means either an easy or a bloodless task. For while
the Danes numbered 22,000 troops, the “Red Prince” in front of them
disposed at this time (though later he was reinforced) of no more than
16,000 men, and there was always the danger that the Danes, assuming
the offensive, would sally out of their lines and seek to overwhelm
their numerically weaker foes. Consequently the Prussians had recourse
to the spade in order to supplement the defensive power of their
rifles, and thus they first of all took up an entrenched position
running in a long semi-circle from Broacker on their right to Satrup
on the left, at a distance of about three miles or more from the real
object of their ambition--the line of Danish redoubts.
Two positions in front of these redoubts--the villages of Düppel and
Rackebüll--were fiercely contested by the Danes; but on the 17th of
March, after fighting in a manner which gave their foes a very high
opinion of their courage, they retired behind their earthworks with the
loss of 676 men, while the Prussians, on their part, had to pay for
their victory by only 138 lives. This disparity in loss was doubtless
due to the fact that, while the Danes were only armed with the old
smooth-bore muzzle-loading musket, the Prussians had adopted the
new _Zündnadelgewehr_, or needle-gun, the parent of all modern
breech-loading and repeating rifles, which gave them a tremendous
advantage over their opponents. In one of the preliminary encounters
above referred to, a party of Danes, against whom a superior force
of Prussian light-infantry (_Jäger_) was advancing, threw down
their arms in token of submission; but as the Prussians came forward,
they snatched them up again, fired a volley, and rushed on with the
bayonet. The Prussians let them come to within twenty-yards’ distance,
and then, raising their deadly needle-guns, shot them down to a man.
The treacherous conduct of the Danes above referred to caused great
bitterness among the Prussians; but, even after death, the latter
showed their foes the respect which brave men owe to one another, and
in West Düppel they raised a cross with this inscription:--“Here lie
twenty-five brave Danes, who died the hero’s death, 17th February,
1864.”
The result of these preliminary tussles was that the Danes attempted
no more outfalls, and from the 17th to the 28th of March one might
almost have concluded that an armistice had been agreed to but for an
occasional sputtering and spitting of rifle-fire between the foreposts,
who thus employed their time when not exchanging other courtesies in
the form of pipe-lights, tobacco-pouches, and spirit-flasks. But now
the time was come when it behoved the Prussians to get as close to the
redoubts as possible, for the purpose of opening their siegetrenches,
and General von Raven’s Brigade was selected to sweep the ground in
front of the Danish position of all its outposts. It was an early
Easter this year, and just when the preachers were proclaiming to their
congregations that the season of peace and goodwill to all men had now
again come round, the Danes and Prussians were lighting like fiends
under cover of the darkness.
The 18th Prussian Fusiliers had crept forward as far nearly as the
wire-fencing and palisades in front of the redoubts, when the dawn
suddenly revealed them to the Danes; and just at this moment, too, what
should appear upon the scene but the ubiquitous _Rolf Krake_,
which, at a distance of about five hundred yards, opened upon the
advancing Prussians such a shower of shell and grape-shot as forced
them to retire, causing these baffled fusiliers to curse the very name
of the ship-builder who had ever laid the keel of such a bold and
bothersome vessel.
[Illustration]
At length, during the night of the 30th March, the Prussians managed
to open their first parallel at a distance of about eight hundred
paces from the line of the redoubts, and now, so to speak, they had
reached the beginning of the end. The men on duty in this parallel,
or shelter-trench (about eight feet deep), were relieved at first
every forty-eight hours, and then every twenty-four, the former period
having been found to be too great a strain on the soldiers, who, in
consequence, had soon as many as ten per cent. on the sick list. For
nothing could have been more trying to the constitution than this
trench-life, with its cold nights, and rain, and mud, and manifold
wretchedness.
Yet the Prussian soldiers, who were all very young fellows--mere boys
some of them--kept up their spirits in the most wonderful manner,
and indulged in all kinds of fun--mounting a gas-pipe on a couple of
cart-wheels, and thus drawing the fire of the Danes, who imagined it
to be a cannon; making sentries out of clay, and otherwise indulging
in the thousand-and-one humours of a camp. They were also cheered by
frequent visits from their commander, the “Red Prince,” who--although
housed in most comfortable, not to say luxurious, quarters at
the Schloss, or château, of Gravenstein, about six miles to the
rear--failed not to ride to the front every day and acquaint himself
with all that was going on. With such a commander soldiers will do
anything, and hence the whole Prussian force in front of the Danish
redoubts began to burn with a fighting ardour which neither cold, nor
wet, nor knee-deep mud could in the least degree damp or depress.
On the other hand, the Danes, though better off for shelter in
their blockhouses, wooden barracks, and casemates, were not in such
good spirits. One of the few things, apparently, that cheered their
hearts was the sight of the numerous English tourists--“T. G.’s,”
or “travelling gents,” as they used to be called in the Crimea,
and _Kriegsbummler_, or war-loafers, as they are dubbed in
Germany--who, arrayed in suits of a most fearful and wonderful make,
streamed over to the Cimbrian Peninsula in quest of sensation and
adventure, exposing themselves on parapet and sky-line to the shells of
the Prussians with a devil-me-care coolness which proved a source of
new inspiration to the Danskés.