The Campbells are comin’, O ho, O ho!
The Campbells are comin’, O ho!
The Campbells are comin’ to bonnie Lochleven,
The Campbells are comin’, O ho, O ho!
Regimental March.
After the Mutiny we say farewell, as it were, to the Old Guard of the Crimea and India, and hear a great deal about the younger men, Wolseley, Roberts, and White, all of whom had been through the Mutiny, two of them being destined to attain to the highest distinction that the British Army can bestow.
Garnet Wolseley was born in Dublin on June 4, 1833. He lost the use of one eye in the Crimea, served in India during the Mutiny, and in the Chinese War of 1860. In 1861 he crossed to Canada, and in 1870 conquered Louis Riel, the half-breed. In 1873 he led an expedition to Ashanti. There have been many places of horror and oppression in the histories of savage peoples, but it is doubtful whether there was ever a town so foul and brutal as Coomassie, the capital of Ashanti. The shedding of blood was the daily delight and pastime of the king, while murder upon a prodigal scale was to him and to his people a kind of rite. His subjects, instead of rebelling against these practices, delighted in such spectacles, and encouraged Koffi Calcalli, the king, to further outrages and orgies. It was, as some one has called it, ‘a metropolis of murder.’ So far, however, Britain had not seen her way to interfere, and had she done so, simply on the ground of common humanity, it is probable that other nations would have suspected her of conspiring to take over the country. At last King Koffi, craving for something new, decided that he would attack the English at Cape Coast Castle. Fortunately he was not able to achieve very much, but on the other hand the English were not strong enough to retaliate. This position was rendered all the more dangerous by the policy of toleration, which from the year 1824, when the Ashantis defeated Sir Charles M’Carthy, to the year 1863, when a West Indian regiment failed most signally, had given the natives a poor opinion of the English arms. It was therefore necessary for the safety of the English settlers that an Expeditionary Force should leave for Ashanti. It sailed under the command of Sir Garnet Wolseley, with whom were the Black Watch under Sir John Macleod.
It was no ‘picnic,’ to quote from a popular expression of to-day; and to give some idea of the country through which the Black Watch marched, I shall quote a paragraph from Sir Henry Stanley’s Coomassie and Magdala.
“Coomassie,” he says, “was a town insulated by a deadly swamp. A thick jungly forest—so dense that the sun seldom pierced the foliage, so sickly that the strongest fell victims to the malarias it cherished—surrounded it to a depth of one hundred and forty miles seaward, many hundred miles east, as many more west, and a hundred miles north. Through this forest and swamp, unrelieved by any novelty or a single pretty landscape, the British Army had to march one hundred and forty miles, leaving numbers behind sick of fever and dysentery.”
To force their way through this fastness of almost impenetrable jungle called for both patience and courage. Wolseley received some assistance from the Fantees, who were enemies of the Ashantis. These natives cut a passage through the forests for the British troops. By the time the Black Watch landed at Cape Coast Castle in January 1874 this preparatory work had been completed.