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.