Kimble [Kimball] Bent An Unusual European Who Deserted The British Army And Joined The Hau Hau #23

len.george (63)in #history • 5 years ago

Just within the stockade of the Moturoa, or Papatihakehake pa, [fortified village], there was a small, roughly built taumaihi, or look-out stage, ten or twelve feet above the ground, high enough to allow a sentinel to see well over the sharp-pointed palisades, and scan the approaches to the fort.

[This name Papa-tihakehake was given to the place after the fight, in commemoration of the defeat of the troops. Papa means a battle-ground, tihakehake refers to the dead bodies of the whites which strewed the ground.]

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In this bush watch-tower there stood, at misty dawn on a grey November morning, the Hauhau scout and warrior Katene Tu-Whakaruru.

Katene was cold, and he stamped his bare feet upon the unbarked logs that floored the sentry box, and he chanted softly to himself a little waiata [song] to Kopu, the morning star, which he had looked for in vain, for a heavy drizzling mist obscured everything.

The thin, persistent rain penetrated the blanket that he held closely wrapped about him.

Presently a faint light began to steal over the forest, and Katene could see the outlines of the black charred stumps and burned trees in front of the pa, then beyond the gloomy woods, through which a narrow winding path led to the open fernlands of the Wairoa.

Suddenly Katene's murmured chant ceased, and he strained his eyes into the mist.

To a Maori forester, the slightest sound was enough to set every faculty on the alert, asking suspiciously, “He aha tena”

He had heard a faint sound in the direction of the track beyond the black tree-stumps, a sound that he fancied resembled the striking of steel against steel.

Kātené hardly breathed.

His eyes glared fixedly through the mist.

In a few minutes, his vision confirmed the evidence of his keen ears.

He saw, just for a moment, a dark figure, then another, come hazily out of the wet fog where the track from the Wairoa emerged on the clearing, then disappear, as if they had suddenly dropped to the ground or vanished behind a tree.

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That glimpse was enough for Katene.

He dropped from his sentry-perch and ran from whare [house] to whare and tent to tent giving the alarm.

“The soldiers are coming,” he said to those whom he awakened. “The soldiers are on us"

They are by now entering the clearing.

Get your arms quickly, Man the trenches But don't make a sound”

The fighting-men poured out of their sleeping huts, snatching up their weapons and accoutrements, and ran to their places in the pits and ditches behind the stockade.

They hastily loaded their tuparas, their rifles, and their carbines, and, peering eagerly through the defence-works, sought to penetrate the raw, damp morning mist that shrouded their front.

The whole bush-castle was alive and ready.

Every man and boy who could shoulder a gun was in the well-hidden firing lines.

The wet mist slightly lifting as the morning light came, the musketeers presently saw dim figures moving out from the dark forest on their front and right and left flanks.

Moving quickly, half running, in a cautious, crouching gait, they flitted from tree to tree, and burnt stump to stump, and nearer and nearer to the stockade.

Not a sound came from the breathlessly waiting warriors, nor from the ghost-like figures that now sank to the ground, each behind a log or a great blackened stump, or the butt of a standing tree.

Gun in hand, finger on the trigger, the Hauhaus waited.

The apparitions were picked bush-fighters of the New Zealand forces, led by Colonel Whitmore, seeking to surprise Titoko in his forest-den.

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Advancing silently in skirmishing order through the bush, they took cover, waiting for light enough to fight by.

There were detachments of four divisions of the Armed Constabulary, many of them veteran bush-fighters, and men of the Patea Rifles and Patea Cavalry.

There, too, came Kepa's [Major Kemp] Whanganui Maoris, with rifle and tomahawk, old hands on the war-trail, and eager for another brush with their ancient enemies of Taranaki.

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Major Kemp [ Kepa]

There were two hundred Government men fronting the fort, but the fighting men behind the palisades did not, according to Maori accounts, number many more than half the number.

Amongst Titokowaru's men, however, there were some of the most renowned bush scouts and warriors in Taranaki, including, besides Katene, the wide-awake sentry, such men as the veteran Te Waka-tapa-ruru, Paraone Tutere, one of the best Hauhau shots, Timoti, the fiercest of the cannibals of Nga-Rauru, and the active young warrior Tutange Waionui, he who had despatched von Tempsky on the battle-field of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu.

Tutange says that he was asleep in a tent when Katene gave the alarm that morning.

He was with his tribe, the Nga-Rauru, most ferocious of all Maori bush-fighters, who occupied one end of the pa, the other tribes holding the fort were Ngati-Ruanui and Pakakohi.

It was the side occupied by the Pakakohi men that was first attacked.

All at once, as the Hauhaus crouched behind their palisades squinting for a sight of pakeha, with impatient fingers on their gun-triggers, fifty or sixty blue and grey figures sprang from cover and charged for the stockade.

Some of the assaulting party ran past the corner of the war-fence, looking for some opening or gateway by which they might charge in.

The leading files were within a few paces of the high, solidly set palisading when suddenly the whole face of the fence flashed fire, and volleys crashed in terrifying reverberations that set flocks of sleepy kaka parrots flying, screaming harsh screams of fright, through the dark forest.

Nearly half the storming party of A.C.'s [Armed Constabulary] fell before that fearful fire.

The first man shot was their leader, a brave officer, Major Hunter, whose brother, Captain Hunter, had fallen at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu two months previously.

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Tutange says that it was Paraone Tutere who shot the major, he fired at the leading figure, not knowing then who he was.

Colonel Whitmore came running in with the stormers, but, with his usual luck, although in the thickest fighting he was never hit.

Those of the attacking column who were not hit instantly dropped to cover amongst the logs and stumps that surrounded the pa front.

Then they returned the fire as well as they could, but one man after another was hit, without being able to see one Hauhau of the scores that occupied the pa and thrust the muzzles of their guns through the interstices of the palisades.

It was a foolish thing, that blind frontal charge on the strong stockade.

Major Hunter was too good a soldier to have done such an insane thing of his own volition.

He was obeying Whitmore's orders.

Hunter was shot in the femoral artery, when within nine or ten yards of the stockade.

He implored those near him to try to stop the gushing blood, and some of his comrades attempted to staunch it, but the wound was too close to the stomach to get at, and he died in a few minutes.

Captain W. E. Gudgeon, with about forty Government Maoris, tried to work around and take the pa in the rear.

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His line of charge was on Hunter's right flank, and he had good cover, but in spite of that he lost two killed and five wounded.

Now a brisk little fight went on on the flanks of the pa between Kepa's men and a party of warriors who had made a sortie from the stockade.

Kepa was furiously assailed by the bushmen, leaping from tree to tree, yelling their frightful Hauhau cries, and it was as much as the plucky Whanganui men could do to hold their own.

Their attempt to take the pa in the rear failed, and they at last slowly withdrew to support the shattered ranks of their white comrades.

The A.C. supports came doubling up, and a heavy fire was concentrated on the stockade, but to little purpose.

It was impregnable to rifle-fire, and in their pitted works the defenders were able to pick off the white skirmishers in perfect safety.

Bullets swept the clearing in every direction, and through the infernal music of the forest-battle the white soldiers heard the loudly yelled war-cries of the chiefs and the shrill voices of the Maori women as they encouraged their warriors, husbands, and brothers, and screamed them on to slaughter with all the fury of brown tattooed Hecates.

The women were gathered in the marae and in the trenches, some armed, all filled with the fire of savage war.

“Ka horo, ka horo” they shouted. “Kia maia, kia maia, Patua, kainga Patua, kainga”

(“They fall, they fall, Be brave, oh, be brave, Kill them, eat them, Kill them, eat them”)

All this time Kimble Bent was walking to and fro on the parepare, [the inner breastwork], the bullets screaming zssh, zssh, over his head and all about him.

The air seemed filled with flying lead, yet very few Maoris were hit.

One woman, he saw shot dead through the head as she rose to wave her shawl and yell a fighting cry to the men at the palisades.

Here, Bent was an eye-witness of the most desperately daring deed he had ever seen.

A fiery old tattooed warrior, by name Te Wakatapa-ruru, the Hauhau mentioned in an earlier post as the man who had killed Charles Broughton, Government Native Agent, on the Patea River, in 1865, was in a quiver of excitement while the garrison awaited the assault, and could hardly be silenced until the attack was delivered.

When the pakeha storming party rushed up at the double, the old man was one of the first to open fire on them with his tupara.

Then, when the order “Kokiritia” [“Charge”] was given, and the Hauhaus rushed out to engage the Government men who were trying to work round to the rear of the pa, he led the wild charge.

Perfectly naked, except for the broad flax waist girdle, which held his short-handled tomahawk, and gripping his double-barrelled gun, the tall old savage took a great running jump at the stockade from the inner parapet, and leapt clean over it.

Yelling a Pai-marire [battle-cry] as he rose from the ground after his extraordinary leap, he snatched the tomahawk from his belt, and charged straight for the advancing whites.

It was a fit of whakamomori, sheer blind desperation, utter recklessness of death.

Possibly the furious old fanatic imagined that his Hauhau angel and his mesmeric password, “Hapa, Pai-marire, Hau”
would avert the bullets of the pakeha.

But he was killed in the very charge, the only Maori fighting-man killed that day.

Two white soldiers met him.

He was in the act of striking a desperate blow when a pakeha ball took him square in the forehead, and with a huge convulsive bound and a half-choked barking “Hau” on his lips, the old tattooed brave fell dead amongst the foremost of his enemies.

It was just the death that he desired, face to the foe, with his war-axe in his hand, the death of a true Maori toa, [warrior]

This savage hero's son, Ratoia, who was living in the village of Taiporohenui, still a young boy at the time of the fight, saw his father's great leap over the palisade, and saw him killed.

Bent tells of a curious matakite, or prophetic dream, which Te Waka-tapa-ruru had on the night before the battle.

The old man was a close friend of the white runaway, and they were accustomed to sleep side by side on the whariki-spread floor of one of the huts.

He dreamed that he saw his face reflected in a pakeha looking-glass and that he was combing his hair.

This vision disturbed the old man, and deeming it a warning from the unseen world, he asked Titokowaru, just when the approach of the troops was first announced, what it might portend.

The war-chief interpreted the dream as an omen of death, and warned Te Waka not to leave the shelter of the stockade during the impending engagement or he would be killed.

But he disregarded this in his fit of whakamomori, and ran amok, and so he fell.

Finding it impossible to take such a strong and well-defended position by storm, the white colonel withdrew his forces.

There were dead and wounded lying all over the place.

The pakehas succeeded in carrying off the wounded and some of the dead, including the gallant Major Hunter.

A number of dead, however, had to be left where they were lying, for it was death to attempt their removal from under the very muzzles of the Hauhau guns.

The rescue of Hunter's body from the Hauhau tomahawks, under heavy fire, was a gallant piece of work.

Captain Gudgeon was one of those who brought the dead officer out, one of his comrades was Captain Edward McDonnell, and troopers Foote and Kelly were amongst the others.

Two or three men were shot in the attempt. Kepa (Major Kemp) was there, too, but he was pretty well engaged in looking after his own men and extricating them from that place of death.

The Colonial soldiers retired, fighting a hard rearguard action, out to the edge of the bush.

Each division of Armed Constabulary in turn halted, knelt down facing the enemy, and covered the retreat of the other divisions, thus giving time for those of the dead and wounded who had been recovered to be carried off the field.

Out to the fern-lands, the Hauhaus followed the troops, sometimes engaging them so closely that the fighting was hand-to-hand, and it was carbine and revolver against long-handled tomahawk.

The skirmishing lasted until the whites were well clear of the bush, the Maoris would have followed them out even to their camp, the Wairoa Redoubt, had not they been recalled by orders from Titokowaru.

The battle of Papatihakehake was over.

It was a more severe repulse for the Government men than even the engagement at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu a bare two months before.

One man out of every four in the force actually engaged was on the casualty list, more than twenty killed and quite thirty wounded.

[Colonel W. E. Gudgeon wrote, “For the number engaged, Moturoa was the most desperate engagement fought in the Maori War.

Whitmore's return did not give nearly our losses.

I made it at the time fifty-two out of less than two hundred actually engaged.

At Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu all did not behave well, but at Moturoa anyone might have been proud of the men.

No force in the world could have behaved better.”]