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 Papa-tihakehake 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.[1]
•••••
A grim story of that hard-fought retreat through the bush is told by Kimble Bent.
After the kokiri, the rush out in pursuit, had been ordered by the Maori war-chief, one of the Nga-Rauru men came across a white soldier lying on the ground, with his head pillowed against a fallen pukatea-tree. He had been cut off from his division
- ↑ Colonel W. E. Gudgeon writes me: "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 any one might have been proud of the men. No force in the world could have behaved better."
