In the panic that set in when the hideous tattooed faces of the Maoris rose up so uncannily from the depths of the earth the slaughter of our men was terrific. Officers and privates alike fell easy victims to the well-armed natives. Then it was that Assistant-Surgeon William G. N. Manley, R.A., and Samuel Mitchell, captain of the foretop of H.M.S. Harrier, won glory for themselves by a gallant rescue.
Commander Hay, of the Naval Brigade, fell badly wounded at the first discharge, and lay groaning in the middle of the pah. All were in full flight, but seeing his officer helpless on the ground Mitchell ran to his side, picked him up in his strong arms and bore him outside the stockade. Here he found Dr. Manley, who oblivious to the bullets that fell thickly around, bound up the commander’s wounds. That done, he and Mitchell conveyed the dying man back to camp.
Not content with having done that duty, the brave surgeon returned voluntarily to the pah and coolly set about tending the wounded. They lay there in heaps, alas! and he had all his work to do to get them removed to a place of safety. The fire which swept the stockade is said to have been terrible, yet not a scratch did he receive the whole time, and he was the last to leave the pah. Both Dr. Manley and Mitchell were awarded the Cross for Valour some months later, for the heroism that in part redeemed the Gate Pah disaster.
As for the Fighting Forty-third, whose colours bore the names of Corunna, Badajoz, Vittoria, and many another famous fight of the Peninsular War, the memory of that night of panic rankled deep in their minds. They swore a solemn vow that the next time they came to grips with the Maoris the enemy should remember it. It was at Tuaranga that they got their chance, on June 21st of the same year, and on this day one of their officers, Captain Frederick Augustus Smith, won the Cross for leaping into a rifle-pit and routing a number of the Maoris single-handed.
This made the second V.C. that the 43rd won, by the way, the first having been given in 1859 to Private Addison for saving the life of an officer in India.
CHAPTER XVII
IN ASHANTI BUSH AND MALAY JUNGLE.
It is a big leap from Maoriland to West Africa, but it is there, to Ashanti, that we must go to see how the next Crosses on the roll were won.
Ashanti, as the map shows, is in the Upper Guinea district, immediately inland of the Gold Coast. Seventy thousand square miles in extent, it is thickly covered with forests of mahogany, ebony, and other valuable hardwood trees, except where it is given up to vast mangrove swamps that are no good to anybody. Its people are pure negroes, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, with woolly hair and projecting jaws. They are a savage, cruel race, fetish-worshippers like most of the tribes in West Africa, who have been notorious for the revolting form of their religious rites.