The next time any of the XVIIIth were in action seems to have been on the 25th of August. The attack on Ring’s convoy had shown how easily traffic could be stopped in the Hunua forest. To make communication safer through this belt of bush the Government of New Zealand set a large number of men to cut down the scrub on either side of the road. Soldiers as well as civilians were employed on the work; among the former were a party of a corps which appears not only to have been ignorant of the first principles of warfare, but grossly disobedient to orders. General Cameron had officially reminded the troops that axe-men should always be protected by a covering party; but the detachment disregarded this order and, far from taking precautions for their safety, piled arms near the road under charge of a single sentry. The Maoris crawled through the bush, rushed the sentry, and before the detachment could regain their rifles nearly all the arms had fallen into the enemy’s hands. Several of the —— were hit; the remainder, defenceless without their rifles, had fallen back for shelter into the forest, when the guard of a convoy, chiefly composed of a company of the Royal Irish, under Captain R. P. Bishopp, appeared on the scene, and after an hour’s sharp skirmishing succeeded in driving away the enemy. In this affair one man of the XVIIIth was wounded.[197] Early in September the headquarters of the Royal Irish were moved to Drury, leaving two companies under Captain Noblett to man the Queen’s redoubt. During the month three detachments of the battalion had brushes with the enemy. Half a mile from the village of Pokeno, near the Queen’s redoubt, a party of 62 non-commissioned officers and men, under Ensign C. Dawson, were attacked by a body of natives, who fired into them from the rear. A bayonet charge drove the enemy into a gully, down which the Royal Irish pursued them for half a mile, when a burst of war-whoops and yells from the village warned Dawson to collect his men to meet a fresh danger. Making his way back to Pokeno, he was received by a volley from Maoris hidden among the stumps and logs of timber in a clearing in front of the village, and from another party on his left flank. Dawson had his men well in hand, kept them in skirmishing order, and maintained a steady fire from all available cover, until he was extricated from this unpleasant situation by the arrival of a party of the 40th, and later by a further reinforcement, the escort to a convoy commanded by Captain Noblett, XVIIIth regiment. The Maoris fled before the levelled bayonets of the combined detachments and took refuge in the bush, into which the soldiers could not follow. A few days later, a convoy in charge of a body of volunteers broke down at Pukekohe, near Drury; some of the Royal Irish, under Captain Inman, were sent to its assistance, and found the waggons stuck in deep mud, while the Maoris were attacking the stockade which contained the garrison of the post. Inman’s party rescued the convoy; then, reinforced by the volunteers, they went in with the cold steel, and received praise from General Cameron for “the gallant manner in which they charged the enemy, driving him back into the bush with severe loss from the position he had taken up near the stockade.” For his services on this and other occasions Captain Inman received a Brevet-Majority.
About the same time another party of the XVIIIth were in action on the Wairoa road, along which various blockhouses had been built to cover the approach to Auckland. One of these works, the Galloway redoubt, was in charge of Major Lyon, an ex-imperial officer, under whose orders some of the battalion were placed. On the 15th of September the Maoris attacked the redoubt, but were beaten off, after an affair in which the steadiness of the Royal Irish was conspicuous. Two days later Lyon, who had been reinforced by another party of the XVIIIth under Lieutenant Russell, took the offensive, and under cover of darkness led his troops towards Otau, a native village occupied by local insurgents. It was found to be on the far side of a river, and while Lyon searched for a ford, he engaged the enemy with musketry—according to a well-known historian, with unexpectedly important results—
“Across the stream at early dawn a detachment of the XVIIIth regiment poured concentrated fire upon the wharés [huts]. They did not know that within them was a band of Maoris, who had come to join the fighting, and who, under the volleys poured upon the huts, fell like sheep. The troops, unable to cross the stream, withdrew, unconscious of what they had done. Major Lyon, who made a circuit by a bridge, found the settlement deserted. ‘The wharés,’ he said, ‘were riddled with shot, blood in profusion both inside and out. They were unmistakably taken by surprise.’ In after years a Maori who was present told how extensive was the slaughter unwittingly inflicted by the XVIIIth, who exercised themselves by firing at the huts without knowing how they were occupied. As the wounded and dead were carried away before Major Lyon reached the spot, he also was ignorant of the severity of the blow inflicted.”[198]
In October, the battalion were again fortunate enough to rescue a party of New Zealand volunteers from a dangerous situation. An officer of the irregulars while reconnoitring a large body of natives near his post at Manku, was drawn into an engagement, forced back into his stockade, and closely surrounded. The news reached Drury in the evening, and a strong party of the XVIIIth under Captain Noblett was at once sent, with some of the 70th, to the relief of the volunteers. Pushing on throughout the night the troops early in the morning reached Manku, from which the Maoris decamped promptly, thus depriving the Royal Irish of the excitement of a skirmish. They at once returned to Drury, where they arrived after twenty-two hours’ continuous marching. At the end of the month two companies in charge of Captain Noblett reinforced Ring’s post in the Wairoa country; and in November an expedition, largely composed of the Royal Irish, was sent to avenge outrages committed on the settlers in this district. The marauders had stockaded themselves in a position surrounded by dense bush, swamps, and precipitous ravines, but after a skirmish the pah was captured and destroyed.
In war opportunities of distinction do not come to every officer, and such in a marked degree was the case in New Zealand, where much good work was done by some of the officers of the XVIIIth whose names do not appear in General Cameron’s reports. Though the vigorous action of the troops on the line of communication and in the Wairoa country prevented the Maoris from raiding Auckland itself, it was impossible for Cameron with the small number of men at his disposal to carry the war into the enemy’s country, and at the same time protect all the outlying farms cleared in the bush by enterprising settlers. In most cases the colonists abandoned their farms, sent their women and children to Auckland, and turned themselves into a militia, which proved a valuable asset in the British force. Occasionally, however, the entire population of a settlement held its ground, and required help from the troops. Thus, in September, Captain Kemp[199] with 150 of the Royal Irish was sent to the relief of one of these outposts of civilisation; a forced march through virgin forest, past many farms which the Maoris had looted and burned to the ground, brought him to his destination, where he found the colonists had thrown up stockades round their tiny church, in peaceful times used by various denominations as a place of worship, but now turned into the keep of the primitive fortress. Leaving these brave pioneers a supply of provisions and cartridges, and a small party of troops to give backbone to the defence, he returned to Drury, where his next duty was to form a post at a deserted farm on the line of communication. With his own company and fifty men under Lieutenant Briggs he cut down tree ferns, and with their trunks, lashed together with wild vines (locally known as supplejack), built a strong palisade, eight feet in height, enclosing not only the farm buildings but also space enough for the tents of his detachment. As soon as the farm had been placed in a state of defence, the British instinct of cleanliness asserted itself, and the house and outbuildings were thoroughly cleansed; then parties of men were sent out to “round up” the farmer’s cattle which had strayed into the forest, while others improved the defences and escorted the convoys to the next post on the way to the front. Encouraged by the presence of the detachment the farmer returned with his family to his house, which can hardly be described as a peaceful home, for, to quote Captain Kemp’s diary, “Our nights were disturbed by seeing lights in the bush. I burned all the low scrub (near the farm), and twice a-week took out a skirmishing party and scoured the forest: we saw a few natives but they always escaped us in the thick undergrowth. However we were not further molested.” Kemp’s diary then briefly records a succession of escorts to convoys and to prisoners taken at the fight of Rangariri; much road-making, and marches knee-deep in swamps.
In January, 1864, the Royal Irish were employed in various ways.[200] Part of the battalion was sent to guard the line of communication from the Queen’s redoubt southward to Ngaruawahia; the remainder formed the garrisons of the chain of works which Brevet-Colonel Carey had established between the Waikato and the estuary of the Thames. Thanks to Captain Kemp, we know something of the hard work done by those of the XVIIIth who were in charge of these posts. On the 7th of January, with two hundred men, he
“marched to the Surrey redoubt; it was very hot as we skirted the swamps and many men fainted from the heat. We placed a detachment in the redoubt, slept in the open outside it, and marched at 5.30 A.M. next day eight miles to the Esk redoubt on high ground in open fern-covered country. Here I left Briggs and a detachment and took my company down to the Miranda redoubt, four miles farther on, situated at the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the estuary of the Thames and defended by a small river on the north side. Here I had command of two hundred men, one half being Waikato militia. We enlarged the redoubt and made a road down to the landing-place (previously all stores were dragged up the face of the cliff and the Commissariat suffered heavy losses). We made a floating bridge over the small river, sunk a well for drinking water, and built a small redoubt on the approach from the south in which a strong piquet was posted at night. Boats being unable to come in at low water we made a causeway across the mud flats to a deep-water landing-place.... We were annoyed at first by spies and small parties of the enemy at night, so I sent out scouring parties and destroyed their villages, bringing in large quantities of beautiful peaches, potatoes, and other vegetables.”
At the end of January, General Cameron had accumulated enough stores at Ngaruawahia to warrant his advancing farther to the southward. He therefore worked up the right bank of the Waipa, building and garrisoning redoubts as he advanced, and in a few days reached the village of Te Rore, where for nearly three weeks he was brought to a halt—not by the enemy, but by the eternal difficulty of supply and transport. Shoals in the rivers made water-carriage uncertain, and though the crews of the little steamers, the flat-bottomed row-boats, and the other craft specially built for the expedition did their best, this mode of transport was always liable to break down. By land things were no better. In the plain between the Waikato and Waipa rivers there were hardly any roads, and the native paths, winding through forests of tree ferns, were so narrow that men could only march in single file. These paths crossed innumerable creeks running in deep watercourses, impassable for guns or waggons till roads had been cut down the steep banks and bridges thrown over the streams. The difficulty of keeping supplied even the small number of men—less than 2500—who were concentrated at Te Rore was enormous, for though Cameron’s headquarters were only eighty miles from his base at Auckland, every box of “stores had to be shifted twelve or fourteen times on account of changes of land and water carriage.”[201] To relieve this strain Cameron cut a road through the bush to Raglan, a port twenty miles distant on the west coast, and thus gained a second or subsidiary base, but as a set-off to this advantage a considerable number of men were necessarily withdrawn from active operations to guard the new line of communication.
While the advance depôt at Te Rore was being gradually filled up, the Maoris threw up a formidable chain of works to bar farther advance into their country; but after a few skirmishes they were manœuvred from these positions and disappeared into the mountains in the centre of the island. To prevent their return down the Waikato river, a post was formed on its left bank at Pukerima, and manned by the headquarter companies of the XVIIIth from Ngaruawahia. The stay of the battalion at the Maori capital had been uneventful, though to celebrate the temporary reunion of most of the companies pony races and sports for the men were organised, and made a welcome break in the monotony of the campaign, for in the long intervals between active operations amusements for all ranks were not to be obtained. An officer writes: “There were very few opportunities during the war for gymkhanas and that sort of thing, and a ‘sing-song’ over the camp-fire was as much as could be attempted. Occasionally a little duck-shooting from canoes was obtainable if we were stationed near a river, or more rarely a raid on the semi-wild boar sometimes to be met with in the bush. Pigeon-shooting was sometimes to be had, but this was about all.”
Not all the companies went with headquarters to the new post; some held the works on the lower reaches of the river, and a detachment of four companies under Captain Ring was at Te Awamutu, where Colonel Carey, recently promoted to be Brigadier-General and second-in-command of the forces in New Zealand, was throwing up strong redoubts. Here everything appeared to be quiet until a scouting party of colonists discovered that a number of Maoris had slipped back to the Waikato plain, and were vigorously entrenching themselves a few miles off near the native village of Orakau. Carey at once reconnoitred the pah, and decided to move on the enemy’s position during the night; the main column was to advance on Orakau,[202] while smaller parties were to place themselves by forced marches on the enemy’s flank and rear. Like a good soldier, Carey did not issue his orders till the last moment, and it was not till after dark on the 30th of March that the officers of the detachment of the XVIIIth heard the news, which reached them in a very dramatic manner. They were sitting at mess in a native hut, dimly lighted by a few camp lanterns, when the voice of a staff officer was heard calling for Ring, who in a few minutes returned, looking pale and depressed. Waiting until the soldier servants had left the hut to reply to his comrades’ inquiries as to the cause of his sudden gloom, he explained that the detachment was to march that night to attack the pah, and he added in confidence that he had a presentiment that his last hour was close at hand. “I have taken part in many affairs of this kind,” he said, “but I have never felt as I do now.” When his friends “chaffed” him and tried to cheer him up, he answered, “Oh! never fear. I’ll do my duty.” After issuing the necessary orders to the detachment he wrote his farewell letters, hastily put his affairs in order, and then marched off with the advance-guard, which he had the honour on this occasion to command.