"The Maoris surrounded the redoubt and tried again and again to swarm over the wall, and they kept it up till broad daylight. We could not see much at first but the flashing of guns all around us. Presently some of the Maoris set fire to the wharés outside the redoubt. They were armed with muzzle-loading Enfields and shot-guns, and we could now and then see the ramrods going up and down as they rammed the charges home. Then sometimes we would see the flash of a tomahawk and catch a glimpse of a black head above the parapets. One of our troubles was that there were no loopholes in the parapets, otherwise we could have shot many of the Maoris in the ditch. We were exposed to the fire of the enemy on the rising ground close by, and this was how so many of the men in our angle were hit.
"Then they started to dig and cut away at the parapets with their tomahawks. We could plainly hear them at this work, and I heard one Maori ask another for a match. I suppose he wanted to try and fire our buildings inside the walls. One after another our men dropped, shot dead or badly wounded. I had very little hope of ever getting out of the place alive. But we well knew what our fate would be if the Maoris once got over the parapets, so we just put our hearts into it and kept blazing away as fast as we could load. We had breech-loading carbines which had to be capped. One incident I remember was a black head just appearing over the parapet in the grey light, then came a body with a bare arm gripping a long-handled tomahawk. Quietly the Hauhau raised himself up, and was just in the act of aiming a blow at one of our men who did not see him when we fired and brought him down.
"My younger brother was fighting not far from me. He fell mortally wounded, and before he died he told us he believed it was a white man who shot him. I was wounded about the same time. An Enfield bullet struck me in the left shoulder. It took me with a tremendous shock, just as I was stooping down across a dead man to get some dry ammunition. The bullet slanted down past my shoulder-blade and came out at the back. This incapacitated me from firing, or, at any rate, from taking aim, so I had to content myself with passing cartridges to Michael Gill—one of the men in my angle—who kept steadily firing away, and with levelling my unloaded carbine as well as I could with my right hand whenever I saw a head bob up above the parapet. When the fight ended Gill was the only unwounded man in our angle of the redoubt; out of the six who manned it when the alarm was given, three were shot dead and two were wounded. One man, George Tuffin, was wounded in five places.
"Daylight came, and those of us who could shoulder a carbine were still firing away and wondering whether help would ever reach us. We knew they must have heard the firing and seen the flashes of the guns at Waihi redoubt, only three miles away. Suddenly the Maoris ceased firing and retired into the bush. Their sentries had given them warning that troops were coming. As they dropped back we rushed out of the redoubt and gave them the last shot, and then Von Tempsky and his A.C.'s arrived at the double, and the fight was over. My wound kept me in the hospital for five months. The only wonder is that any of us ever came out of that redoubt alive."
The sun had risen before the fight was over. A few minutes more and the Hauhaus would have succeeded in undermining the parapets sufficiently to force an entrance, and the defenders would have fallen to the last man, and the whole of their arms and the post-supplies have been carried off to Titokowaru's fort in the forest.
The little redoubt was a frightful sight. Dead and wounded men were lying all over the place in pools of blood; two of them were shockingly mutilated with tomahawks. Out of the twenty-one defenders of the redoubt, ten were killed and five were wounded; only six came through the fight without a wound.
Hauwhenua withdrew his disappointed Tekau-ma-rua, carrying those of their wounded who were unable to walk, and marched back to Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu. The "lion" of Titoko's speech, though sore wounded, had in truth closed his mouth on some of their most daring braves. Takitaki, a bold, athletic young Hauhau, who was in the Tekau-ma-rua, was one of those who attacked Captain Ross at the gateway. The Captain shattered Takitaki's left arm with a bullet from his revolver before he fell. [6]