Kimble [Kimball] Bent An Unusual European Who Deserted The British Army And Joined The Hau Hau #24

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

The grim story of that hard-fought retreat through the bush was 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 by the foremost of the pursuing Hauhaus, and was lying there feigning death, hoping that the rest of the Maoris would pass on and not notice him.

The Nga-Rauru man, however, stopped and looked closely at the prostrate pakeha.

He said to one of his comrades, “I don't think that man is dead.

Going up to the Constabulary man, he put his hand on his shoulder, and said in English, “Wake up”

The white man opened his eyes.

He exclaimed, “Save my life, Let me go, and I'll never forget you, I'll repay you for it.”

The Nga-Rauru man, who must have been a humorous kind of barbarian, said to his victim, again in English, “Go on your knees and pray to your God to save your life”

The soldier knelt as he was told, and ejaculated some sort of a prayer.

Playing with his prey, the savage asked, “Well, are you saved now?”

The kneeling soldier looked up but could make no answer.

He stared at his terrible-looking captor, with horror in his eyes.

“Poroporoaki ki to Atua” (“Say farewell to your God”) cried the Maori, and swinging his gun round in both hands, he brought it butt down with a frightful smashing blow on the soldier's head.

The man fell backwards dead.

His slayer stripped him of his uniform and accoutrements, and a little later could have been seen dancing a furious haka in front of the stockade, his face blackened with charcoal from the charred tree-stumps, the soldier's cap on his head, and the captured carbine in his hand.

Young Tutange Waionui was in the thick of the skirmishing.

“My weapons that day,” he says, “were a tupara (double-barrelled gun) and a revolver.

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The gun was a muzzle-loader, I preferred it to the breech-loaders used by the pakeha because something was always going wrong with them.

I could load (puru-pu) very quickly, but a quicker man was old Te Waka-tapa-ruru, he who was killed, there was no one so expert as he at loading a muzzle-loader.”

What scenes of horror followed that battle in the bush.

The Hauhaus were in a delirium of triumphant savagery.

Like frenzied things, they came dancing and yelling back to the pa.

They had blackened their ferocious faces with charcoal from the burnt tree-stumps in front of the pa.

Singing war-songs, shouting Pai-marire cries, dancing their weapons in the air, projecting their long snaky tongues and rolling their eyes till only the whites were visible, set in a petrifying glare, the grimace of the pukana, it was a sight that brought fear to the heart of the lone white man, accustomed though he was by this time to spectacles of barbaric ferocity.

The women were as wild and savage-looking as the men, their dark eyes blazing with excitement, their faces black-painted like the warriors, their loosened hair flying behind them, many of them nude from the waist up, waving shawls, mats, tomahawks, in welcome to the returning heroes, shouting, singing, screaming.

Outside the front fence of the pa, just as they fell, among the logs and stumps and on the blood-stained ground, lay the dead men whom the retreating A.C.'s [Armed Constabulary] had been compelled to leave on the battle-field.

There were seven of them.

Upon these fallen soldiers rushed the Hauhaus.

They stripped them of their uniforms.

They tied flax-leaf ropes around the necks of the dead pakehas and hauled them away to the gateway of the pa.

As they dragged the corpses off, leaping from side to side as they hauled in a fury of blood-madness, they shouted out such sentences as these.

“Taku kai, Taku kai, E hara ka kite noho koe taku kai, taku tika, taku he! Nau te kino, naku whakahoki tou kino.

Taea hokitia, te mahi o te atua a Titokowaru”

(“My food, My food, Behold my food, behold the right and the wrong of it all.

'Twas you”, addressing the slain, “that wrought the evil work. And I have returned your evil. Behold the work of the god of Titokowaru”)

A young Hauhau, huge-limbed and naked but for a very brief waist-mat of dangling flax, leapt to the side of one of the white men's bodies, just as it is harnessed in so revolting a fashion to be dragged into the pa.

His tomahawk flashes in the air above him as he steps over the fallen soldier, once, twice, thrice.

He thrusts in a hand into a huge gaping wound in the dead man's breast, he is searching for something.

He rises with some object, all bloody, in his horrible red hand.

He sticks his tomahawk back into his girdle, he comes bounding from the corpse, waving his dripping trophy in his hand, swinging it around his head. His fiendish yells ring echoing over the forest clearing.

What is it he flourishes so exultingly?

It is the white man's heart.

This is the young warrior Tihirua, the priest of the burnt sacrifice.

He has torn out the manawa [heart] of the soldier, as a mawe, an offering to the God of War.

At his waist, buckled to his flax girdle, is a leather pouch, such as was generally used for carrying percussion-caps.

Out of this, he takes matches, pakeha matches, Striking match after match, he holds them underneath the bleeding heart until it is singed, and dark smoke goes up from it, incense to Uenuku, the war-god, who appears to his savage worshippers in the arch of the rainbow.

The heathen rite, the ceremony of the Whangaihau, performed, Tihirua flings down his terrible trophy and then directs the hauling of the bodies into the palisaded inferno.
. . . . .

Bent, standing just outside the pa gateway, watched the in-bringing of the bodies of his fellow-whites, prelude, he too well knew, to a cannibal feast.

He turned to enter the village, when an old Maori, tugging away madly at a flax line which he had made fast to the neck of a dead man, caught sight of him and shouted,

“You, pakeha, Come and give me a hand.

Help me to drag in my food”

“What do you want?” Bent heard a rough voice ask.

He turned and saw the war-chief Titokowaru standing at his side. “What do you want of this pakeha?”

The Maori replied that he wished the white man to help him haul the soldier's body into the marae.

“No” cried the chief in his great hoarse voice. “No, you must not call upon my pakeha to help you. He shall not touch the bodies of his countrymen.”

So the war-captain and his cartridge-maker stood by watching the frightful procession of Hauhaus and their prizes.

The seven naked bodies were dragged into the pa and laid out in the centre of the marae.

The excited people all gathered in a great circle around the bodies.

One after another the orators leapt out from the squatting ranks, their eyes flashing wildly in the pukana glare, they bounded to and fro, and cut the air with their tomahawks as they told the thrilling episodes of the fight.

All the clothes, arms, and accoutrements taken from the dead and wounded were laid before Titokowaru.

“Whose was this?” the war-chief would ask, picking up a carbine, or an ammunition-pouch, or a soldier's tunic from the heap.

“Mine,” replied the man who had taken it on the battle-field.

“Take it away, then,” said Titokowaru. “Whose is this?” picking up another trophy.

“It is mine,” a young man would reply; “it is my first spoils of war, a tanga-ika.”

“Burn it,” was the chief's order.

Then the human bodies lying on the marae were apportioned one by one, to each tribe, as piles of food are served out at a ceremonial Maori gathering.

“Nga-Rauru, this is yours, Tangahoe, this is yours” and so on, till the seven bodies were all disposed of.

A woman sat weeping on the marae.

She was Te Hau-karewa, wife to one Te Rangi-whakairipapa and a sister of Te Waka-tapa-ruru, the old warrior who had fallen in his desperate rush upon the white enemy that morning.

Though old, she was a tall, fine-looking woman, with a mass of black curly hair.

Ceasing her tangi for the dead, when the bodies of the soldiers were laid out on the ground, she rose, and, taking a stick in her hand, she walked along the row of the dead men and struck each a blow on the head.

“Upoko-kohua” she cried vehemently, with hate flashing in her eyes; “Upoko-kohua, Ka taona koe ki te umu, he utu mo taku tungane kua mate, ko Te Waka-tapa-ruru, Mehemea ko au i tata i taku tungane i te takiwa i mate ai, ka kainga au i te karu o te tangata nana i whakamatea Te Waka”

(“Boiled heads, Cursed heads, Soon ye'll be cooked in the oven, as payment for the death of my brother, Te Waka-tapa-ruru. Had I but been near my brother when he fell, I would have swallowed the eyes of the man who slew him”)

Then, throwing away her stick, she sat down again, and fell to weeping in the very abandonment of woe, for the savage woman of the woods loved her grim warrior-brother greatly.

Info From

The first of the below posts has a list of the previous posts of Maori Myths and Legends

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/how-war-was-declared-between-tainui-and-arawa

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-curse-of-manaia-part-1

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-curse-of-manaia-part-2

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-hatupatu-and-his-brothers

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/hatupatu-and-his-brothers-part-2

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-the-emigration-of-turi-an-ancestor-of-wanganui

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-continuing-legend-of-turi

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/turi-seeks-patea

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-manaia-and-why-he-emigrated-to-new-zealand

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-love-story-of-hine-moa-the-maiden-of-rotorua