THE SLEEPERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 238, 9 October 1933, Page 6

THE SLEEPERS.

"They came a long way to sleep in my garden, and I wanted to see their home," said a French official visitor now in the Dominion. He referred to the fact that in his garden near Arras there were the graves of fifty-seven Australian and New Zealand soldiers. It is a gentle and poetic way of softening down war's tragedy. The greatest of writers have often likened death to peaceful slumber. "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come." The Maori has a phrase of beauty often used in alluding to death: "K moo ana i te moe roa," "Sleeping the long sleep." Our French visitor's description of his garden of the sleeping ones recalls a like touching speech from a North New Zealand chief to a Governor of the colony. The Maori, a gallant old warrior, did honour to the slumbering men in his native soil, though they had been his foes.

In the Maori churchyard at Ohaeavvai, close, to the main road from Kaikohe to the Bay of Islands, occupying exactly the site of the stockade which Colonel Despard unsuccessfully attacked in 1845, there lie the remains of over forty British soldiers who fell in the battle. Governor Sir George Bowen, in a dispatch in 1870 to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, mentioned a visit he had recently made to Ohaeawai, and said that the Maoris there had just erected a pretty church on the site of the fortifications of Heke's war, "among the now decayed palisades and rifle pits," and that they had reserved the whole of the pa as a burying ground. "When the Bishop of Auckland," the Governor continued, '■'shall have consecrated this new burial ground the Maoris intend to remove into it the remains of our soldiers who now lie in unmarked graves in the neighbouring forest, and to erect a monument over them, so that, as an aged chief, formerly conspicuous among our enemies, said to me, 'The brave warriors of both races, the white skin and the brown, now that all strife between them is forgotten, may sleep side by side until the end of the world.'

"I question," the Governor said, "if there be a more touching episode in the annals of the warfare of even civilised nations in either ancient or modern times."

The Ngapuhi reinterred tho bones of those British soldiers in tho sacred ground beside the church, within its high stone wall. A Celtic cross was sent up by tho Government, no doubt at Bowen's suggestion. This stands on the graves and overlooks the old battlefield, and it bears an inscription in Maori in memory of "the soldiers and sailors of the Queen who fell here at Ohaeawai."

The Maoris displayed greater consideration for tho Queen's redcoats killed in that forlorn hope than Despard, tho commander, did himself. The three officers killed were buried in the Waimate churchyard and inscribed stones mark their graves. But the humble non-coms, and privates wore presumably too numerous to give similar churchyard burial. Had it not been for the remonstrances of Tamati Waka Xene and the other friendly chiefs the colonel would have marched off to Wahnato leaving- his dead unburiod, so overcome was he by his failure. However, they slept, as soundly in their trenches in the fern as their officers in the sanctified ground. —J.C.