Untitled

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume III, Issue 174, 13 May 1864, Page 2

It is with deep, but unavailing sorrow that we have read the disastrous tidings from Tauranga. Sorrow for the brave and glorious dead slain in that terrible struggle, and sorrow that we should ever have to ; ecord the melancholy and humiliating fact that a handful of ill-armed savages sheltered behind apparently insignificant defences, should repulse with fearful loss the flower of picked and tried troops whose “ flag has braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze,” and whose laurels were never withered by an unsuccessful fight. While the attention of the whole civilised world is directed to the perfection of guns, gunnery, and missiles of destruction of all sorts, while millions of pounds sterling are annually spent in experiments in the art of war, and while the utmost skill and ingenuity ot our naval and civil architects is yearlv exhausted upon the construction of impregnable defences by sea and by land, a few barbarians, without science, means, or money, in an incredibly short time, with no better tools than spades, and no better materials than earth and branches, construct a fortification sufficiently strong to defy the concentrated fire of several powerful batteries of shot and shell, maintained for many hours, and ultimately to repulse with fearful loss a brave but rash assault made upon their uncouth position by the bravest troops on earth led by the flower of m odern chivalry. Truly, wonders never cease, and if the fact of the successful resistance made by those few natives from behind their earthworks is to be accepted as a precedent in military engineering, it would seem that the less time and money spent upon what are called National Defences the better for the people, in more ways than one ; first, as regards the important question of cost, and secondly as regards the equally important question of success. That we shall by sheer force of numbers, and by the irresistible combination of every conceivable scientific and other means, at length overcome the Maoris is not open to doubt, but that that object will be accomplished gloriously and satisfactorily is exceedingly questionable.

The cunning instincts of ferocious and bloodthirsty animals as always keenly active in times of danger and in times when selfpreservation is the grand point. The whole vulpine and feline families adopt all sorts of devices to frustrate their enemies, and to save their own lives. By the same instincts of self-preservation, all warlike savage nations defend themselves with an ingenuity, skill, and bravery which is truly astonishing. We are not sanguine of a speedy termination of the war ; the very nature of our method of fighting insures a long continuation of the struggle—a struggle, we need hardly say, necessitated by untoward circumstances, but inglorious and ruinous in its results.

The boasted power of the British nation very faintly affects - these natives, nor’ shall we witness any material diminution in their hostility or any signs of peace, until some daring ©eds are done, and some acts of individual and collective bravery convince the ingenious and bold warriors of Waikato that we are as brave and enduring as themselves. It appears to us that roving bands of determined men penetrating up and down into the strongholds of the enemy’s country would do more to inspire terror in the minds of the Maoris than all the “ pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war” as at present practised by us as against that people.