THE MASSACRE OF TAURANGA.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume IV, Issue 194, 30 September 1864, Page 3

THE MASSACRE OF TAURANGA.

(From tiio United Service Gazette, July 23.) Patiently have we waited until the New Zealand Loan Bill had passed its final stage in the House of Commons, in the faint hope that some military member would have the pluck and the professional sympathy even in the eleventh hour to task a question or two respecting the massacre of Tauranga. We knew that Sir James Fergusson had reasonable gifts of speech, and that Colonel Bartclott had never been silent when the interests of his order were concerned. To G eneral Peel we looked forward as at once the practical soldier and statesman, with clearness of expression to make himself understood, and political weight and influence sufficient to cause him to be attended to, as likely to demand the why and wherefore of the brutal slaughter of our troops, and whether the precious and costly soldiers of the Queen wore again to be used as instruments by the land-robbers of New Zealand in their nefarious enterprises. But the whole of our military members have failed their comrades at the pinch. One of the most distinguished regiments in the service has been dropped into a trap to be slaughtered like rats in a hole, and the promoters of that slaughter have hardly waited to pick up the mutilated corpses before they commenced calumniating the dead, Wh at must be the sensations of the wife of the English clergyman at Cologne when she reads of the murder of her two brave sons, and in the same despatch an insinuation that cowardice and panic were the causes of the calamity ? The widow of Capt. Lloyd raves in helpless distraction over details of Maori cruelty, and shudders us she learns that the head of her deceased husband is being carried from pah to pah in barbarian triumph ; but what would the unhappy woman’s emotion be if she further knew that such dreadful events had produced no kind word in the English Parliament, nor any legislative measure but the adoption of a loan to enable the rapacious colonists of New Zealand to send more of our soldiers into the slaughter. No ; the New Zealand Loan Bill has gone through all its stages ; an enlightened and humane Colonial Minister has sacrificed his own convictions to official necessities in promoting the job, and neither in the first, nor the second, nor the third reading, nor in committee, nor on the report, has a single voice been raised in expostulation against their being still employed in a murderous, an inglorious, and a plundering war, of which they must reap all the danger and the disgrace, whilst a gang of swindling landshurks absorb all the profits. It cive us some, although a melancholy gratification, to believe that now, for not the first time, the United Service Gazette has given a lead which its cotemparaies of the general press have not been unwilling to follow. The all-powerful Times shakes its head doubtingly over this New Zealand war, and although its relations with the Government paralyze its leading columns somewhat, it gives free insertion to correspondence painting in true and melancholy colours the game which is being played at the antipodes, and of which our brave soldiers are the counters. The House of Commons lias given but a reluctant assent to this Loan Bill, and has only been silenced by a conspiracy of officials and ex-officials, the former bound hand and foot by promises extracted from them by New Zealand attorneys, the latter anxious to have difficulties smoothed away before their own accession to office. Mr Cardwell, good easy man ! has not been half sharp enough for the deputation that has come over to negotiate this “loan,” which will most probably become a gift before the termination of the ensuing session of Parliament. Sir Stafford Northcote, who runs neck and neck with Mr Disraeli for the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in the coming Conservative Ministry! would not for the world strew his official path with a single unneccessary thorn. Perish officers, perish men, perish the reputation of the British army. Military incapacity must be condoned, colonial rapacitymust be fed, everything, in short, must be submitted to, so as that an emharrax may be avoided both for Ministers and tiieir proximate successors at the end of this last session of a long and useless Parliament. There is in General Cameron's despatch a passage which, unless all other contemporaneous accounts of the Tauranga slaughter be false, must contain a wilful perversion of the truth. We allude to the lines in which he states that he cannot account for the sudden retreat of our men except by supposing that they became confused by the loss of their officers and perplexed by the interior intricacies of the pah. There arc two devices in use amongst the Sopiiists which they use when their object is to “ make the worse appear the better reason,” and one of which seems to have been in the mind of General Cameron when penning this notable despatch. Sometimes the Sophists took the cause for the effect, and sometimes the effect for the cause. General Cameron has adopted the latter expedient, and has thus contrived to slur over ingeniously his own share in the terrible calamity which took place. The men were confused by the sudden annihiiationof all their officers, and perplexed by the interior intricacies of the pah! Why were the officers slaughtered, and why did the intricacies of the pah come upon the assaulting column by surprise ? Because General Cameron had ordered his officers regardless of their lives to ascend an impracticable broach, when his proper

course would have been a mine or n distant cannonade, and because he had forgotten that the Maorics were adepts at an ambush, and neglected to forewarn his men of the probable danger with which they would have to contend when they entered the pah. We consider that General Cameron, bravo and zealous thought he bo, has shown himself to be utterly unfit for the chief command in such a war, and that the Minister who much longer entrusts him with the lives of 10,000 of our soldiers will be guilty of constructive manslaughter. The House of Commons has, we conceive, committed two grievous sins, one of omission and the other oi commission, in connection with the Loan Bill. It has omitted, through its military members, to have the slaughter at Tauranga and its causes properly cleared up, and it has committed the unpardonable folly, if not crime, of furnishing the landsharks of New Zealand with fresh means of carrying on their filibustering war. We hope that the military members may not yet see reason to regret their subservient silence on this occasion. We have amongst other things one strange and unusual cause alleged for the retreat of the 43rd at Tauranga. We are told, forsooth, of the soldiers being “ demoralized,” disgusted, in short, with the character and policy of the war Hence is a doctrine at once now and dangerous, and which, if permitted to stand as a precedent, must ultimately prove fatal to the discipline of the Army. Whoever before heard of British soldiers holding a caucus before going into battle, and discussing the pros and eons of the cause for which they were about to fight. Wo had fancied that all a British soldier wished to understand was the order of his commanding officer, and it is therefore that we hold General Cameron so tightly to his responsibility for ignorantly throwing away the lives of the officers and men of the 43rd, and then in his despatch slurring over the facts in order to conceal his culpability. But now we are told, told ovenday in the columns of the Times, that our soldiers in New Zealand are disgusted with the motives of the war, and therefore allow themselves to be repulsed and their officers murdered by the savage Maoris. Let our military members v>ho have shrunk from defending the dead, or vindicating the living, in this New Zealand debate ponder over the significant fact which we have just noticed, and let them ask themselves how our troops are in future to be led to battle if the men get into the habit of discussing the pros and cons of the quarrel instead of implicitly obeying the order to “March?”