SIR GEORGE GREY AND HIS TROOPS.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume IV, Issue 201, 18 November 1864, Page 2 (Supplement)

SIR GEORGE GREY AND HIS TROOPS.

[From the Oi'os's, November 7. j

"VYe have been living in a country torn by rebellion for more than a year and a’-half. Durum the greater part of that period we have had at our disposal ten thousand British troops, with their arms of precision, parks of artillery, and other implements of scientific war. We have had in addition to these, between 1,000 and 5,000 men of the colonial forces on regular pay, enlisted for a term of years ; and we have had between <I,OOO and 5,000 militia and volunteers—some takirm part in the strife ; all ready to do so whenever the wave of actual hostilities might sweep into the neighbourhood of their homes,"whieh it v,as their business to defend. Add to this five man-of-war steamers of the British navy, and at least six other iron steamers (one iron-clad), the property of the Colonial Government ; a transport corps of nearly 2,000 horses; and a cavalry defence force 300 strong.

The enemy against whom this great armament was arrayed consisted of perhaps 3,000 men in arms, but of whom it is believed not 1,500 were ever brought into the field at one time, or in one district. It is further believed that in no action which has been fought were there so many as 600 of the enemy opposed to our troops ; while, in some of the bloodiest encounters, not more than 250 or 300 were opposed to a force on our side of at least from twice to four or six times that number. These enemies, with whom our army had to fight, were armed with old flint and steel Tower muskets, with Brummagem fowling-pieces, with tomahawks, with sticks, with greenstone meres, and similar weapons. At one time they had three old cannons, taken from the wreck ofa whaler, out of which they fired steelyard weights, stones, tenpenny nails, door handles, and other metal of the same sort. These rough and ready warriors had no uniforms, and no clothes but a few shirts and blankets ; they were innocent of goose step, of quick march, of slow march, of right about face, and “shoulder arnims.”’ Their ammunition was various: musket balls, boys’ marbles, plugs of wood, hobnails, and whatever would go into or come out of the muzzle ofa gun. They had no doctors, with scalpels, and handsaws, and catheters, and lint, and pills, and potions’ and dog-latin ; no Deputy-Commissary-Oenerals, with scarlet and gold, and blue ; no practised athletes enrolled as military trains ; no bands of music nor rations of rum to put heart into a man ; while their oifleers were equally ignorant of Jomini and billiards, and not one of them owed a tailor’s bill.

Yet, this wretched ragged rabble ; this undisciplined half-starved naked assemblage of savages, have managed to hold their own, and find full employment for all the Whitworths and Enfields and Terrys, the doctors and the D.A.C.G.’s, the transport corps and military trains, the bands of music and rations of rum, which form the fighting material of the three generals, the countless colonels, the innumerable majors, captains, lieuten ani s, and ensigns, who have been sent 15,000 miles to give these barelegged gentry a lesson in ‘ the disciplines of the wars.” We have lost all faith in the history of British wars. Poiotiers and Aginconrt were troubadour songs ; Oudenarde, Ramillies, and Blenheim, were ‘•works of fiction Plasscy, Assaye, and Seringapatam were “Eastern talcs ; Salamanca, Yittona, and Waterloo, were only John Bull's bra<* ; while Lucknow and Delhi were highly coloured ’ fables invented as set-ofisjo the Cabul retreat and Chillianwallah. On no other principle but one we account for the immense difference between that which we have heard and that which we see. The historians and newspaper correspondents would have us believo that these very troops, 10,000 of whom have scarcely succeeded in getting up a little excitement among the unbreeched Maoris, forced their way through overwhelming armies of Sepoys, and fought and gained, under Havelock and Clyde, six or seven pitched battles in every week ! Let them tell it to the M arines | for our part we decline to believe it. We say it is absolutely unreasonable to expect ns to believe it. The Sepoys were well trained wall armed, well clothed, well led, well officered, and they outnumbered our troops by twenty to one; the whole country swarmed with them ; they had fortified cities, lines of defence, the sympathies of at least a hundred million of their countrymen, and a climate which was to them an ally worth an army of a hundred thousand men. Yet we are told "that Havelock and Outram, and (he Lawrences, and Clyde, and a few more such, with these very troops" that we have in New Zealand, beat down, crushed, extinguished, and utterly trod out in barely two years, the most fearful revolt which ever occurred in the world’s history. Here, with an undisciplined, bare-legged Maori rabble, without cities or appliances of war, without even the sympathies of half of their own people, and unable to bring into the field a tenth of our forces, we have been a year and a half attempting to put down a feebly organized rebellion, and haven’t done it. We repeat ; let them tell it to the Marines.

There is, however, another theory on which we can, periiaps, reconcile tiio amazing discrepancy. When (he great armies of Britain stained with their victorious blood the plains of France and Spain, or carried their colours in triumph to the remote waters of the Sutlej or the Ganges, it, was meant that they should do it. When Wellington drove from tiic Peninsula the armies of the Empire, or Havelock rescued English women at Delhi, they went to their work unchecked and unconstrained. It was for that they were sent; and that they did. Not so in New Zealand. There has been here a check-string at work, and that in the hands of a man who never pulls n string but for his own purposes. The master of ten thousand bayonets, the “great pro-Consul” saw that any army might be used for more purposes than putting down a revolt. It might be used for building up a reputation ; —a reputation that bad been lor years on the wane, and which could alone be retrieved by some adroit desperate game, such os only the master of ten thousand bayonets could play; Credit is to be gained, not by the army _££2lT!jjTi Tl s a peace, but by the Governor who

patches one up. Donee it is that the revolt in New Zealand at the end of eighteen months is still uncrushed Hence it is that the great section of the British army which has been quartered here for so long lias so few laurels to show, and will carry away with it when it goes so little additional fume. The revolt which it was sent to quell will be smothered for a season by a “peace proclamation and the British Government will no doubt be told that the work for which the army and (hegreat pro-Consul wore sent has been successfully accomplished. The army will be recalled and go perhaps to some field where “great proConsuls” will not thwart its work. There it may do its work as it has ever done when allowed to do it, with credit to itself, with advantage to those whose interests, as part of the polieo of nations, it was sent to protect. But New Zealand will not rank as its most glorious field, nor will history he ready to record that the work it was sent to’ do was done. No blame, however, to it. The hlamq of a wasted opportunity, and of a future field of trouble when (hat army shall be gone, rests on other shoulders, on the shoulders of one to whom an army and a efiony are alike as dust in the balance, weighed against his own self-aggrandise-ment.

So the army will go home, with a feeling of disgust, not very well understanding what it came here for, what it was taken away for, or what it did when it was here. It will never feel exactly sure whether it was in winter quarter or in a campaign ; and when it gets the medal and the promotion, the V.C.’s, and the bits of ribbon which rail to the lot of the favoured few, it will perhaps arrive at the conclusion that they who distribute these rewards know all about the matter, and are satisfied with the result of the year and a half’s occupation of those broad plains of Waikato, to which their late opponents are invited to return in peace, on signing a declaration of allegiance, and giving up a few acres of hill and swamp, to the satisfaction of the Governor and the General.

And all that we who remain behind will know is, that that great scandal to the British name, the destruction of the province of Taranaki, remains unredressed, and its restoration unattempted ; that the leading rebel tribe, the Ngatimaniapoto, lias scarcely lost a man, and not an acre of its land has been taken possession of by our army ; that Thompson, the Kingmaker, still holds out his sulky independence, ready to renew the strife; that Wanganui, and the country thence to Wellington, are only saved from sharing the same fate of Taranaki by the services of a friendly tribe and the discretion of the settlers ; that even the principal fruit of the last summer’s campaign, the prisoners of Rangiriri, have slipped through the great proConsul’s fingers, and now threaten us with a Northern war ; and that the country is in reality in a more perilous state by far than it was before the 10,000 British bayonets were sent to our relief.