SOME STILL LEFT

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 329, 16 September 1932, Page 6

SOME STILL LEFT

MAORI WAR VETERAN LIVING IN WHAKATANE DISTRICT. LAST N.Z. CROSS WINNER "We still have a few human links, a few surviving frontiersmen, to keep the adventurous past of N;sw Zealand close to our modernity, to remind us that the most eventful, even savage, era of this country is not yet more than one lifetime b-shind us," writes "Tangiwai" in the "New Zealand Railways Magazine." He adds: "The last of our New Zealand Cross holders, sturdy old Ben Biddle, still lives up Whakatane way, the last of twentythree Cross men who won the rarest military decoration in the British 3mpire. Out at Petone still lives one of the last of von Tempsky's Forest Rangers, veteran David Taylor, who was in the disastrous bush battle of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu, in which Von Temsky was killed, in 1868. Another old ranger, one of Major Westrupp's men, lives in Lower Hutt. "Old soldiers never die, they say. At any rate they are often tough lads, hard to kill. At the time of writing the veteran Michael Gill survives in Napier, one of the last two sprvivors of the famous 'Die-hards,' the 57th Regiment, of Maori War service. He is over ninety; so, too, is his old com-

rade, Sergeant-Major Bezar, of Wellington. -Gill is on-e of the h'eroes of the defence of Turuturumokai Redoubt, in Taranaki, in 1868. In that warm corner ten out of the little gar_ rison of twenty-two men were killed and six were wounded. "Po-ets have written of the English dead who salted down the outlands of the Empire. As a matter of fact, some of the Imperial regiments whieh fought in our Maori wars were nearly all Irish. In that valiant defence of Turuturumokai against a large body of Hauhaus, nearly all the garrison were Irishmen. The boys from Kilkenny, Tipperary, Skibbereen and Athlone did their share to uphold the mana of Mr. Kipling's 'English Flag' in this country. Michael Gill, tough old Die-hard, is, as he would say himself, 'wan of thim'."