THE MAORI BATTALION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 240, 28 January 1944, Page 13

THE MAORI BATTALION

THE PRICE OF CITIZENSHIP: By A. T. aa Printed by Whitcombe and — ombs. HIS is a strangely moving record | of the 28th Maori Battalion, with historical notes and commentary by Sir Apirana Ngata. But it is not easy for a pakeha to do it justice. The Ngata of Politics we know. This is Ngata, the Maori, proud, mystical, an interpreter of dreams. "A few days before my father died in 1924, I saw him in a dream standing on the plaza of the runanga house in the failing light of evening. I hurried home at the end of March, 1929, after an inspection of what is now the Ngakuru estate, ‘developed by the Lands Department, after a similar warning of the coming loss of my eldest son and his mother. Twelve years passed before the psychic mystery recurred. My youngest son on the night after he was captured in Greece appeared on his native marae to inform me that he had been taken the night before, a fact that he later confirmed by letter." So the "sad roll of honour" from Tunisia, 12 relatives killed with Moana Ngarimu, and 41 other relatives wounded, was foreshadowed in a dream, and it is not stretching words beyond their mystical meaning to say that this book is the interpretation and fulfilment. It is first of all a complete roll of the battalion with battle-honours, wounds and deaths to the end of the Tunisian campaign. But it is also a tribute by a Maori to Maoris, a glimpse into the Maori mind, and a call to the rest of us to "realise the implications of the joint participation of Pakeha and Maori in this last and greatest demonstration of the highest citizenship."