We are not concerned to follow in any detail the course of the war, but only to speak of Bishop Selwyn’s activities during it. Ten thousand troops had gathered in the country and there was not a single chaplain with them. The Bishop therefore joined the army as chaplain. He hoped thus not only to minister to the troops, but to be in a position to protect his native teachers and Christians. He lived in camp, pitched his own tent and shared the life of the soldiers, who admired him for his courage and endurance. An English officer describes how he first saw him. Looking through his telescope he perceived the figure of a man on foot rapidly making his way to the mission station; after a while he came to a small stream, and was observed feeling for its bottom with a long stick; when it proved too deep to be forded he stript, tied his clothes in a bundle on his head and swam across. Selwyn was on his way to warn a native clergyman of the coming of the English soldiers, and to protect him and his school. During the trying months of war which followed, he did all he could to help both sides, and thus earned the criticism of both colonists and Maoris, they could not understand his position, nor perceive that his one desire was to mitigate the cruel sufferings of war. “If there must be war,” he said, “our great effort ought to be to debrutalise it, and the army from the General downwards, have shown every willingness that it should be so.” He held constant services for the soldiers, attended to the wounded, buried the dead, and fortunately got permission from the War Office to appoint three other chaplains to assist him. During these days he wrote (December 4th, 1863): to his sons in England: “It is a strange thing to be moving up the Waikato with an army, after twenty years of an annual visit of a peaceful kind. To see the hills crowned with English forts, and steamers smoking on the river, is a strange and to me a painful subject of reflection.” He sought for wounded men, both Maori and English, in the swamps after an engagement, fearless of stray gunshots. A naval chaplain, who was helping him, was riding with him one day through dense bush, said to be infested with Maoris, when they came to a part of the road cut up with deep ruts on the side of a steep hill. The Bishop jumped from his horse and proceeded to fill up the ruts so as to save the wagons for provisioning the troops from being capsized. Further on, he found an Irish soldier lying drunk and bareheaded, and got down to drag him into shelter saying: “Those men do not know the danger of sunstroke.” To the misery of watching these scenes of war was added the bitter disappointment of seeing the conduct of the natives. Selwyn wrote to the Bishop of Adelaide: