Failing in their first attempt to take the redoubt by assault, some of the Hauhaus took post on the rising ground a little distance off, where they could fire into the work, and one after another the defenders dropped, shot dead or badly wounded. The ditch was full of Maoris. Only the narrow parapet separated them from the whites, and they yelled at the defenders and shouted all the English "swear-words" in their vocabulary. The _pakehas_ "talked back" at them, says one of the few survivors of the heroic garrison, and cried "Look out! The cavalry are coming!" but the Hauhaus only laughed and said, "Gammon, _pakeha_--gammon!" Then, finding that any Maori who showed his head above the parapets was quickly shot down, they started to dig away at the wall with their tomahawks, and succeeded in undermining the parapet in several places. By this time half the garrison had been shot down. One of the first killed was Corporal Blake, who fell in one of the angles. Private Shields, the captain's orderly, was killed in one of the angles; Private George Holden was shot dead behind the parapet; Gaynor was killed at the gate. Then Sergeant McFadden fell while bravely helping to hold an angle against the swarming enemy. Private Alexander Beamish, who fell mortally wounded while helping to defend an angle of the fort, told his brother, John Beamish (now a resident of Patea), who was fighting by his side, just before he died, that he believed it was a white man who shot him. Bent says that the deserter Kane, while taking part in the attack, was wounded in the right cheek by a _pakeha_ bullet, and then retired from the fight. John Beamish was struck by an Enfield bullet and severely wounded about the time his brother was shot, but though then unable to shoulder his carbine, he opened packets of ammunition and passed cartridges to Gill, the only unwounded man in his angle of the redoubt, until the end of the combat. Here is John Beamish's story of the fight, as he told it to me some years back: "The Maoris surrounded the redoubt and tried again and again to swarm over the wall, and they kept it up till broad daylight. We could not see much at first but the flashing of guns all around us. Presently some of the Maoris set fire to the _wharés_ outside the redoubt. They were armed with muzzle-loading Enfields and shot-guns, and we could now and then see the ramrods going up and down as they rammed the charges home. Then sometimes we would see the flash of a tomahawk and catch a glimpse of a black head above the parapets. One of our troubles was that there were no loopholes in the parapets, otherwise we could have shot many of the Maoris in the ditch. We were exposed to the fire of the enemy on the rising ground close by, and this was how so many of the men in our angle were hit.