As soon as the Royal Irish landed they were sent to Otahuhu, a camp a little to the south of Auckland, where General Cameron was concentrating his troops. Here the battalion received their campaigning kit: officers and men were provided with blue serge “jumpers,” haversacks, water-bottles and pannikins: all ranks carried a blanket and waterproof sheet, rolled, and slung over the left shoulder; the men were armed with Enfield rifles and bayonets. Five days later the column marched through Drury to the Queen’s redoubt, a work which commanded the crossing of the Waikato at Te Ta. A detachment of two hundred of the XVIIIth, under Captain Inman, was dropped at Drury to hold that post on the line of communication, and a few days later the whole of the battalion appears to have been echeloned along the bush track between Drury and the Queen’s redoubt. On hearing that Cameron was in motion the Maoris divided their forces: one column was to hold the British at the Waikato while the other was to turn Cameron’s left, harass his communications, and if possible swoop upon Auckland. It was with the enemy’s right wing that the Royal Irish were chiefly engaged for the first few months of the war, but before giving an account of their doings it is necessary to sketch very briefly the operations south of the Waikato. On July 12, 1863, Cameron crossed the river and dislodged the enemy from the heights of Koheroa above the Mangatawhari creek. He was, however, unable to follow up this initial success; for nearly three months difficulties of land transport, the want of steamers of sufficiently light draught for river work, and the activity of the Maoris on his rear prevented further movements against the series of works which at various points commanded the right bank of the Waikato. The military genius of the Maoris and its limitations were alike revealed in these fortifications, in which the system of defence evolved by a long series of inter-tribal conflicts had been cleverly adapted to new conditions of war. Before firearms were introduced into New Zealand, the “Maoris’ _pahs_, or stockaded and entrenched villages, usually perched on cliffs and jutting points overhanging river or sea, were defended by a double palisade, the outer fence of stout stakes, the inner of high solid trunks. Between them was a shallow ditch. Platforms as much as forty feet high supplied coigns of vantage for the look-out. Thence, too, darts and stones could be hurled at the besiegers. With the help of a throwing stick, or rather whip, wooden spears could be thrown in the sieges more than a hundred yards. Ignorant of the bow and arrow, and the boomerang, the Maoris knew and used the sling; with it red-hot stones would be hurled over the palisades among the rush-thatched huts of an assaulted village, a stratagem all the more difficult to cope with as Maori _pahs_ seldom contained wells or springs of water.”[190]