Orakau was abandoned. The Gate Pah had been lost and won. It had also been avenged at Te Ranga, where a hundred and twenty Ngaiterangi warriors lay dead in the trenches, and the 43rd had full _utu_ for the slaughter of their officers and comrades. With few exceptions, all the high chiefs were among the slain. The boastful Rawiri, the chivalrous Te Oriori, the Christian convert Henare Taratoa, had fought their last fight. On the body of the latter was found a letter in the native language, and the text, "If thine enemy hunger, give him food; if he thirst, give him water." Orakau was the Flodden of the Maori nation. As the fugitives from the blood-stained pah trooped across the fords of the Puniu on the night succeeding the fight, the parallel may well have occurred to Sir Walter Scott's countrymen, so many of whom have adopted New Zealand as their home. "Tweed's echoes heard the ceaseless splash, While many a broken band, Disordered through her currents dash, To gain the Scottish land." The war was practically over after the fall of Te Ranga. The turbulent Waikato tribes had lost their high chiefs, their bravest young men. The flower of the land of Maui lay low. The universal wail rose high in a hundred kaingas. Taught by bitter experience, the more intelligent natives had arrived at the conclusion that the resistless pakeha must be obeyed. His soldiers and his sailors, his volunteers and his allies (leading tribes of their own blood), his guns and his mortars, were all too powerful. Their chiefs who had visited England and seen the might of Britain had told them as much before. But, strong in the pride of their own power and the oracles of the Tohungas, they did not believe it. Now it was too plain to be disputed. Defeat was written in the burned and disabled pahs, in the ruined farms, in the confiscated lands of their ancestors, which they had no power to redeem. This, however, was in strict accordance with Maori usage, with the law and custom of Rauparaha, of Hongi Ika, of Te Waharoa, those ruthless conquerors and their ancestors who had ravaged and annexed the lands of tribal foes from time immemorial. _Væ Victis_ was one of the oldest of human laws. It was theirs also. One grim feature of a returning and successful expedition, the train of downcast or weeping slaves, driven along with blows and shouts of derision, was wanting in this campaign. No heads of chiefs or warriors were tossed out or stuck on poles as village after village was passed. No bound captive was handed over to the relations of the fallen for slow and dreadful torture. On the contrary, all the combatants, save those convicted of murder or outrage, were dismissed to their homes, while their wounded were tended in the hospitals of these strangely constituted pakehas with the same care and skilfulness as their own.