The casualties among our officers had been very heavy. Lieutenant Hunter had been killed; Dr Best and Lieutenant Rowan, badly wounded by the first volley, had been carried out of action, while Captain Palmer and Lieutenant Hastings, both badly wounded, had subsequently to be abandoned to the awful fate of falling alive into the hands of the ferocious Hau Haus. In the meantime, Te Kepa had fared much better, for with his warriors well in hand he had worked round the left of the clearing, and with a rattling charge had swept away the party of Hau Haus sent to oppose him, subsequently taking up a strong position ready to storm the pah when ordered to do so. Our plight, however, was now hopeless, as the enemy manned a low, well-bushed hill, the fire from which enfiladed the creek, rendering our position in the bed of it more untenable than ever. Still I am convinced that, had our men all been old hands, our gallant O.C. would have pulled us out of the mess, and we should have won the day, but nothing could be done with the raw new chums, most of whom seemed to be paralysed by the slaughter and the blood-curdling yells of the Hau Haus. This being the case, Colonel McDonnell saw that the only way to preserve the remainder of his force was to order an immediate retreat; so, directing us to carry out the wounded, he despatched his brother, Captain McDonnell, to Von Tempsky with orders for him to at once withdraw his men out of action and join his own party, Te Kepa offering to cover the retreat of our shattered force. We had brought ten stretchers with us: these had been rapidly filled, and as we had now not more than sixty men, officers and privates, left, we were just able to handle fourteen wounded men, four being carried on rifles, as it required at least four men to carry a stretcher and six men to carry a man on rifles through the rough bush, so that all the remaining dead and wounded men had to be abandoned. This abandonment of our wounded comrades was a heart-rending calamity, but nothing else could have been done under the circumstances, although we knew well the dreadful fate that awaited the unfortunates. It takes time to write an account of a scrimmage of this sort, but in reality not ten minutes had elapsed from the moment we had descended into that infernal creek until we started to get out of it, during which period, out of the two hundred white men, one-fourth of our force had bolted, and out of those that had remained over one-third of their number lay dead or dying in the bed of it.