Just as the daylight had begun to light up the top of Mount Egmont, and we had covered about five miles, a long wall of dense blackness appeared in front of us which we knew to be the bush, and we reached it when it was light enough to see a man thirty yards from us. Previous to this we had received the whispered order: “From your centre, five paces extend.” So we were advancing in skirmishing order, and when we were still some twenty yards away a whisper of “’Ware scout” ran along the line as a dim figure stepped from behind a tree and came towards us. This turned out to be George, who with the tea-bucket on his head looked, in the dim light, a blood-curdling apparition. As we had extended from the centre the road made a gap between the two half companies, and being centre man I was next the road on the right-hand side of it. Mr Roach’s position while the company was in skirmishing order was also in rear of the centre, so that he was alongside me when George met us. “Well, George,” said he, “what have you got to tell me, and where is Pierre?” It is no good my endeavouring to try and write what George called English. Talleyrand, I think it was, who said, “Speech was given us to conceal our thoughts with.” Certainly Providence never expected George to convey his in the English tongue, so I will transpose his jargon so far as I understood him. “The bush,” said George, “is not a mile through, and is fairly an open one. The pah stands in a clearing about two hundred yards from the edge of the bush on this side, but not so far on the other. On this side, for more than one hundred yards the trees are cut down after you get out of the bush, but the stumps are left, though the trunks and the branches are all cleared away, as is also the brushwood. The stumps, however, will give good cover. For a distance of eighty yards round the pah all the stumps are pulled out, and there is no cover for a rabbit. Over one hundred Maoris have come out of the pah and are waiting in skirmishing order in the bush half-a-mile in front of us. Pierre is still watching them.”