“AND WE DIE, AND NONE CAN TELL THEM WHERE WE DIED.”--KIPLING We reached Patea and formed a standing camp, for as great political changes were on the tapis the campaign for a period marked time. During our absence the forces remaining behind under Colonel Butler had not been idle, having defeated and driven off the ground a large party of Hau Haus at a place called Katotauru, while the Kupapas had also rendered good service. It was now generally known that the regular troops were to be withdrawn from the country, so that the action at Katotauru was the last engagement in which they took part, though they were still employed for a short time to garrison certain places. It is not a pleasant thing to say, but it is the truth, that during the past six years their efforts had been futile, although all the colonial fighting men allowed that had Sir Trevor Chute been in command from the start of the war things would have been very different. It was at this time that Colonel Haultain, the Colonial Defence Minister, determining to carry out a bold policy, gave directions to occupy the confiscated land situated between the Waitotara and Waingangora rivers, and issued orders that all the west coast colonial troops, many of whom were at that time serving on the east coast, should return and rendezvous at Patea. In the meantime things were a bit quiet with us. When I say “quiet” I use the word in the sense that we had no fighting at least, with the Hau Haus, for a time, for no one could call the Rangers’ camp peaceful nor reposeful, nor was it a place in which a man given to sedentary pursuits would care to linger or dwell. I was now to experience the great curse of the colony, for I regret to say the majority of our men, rough and uncouth as they were, but who had been quiet and tractable enough in the field, now became a prey to the grog-seller, and the scenes of foul, drunken debauchery were disgusting to the last degree. This was only to be expected from the majority of our crew, as there were many among them who were the flotsam and jetsam of the South Seas and Pacific slope, but what surprised and disgusted me was that many of our worst cases were men whom I knew to have been at one time gentlemen. Of course I had seen plenty of hard drinking at home (a man in the wild parts of the world, although colonial born, always speaks of the British Isles as “home”), but then the vice was accompanied with music, excitement and fun, when a man carried off his legs by conviviality might be excused for temporarily forgetting himself, and the crime was disguised by its surroundings; but here it was not even vulgar, it was bestial, and for days our camp was a pandemonium, filled with drunken, blaspheming fiends who, without any joviality, wit or humour, scarcely with even an attempt at a sing-song, gulped down vile doctored rum till they collapsed and wallowed in their degradation.