Desperate Work at Sari Bair.

They went for those Turks, bayoneted them in their lines, and cleared the trenches, and burst into a haka page 22 yell of “Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!” then silence as they pressed on to the next point.

“… We could hear our men doing splendidly,” Captain Buck wrote in his diary (August 26). “Rattle of musketry, then silence, and the loud English cheer, followed by a Maori haka. Owing to the Maoris being distributed, the hakas came from every ridge. Everybody is pleased with our men.” Captain Buck had a most strenuous time of it with the wounded; he tended many besides his Maoris.

Sunday, August 8, saw the Maoris in the fiercest fighting of all, the desperate attack on Chunuk Bair, as a preliminary to the general assault of Koja Chemen Tepe, the apex of the range held by the Turks. The fighting continued till on the 10th the Turks made so strong a counter-attack that the ground won by the New Zealanders and others had to be abandoned. The Maori casualties were severe in the four days' fighting—the first battle in Europe in which Maoris were ever engaged. During August 6th—10th they had 17 killed, 89 wounded, and two missing, out of 400 men, the total strength of the Battalion.

The Maoris' medical officer was in the thick of it, attending to the wounded. Of the work on August 9, he wrote: “We had a very bad time with shrapnel which burst all about our gully, the aid post. Only the fact that we were dug in a little saved us.

… The shrapnel bursts were only a few feet beyond us. Once, while I was dressing a wounded Ghurka, I had to lie down beside him, as the shrapnel was striking the ground just beyond us.”

Mr. John Masefield eloquently joined our Maoris with the other fighters of the Empire when he wrote in his “Gallipoli,” describing the storming parties in the battle of Sari Bair: “Men of all races were banded together there. There were Australians, English, Indians, Maoris and New Zealanders made one by devotion to a cause, all willing to die so that their comrades might see the dawn make a steel streak of the Hellespont from the peaked hill now black against the stars.”

Later on, in September, there was some of the most severe fighting in the campaign, and the Maoris suffered severely. The Australians were camped near them, and Captain Buck tended some of their wounded under heavy artillery fire. Then came the dramatic evacuation scene, on October 3, a rest on Lemnos; and departure for Egypt.