White Feathers (6 page)

‘We haven’t had our orders yet, but that’s what we’ve heard,’ confirmed Joseph gloomily. ‘Any way, thanks for the feed.’

‘Welcome,’ said the lance corporal congenially as he turned away to serve the next man.

As Joseph and Jack wandered back towards the Maori Contingent’s lines, they stopped suddenly.

‘Can you hear that?’ asked Joseph.

‘It’s a war
haka
, eh?’ replied Jack. ‘Someone’s doing a bloody
peruperu
!’

They wove hurriedly back through the lines until they came to an open space in front of the contingent’s tents, which was quickly filling up with Maori soldiers. At the front and directly in the middle of the group stood Ihaka, a wild grin on his dark face. The whites of his eyes and his big, sweating chest gleamed in the dim light as he stamped his booted feet, swung his rifle and bellowed the
peruperu
. It seemed that almost all of the contingent had congregated, and the volume of the chant was rising by the second. Swarms of other soldiers, attracted by the noise, were appearing between the tents and jostling each other for a better look.

Joseph glanced at Jack. ‘Well, shall we join them?’

‘Might as well,’ Jack replied, grinning widely himself and already stripping off his shirt. Then he paused and said, ‘Shit, our rifles. I’ll go and get them.’ The
peruperu
would be incomplete without the brandishing of weapons.

When he returned a minute later they moved together into the front row next to Ihaka and picked up the rhythm. By now a great crowd had gathered to watch the spectacle, spellbound by the ferociously bulging eyes and protruding tongues of the Maori soldiers, all armed and jumping into the air with feet tucked beneath them, and the frenzied chant that alternated between a guttural hissing and blood-curdling yelling. In Maori, they chorused:

Gird yourself in the dogskin cloak,

And leap into the fray!

The battle, what of it?

Warrior meets warrior man to man,

Ha! The battle is joined!

Then the lines parted to let through a dozen lunging, dancing men wielding
taiaha
, or fighting sticks, and Joseph laughed out loud to see the observers in the front row step back in alarm. Not the Pakeha New Zealanders, who were performing their own spontaneous version of a
haka
on the sidelines, but a handful of British and Australian visitors, whose expressions registered an uneasy mix of astonishment, fear and wonder.

As the
peruperu
neared its climax and Joseph began to sweat freely, his blood racing and his throat aching, he felt suddenly and wildly elated, as if all of his recent ambivalence about being part of this new war had flown away and left in his heart nothing but a burning desire to fight. He was aware of the spirits of his Ngati Kahungunu ancestors flooding into him, and he knew by their exultant expressions that the men beside him were also in direct communion with their
tupuna
.

The
haka
ended with a final, deafening shout and a massive leap into the air, followed by tumultuous applause and cheering from the onlookers. Panting from exertion and wiping trickles of sweat from his face, Joseph approached Ihaka, intending a half-hearted admonishment, but the triumphant look on his friend’s face stole the words from his mouth.

‘See!’ demanded Ihaka, ‘they know what we made of now! They have to send us warriors to the fighting, ’cos we the best!’

Joseph turned to Wi, who was never far from Ihaka, and shook his head benignly.

There was nothing he could say.

The contingent’s blood lust remained high for several days and, in retrospect, Joseph would always wonder whether the
haka
that had so galvanised them had also contributed to the appalling shambles of Good Friday.

It all started when his company was on leave in Cairo with others of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force and a large party of Australian troops. Like many other soldiers caught up in the event, Joseph was unaware at the time of what had initially sparked the riot. Some reckoned that the debacle had in no way come as a shock, others were surprised that it hadn’t happened earlier. After all, relations between the Allied forces and their Egyptian hosts had been strained for some time, both at Zeitoun Camp and in Cairo itself.

Every soldier had been approached at least twice by the persistent and apparently deaf native men and boys peddling cigarettes, oranges and rude photographs whenever and wherever they saw an opportunity. The oranges were thirst-quenching but the harsh cigarettes immediately cancelled out any relief provided by the fruit, and the photographs were offensive to some, titillating to others, but eventually boring to all, especially when the real thing could be obtained for very little financial outlay, if a man wasn’t too choosy about where he laid his hat.

The situation was even worse when the troops ventured into the city. A soldier could hardly take five steps down a street without being accosted by crowds of natives offering all manner of goods for sale, from muslins and silks to Sudanese beads, peanuts, sex, souvenirs, ‘authentic’ artefacts and other strange bits and pieces. When one of the more naive young privates in Joseph’s section purchased an exorbitantly priced scrap of textile said to have been wrapped around the actual mummified body of Rameses III,
Joseph, sick of his men being rooked, lost his temper and told the soldier to return the disgusting piece of rag and get his money back. It stank too much to be that ancient and no doubt harboured all sorts of dreaded diseases. The private did as he was told but, unable to find the hawker who had sold him the ‘artefact’, thumped the nearest Egyptian with wares for sale and helped himself to the money he felt he was owed. The fracas that followed resulted in the lieutenant in charge of Joseph’s platoon, a popular officer named Ropata McPherson, advising him to discourage his men from going into the city in future. Joseph, however, believed they were entitled to learn to look after themselves, though after Good Friday he wished he’d taken heed.

But the New Zealanders and Australians themselves were more often than not guilty of arrogant and opportunistic behaviour. Running out of cafés before paying was a favourite, abusing the natives was another, but the biggest cause of resentment, on both sides, was the troops’ attitude towards the Egyptian women. Prostitution thrived in Cairo, and although whores were usually easy to spot, many of the men still apparently had trouble distinguishing between the females who were for sale and those who were not, resulting in many outraged complaints to the authorities about respectable Egyptian women being, at best, insulted, and at worst assaulted. On the other side of the coin, many of the prostitutes were riddled with venereal disease, and had very little compunction about passing it on to their customers. The afflicted troops then blamed the women for their painful predicament and subsequent spells in hospital. All these pressures, together with the pent-up frustration of waiting to go into battle, fuelled the events of the 2nd of April.

Early on the evening of Good Friday, having just finished a moderately satisfying but atrociously overpriced café meal, Joseph, Jack, Ihaka and Wi were walking off their dinner and
inspecting the stalls in the colourful Wazzir, a district known for its brothels. Suddenly they were forced to dodge a hail of items being hurled from a third-storey window. First came a flutter of women’s clothing accompanied by loud screeching, which caused some laughter on the street below, but when this was followed by a very solid chest of drawers and then a piano, Joseph and his mates wisely took cover under the protection of a balcony. A crowd soon gathered and Australian and New Zealand soldiers began to appear as if from nowhere and contribute enthusiastically to the destruction; predictably, Joseph was unable to restrain Ihaka and he quickly disappeared into the mêlée. Brothel after brothel was entered and ransacked, the debris piled up outside and then set alight, and troops crowded into the bars and helped themselves to bottles, which they drank dry then threw indiscriminately into the throng. When fires broke out in several houses and the fire brigade arrived, the hose was slashed and the nozzle snatched up and used to smash windows.

Shortly after that the Red Caps, the universally unpopular military police, arrived and Joseph decided it was time to leave, but not before he witnessed a phalanx of out-of-control troops turn on the MPs and launch into them with fists and make-do weapons. The grossly outnumbered police opened fire. Joseph heard later that one of the four soldiers wounded was a New Zealander.

Zeitoun Camp was in an uproar when Joseph arrived back, alone because he had lost contact with Wi and Jack. He rounded up the men in his section to find that three were missing: Ihaka and Privates Joe Witana and Hone Reti, whose father Joseph had sailed with on the schooner
Whiri
, and whom he had spied hurling furniture around the Wazzir with the best of them.

At midnight the lost trio drifted in, all bearing bruises and ripped uniforms and reeking of alcohol. Joseph lined them up in front of their tent and railed at them while the rest of the section
slunk away, grateful they’d had the good sense to keep out of the fracas. After being yelled at for a good thirty minutes, the miscreants were dismissed with the threat that if they ever became involved in a similar situation again they would be shipped home immediately in abject disgrace.

All leave into Cairo was cancelled, the troops were confined to Zeitoun Camp for the remainder of their stay and relations between the New Zealanders and the Australians, camped fifteen miles away, cooled markedly as each blamed the other for starting the riot.

The shameful affair of the Wazzir seemed to mark a downturn in the Maori Contingent’s spirits. As it seemed more and more likely they would be sent to Malta for garrison duty, their grumbles grew to a loud protestation that eventually manifested itself in an impassioned public plea from Major Te Rangi Hiroa for his people to be permitted to go to the Dardanelles with the main force. He also warned that any Maori
taua
, or war party, would be ashamed to go home without having even confronted the enemy and that such a prospect would have a dire effect on morale. But the decision had been made: the Maori Contingent was to go to Malta.

Once on the island they marched across a scrubby and dreary plain to a camp with the unpronounceable name of Ghain Tuffiah. There, they dug endless holes, took part in mock exercises and underwent interminable foot inspections, and Joseph thought of Erin McRae and her huge, luminous eyes far more frequently than he could ever have imagined. The men listened with mounting frustration to the news of the Gallipoli landing on the 25th of April and were awed into silence at the numbers of wounded evacuated from the Dardanelles and arriving at the hospitals on Malta. But then word was received that the Maori Contingent would be needed at Gallipoli after all.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

A
s he hung over the ship’s rail Joseph commented idly to Jack that the steep hills ahead of them reminded him a little of those in the Hawke’s Bay. It was the 1st of July and their troopship had anchored in Mudros Harbour, the main port of the spectacular Greek island of Lemnos. There was no response and he glanced up to see Jack waving cheerfully to a group of sailors on a British warship cruising slowly past, its gentle passage forming small waves that whispered and sighed across the sapphire water.

‘Who are you?’ one of the sailors called.

‘We’re the Maoris!’ Jack bellowed back.

The sailors looked at each other and shrugged, then another responded, ‘Oh, the
Maoris
! Three cheers for the Maoris!’ He and his mates cheered loudly and enthusiastically, and grinned hugely as the New Zealanders came back with, ‘Three cheers for the Jacky tars!’

The men were kept on board ship until they transferred to a steamer the following day, where they waited until they finally set sail for the Gallipoli Peninsula at five o’clock in the afternoon.

Few of the men slept easily that night, if at all. Joseph calmed himself by rereading a long and gossipy letter from his mother,
written at the end of March, which had arrived before the contingent left Malta.

My Dearest Joseph,

I hope this finds you well. At the time of writing we were unsure of your destination but Andrew said to write something and post it off any way in the hope that it will catch up with you wherever you are.

I have a fair amount of news so I hope you’re well settled with a cup of tea! Lucy has had her baby, a very healthy boy she has named Duncan Robert. Both are well, although I believe Lucy is feeling a little depressed about James not being here with her for the birth. Jeannie is fussing like mad over the baby, which is good because it’s giving Lucy plenty of time to get back on her feet, so I expect she’ll be feeling right as rain again in no time. Duncan doesn’t look like anyone yet, although Lucy insists he’s the spitting image of his father.

I suppose you haven’t bumped into James at all? Andrew says I shouldn’t be so silly — the two of you are bound to be in different places — but we’ve been reading in the papers lately that the New Zealanders are being sent to the Dardanelles because of the Turks, so I thought your paths might cross. We’ve had several postcards from James, from Egypt, so I’m assuming that’s where you are too.

The most shocking news I have for you is that Keely and Erin have both volunteered for nursing service over seas. I must say I was rather upset when they turned up a month or so ago and told us, and so were Jeannie and Lachie, but there really isn’t much we can do. Andrew has been affected the most, I think, because he had such high hopes of Keely settling down. He only let her go nursing in the hope that she would get sick of it, give up halfway through and find herself a suitable husband instead! As of course you know I had a little trouble settling myself, when I was her age, so I can understand a little of what they feel but Andrew is incapable of seeing it from their point of view. Poor Andrew — it’s been bad enough James going off, and you, but Keely as well! He went into a decline for several days but I think he’s resigned himself to it now, although he certainly isn’t happy about it.