CHAPTER XI

OTIS AND THE WAR

Am I the boss, or am I a tool, Am I Governor-General or a hobo--hobo; Now I'd like to know who's the boss of the show, Is it me, or Emilio Aguinaldo?

Army Song of the Philippines under Otis.

"The thing is on," said General Hughes, Provost Marshal of Manila, to General Otis, at Malacanan palace, on the night of February 4, 1899, about half past eight o'clock, as soon as the firing started. [188] He was talking about something which every American in Manila except General Otis had for months frankly recognized as inevitable--the war.

On the day of the outbreak of February 4th, General Otis had under his command 838 officers and 20,032 enlisted men, say in round numbers a total of 21,000. Of these some 15,500 were State volunteers mostly from the Western States, and the rest were regulars. All the volunteers and 1650 of the regulars were, or were about to become, entitled to their discharge, and their right was perfected by the exchange of ratifications of the treaty of peace with Spain on April 11, 1899. The total force which he was thus entitled to command for any considerable period consisted of less than 4000. Of the 21,000 men on hand as aforesaid, on February 4th, deducting those at Cavite and Iloilo, the sick and wounded, those serving in civil departments, and in the staff organizations, the effective fighting force was 14,000, and of these 3000 constituted the Provost Guard in the great and hostile city of Manila. [189] Thus there were only 11,000 men, including those entitled to discharge, available to engage the insurgent army, "which," says Secretary of War Root, "was two or three times that number, well armed and equipped, and included many of the native troops formerly comprised in the Spanish army."

Such was the predicament into which General Otis's supremely zealous efforts to help the Administration get the treaty through the Senate by withholding from the American people the knowledge of facts which might have put them on notice that they were paying $20,000,000 for a $200,000,000 insurrection, had brought us. This is not a tale of woe. It is a tale of the disgust--good-humored, because stoical--which finally found expression at the time in the army song that heads this chapter, disgust at unnecessary sacrifice of American life which could so easily have been prevented had General Otis only revealed the real situation in time to have had plenty of troops on hand. It is a requiem over those brave men of the Eighth Army Corps from Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and the Western States that bore the brunt of the early fighting, whose lives were needlessly sacrificed in 1899 as the result of an unpreparedness for war due to anxiety not to embarrass Mr. McKinley in his efforts to get the treaty through the Senate, an unpreparedness which remained long unremedied thereafter in order to conceal from the people of the United States the unanimity of the desire of the Filipinos for Independence.

It is quite true that none of our people then in the Islands realized this unanimity in all its pathos at the outset, but it soon became clear to everybody except the commanding general. It naturally dawned on him last of all, because he did not visit the most reliable sources of information, to wit, the battlefields during the fighting, and therefore did not see how tenaciously the Filipinos fought for the independence of their country. Moreover, General Otis tried to think till the last along lines in harmony with the original theory of Benevolent Assimilation. Hence Mr. Root's nonsense of 1899 and 1900 about "the patient and unconsenting millions" dominated by "the Tagalo tribe," which nonsense was immensely serviceable in a campaign for the presidency wherein antidotes for sympathy with a people struggling to be free were of supreme practical political value. General Otis actually had Mr. McKinley believing as late as December, 1899, at least, that the opposition to a change of masters in lieu of Freedom was confined to a little coterie of self-seeking politicians who were in the business for what they could get out of it, and that the great majority would prefer him, Otis, to Aguinaldo, as governor-general. It is difficult on first blush to accept this statement as dispassionately correct, but there is no escape from the record. Mr. McKinley said in his annual message to Congress in December, 1899, in reviewing the direction he gave to the Paris peace negotiations which ended in the purchase of the islands, and the war with the Filipinos which had followed, and had then been raging since February 4th previous, "I had every reason to believe, and still believe that the transfer of sovereignty was in accordance with the wishes and aspirations of the great mass of the Filipino people."

Yet every American soldier who served in the Philippines at the time knows that Aguinaldo held the whole people in the hollow of his hand, because he was their recognized leader, the incarnation of their aspirations. [190]

During the presidential campaign of 1900, while the war with the Filipinos was still raging, partisan rancour bitterly called in question the sincerity of President McKinley's statement in his annual message to Congress of December, 1899, that he then still believed "the transfer of sovereignty was in accord with the wishes and aspirations of the great mass of the Filipino people," on the ground that he must by the time he made that statement have understood how grossly--however honestly--General Otis had misled him as to the unanimity and tenacity of the Filipino purpose. But it is only necessary to read Admiral Dewey's testimony before the Senate Committee of 1902 to understand Mr. McKinley's allusion in this same message to Congress of 1899 to "the sinister ambition of a few leaders," and this, once understood, explains the other statement of the message. Admiral Dewey came home in the fall of 1899 and undoubtedly filled Mr. McKinley with the estimate of Aguinaldo which makes such painful reading in the Admiral's testimony of 1902 before the Senate Committee, where he abused Aguinaldo like a pick-pocket, so to speak, saying his original motive was principally loot. [191] In the fall of 1899 Aguinaldo had issued a proclamation claiming that Admiral Dewey originally promised him independence, and Admiral Dewey had bitterly denounced this as a falsehood, so that the Admiral always cherished a very real resentment against the insurgent chief thereafter. His estimate of the Filipino leader as being in the insurrection merely for what he could get out of it was wholly erroneous, and has long since been exploded, all our generals of the early fighting and all Americans who have known him since being unanimous that Aguinaldo was and is a sincere patriot; but it undoubtedly explains Mr. McKinley's still clinging, in 1899, to the notion derived from General Otis that the insurrection did not have the moral and material backing of the whole Filipino people. The Filipino leaders were familiar with the spirit of our institutions. The men who controlled their counsels were high-minded, educated, patriotic men. "For myself and the officers and men under my command," wrote General Merritt to Aguinaldo in August, 1898, just after the fall of Manila, "I can say that we have conceived a high respect for the abilities and qualities of the Filipinos, and if called upon by the Government to express an opinion, it will be to that effect." [192]

The leaders believed that the American people did not fully understand the identity of the Philippine situation with that in Cuba, and that if they had, the treaty would not have been ratified. They also knew the supreme futility of trying to get the facts before the American people by peaceful means. And it was really with the abandon of genuine patriotism that they plunged their country into war. We did not know it then, but we do know it now. It would be simply wooden-headed to affirm that they ever expected to succeed in a war with us. Of course some of the jeunesse doree, as General Bell calls them in one of his early reports, [193] grew very aggressive and insulting toward the last. But the thinking men went into the war for independence in a spirit of "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," to correct the impression General Otis had communicated to Mr. McKinley, and through him to our people, in the hope that the more lives they sacrificed in such a war (they risked--and many of them lost--their own also), the nearer they would come to refuting the idea that they did not know what they wanted. It was the only way they had to appeal to Caesar, i.e., to the great heart of the American people. As the war grew more and more unpopular in the United States, the impression was more and more nursed here at home that the people did not really want independence, but were being coerced; and that they were like dumb driven cattle. The striking similarity of these suggestions to those by which tyranny has always met the struggles of men to be free, did not seem to occur to the American public. They were accepted as authoritative, being convenient also as an antidote to sympathy. General Otis had suppressed such words as "sovereignty," "protection," and the like from his original sugar-coated edition of the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, offering an elaborate cock-and-bull explanation of why he did so. The Filipino answer to this took the form of a very clever newspaper cartoon, representing an American in a carromata--a kind of two-wheeled buggy--with a Filipino between the shafts pulling it; which cartoon of course, never reached the United States. The Filipinos had never heard the story on General Mahone about "tie yoh hoss an' come in," [194] but they had heard of the jinrickshaws of Japan, and they had read in Holy Writ and elsewhere of conquered people becoming hewers of wood and drawers of water to invading conquerors. And they are not without a sense of humor. It is a common mistake with many Americans--for quite a few among us suffer intellectually from over-sophistication--to suppose we monopolize all the sense of humor there is, and that that alone is proof of a due sense of proportion. At any rate, the Filipinos, with all due respect to General Otis's good intentions, understood that "sovereignty" and "protection" meant alien domination, so there was nothing in the Otis notion that for them those words had a "peculiar meaning which might be advantageously used by the Tagalo war party to incite," etc. [195]

Having now gotten into a war on the theory that only a small fraction of the Filipino people were opposed to a new and unknown yoke in lieu of the old one, General Otis still continued to try to square his theory with the facts. For many months he sat at his desk in Manila cheerily waging war with an inadequate force, and retaining in the service and on the firing line after their terms of enlistment expired, under pretence that they consented to it willingly, a lot of fellows from Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and the Western States, who had volunteered for the war with Spain, with intent to kill Spaniards in order to free Cubans, and not with intent to kill Filipinos for also wanting to be free. Seeing nothing of the fighting himself, he of course failed to get a correct estimate of the tenacity of the Filipino purpose. No purpose is here entertained to suggest that any of those early volunteers went around preaching mutiny, or feeling mutinous. They did not originally like the Filipinos especially; furthermore, they liked the Philippines less than they did the Filipinos, and they had a vague notion that some one had blundered. But it was not theirs to ask the reason why. Besides, the orders from Washington being not to clash with the Filipinos at least until the treaty was ratified, the Filipino soldiers and subaltern officers had been calling them cowards for some time with impunity. So that as soon as the treaty was safely "put over," they were very glad to let off steam by killing a few hundred of them. But their hearts were not in the fight, in the sense of clear and profound conviction of the righteousness of the war. However, war is war, and they were soldiers, and "orders is orders," as Tommy Atkins says. So let us turn to an honester, if grimmer, side of the picture.

The first battle of the war began about 8:30 o'clock on the night of February 4th, and lasted all through that night and until about 5 o'clock in the afternoon of the next day. Our casualties numbered about 250 killed and wounded. The insurgent loss was estimated at 3000. "Those of the insurgents will never be known," says General Otis. [196] "We buried 700 of them." [197] There was fighting pretty much all around Manila, for the insurgents had the city almost hemmed in. An arc of a circle, broken in places possibly, but several miles long, drawn about the city, would probably suggest the general idea of the enemy's lines. They had been allowed to dig trenches without interference while the debate in the Senate on the treaty was in progress, pursuant to the temporary "peace-at-any-price" programme. The arc was broken into smithereens by 5 P.M. of February 5th. When the morning of February 6th came Col. James F. Smith, commanding the First Californias, was non est inventus, and so was a large part of his regiment. "No one seemed to know definitely his location," says the Otis Report. [198] As a matter of fact he had taken two battalions of his regiment and waded clean through the enemy's lines, and had to be sent for to come back to form again with the line of battle needed to protect the city. So the Californias probably carried off the pick of the laurels of the first day's fighting. General Anderson, commanding the First Division of the Eighth Corps, threw them some very handsome well earned bouquets in his report, stating also that their colonel had shown "the very best qualities of a volunteer officer"--why he limited it to "volunteer" does not appear, but is inferable from the well-known disposition of all regulars to consider all volunteers "rookies" [199]--and recommended that he be made a brigadier general, which shortly afterward was done. [200]

It would be invidious to follow the various phases of the subsequent early fighting, and single out one or more States [201] and tell of the hard earned and well deserved honors they won, because space forbids a proper tribute to the heroism of all of them. As for the regulars, [202] they were the same they were at Santiago de Cuba, the same they always are anywhere you put them. When a newspaper man would come around a regular regiment during the fighting before Santiago he would be told that they had no news to give him, "We ain't heroes, we're regulars," they would say. After the outbreak of February 4th, all our people did well, acted nobly, "Angels could no more." Neither could devils, as shown by the losses inflicted on the enemy.

There was more fighting outside Manila during the next two or three days, and when that was done the somewhat shattered insurgent legions had recoiled to the distantly visible foot-hills, convinced that their notion they could take Manila was very foolish and very rash.

At the town of Caloocan, some three or four miles out to the north of Manila, were located the shops and round houses of the Manila and Dagupan Railway, which runs from Manila in a northwesterly direction about 120 miles to Dagupan, and was then the only railroad in the archipelago. It was fed by a vast rich farming country, the great plain of central Luzon. Naturally, the central plain which fed the railroad that traversed it and kept its teeming myriads of small farmers in touch with the great outside world was to be sooner or later, the theatre of war. To seize transportation is instinctively the first tactical move of a military man. Lieutenant-General Luna, commander-in-chief, next to Aguinaldo, of the revolutionary forces, the man whom later Aguinaldo had shot, was just then at Caloocan with 4000 men. So it fell to General MacArthur, commanding the Second Division of the Eighth Corps, to move on Caloocan, which he did on February 10th.

John F. Bass, correspondent for Harper's Weekly, writing from Manila a short time after this, describes this movement. It was our first move away from the city of Manila. With a few masterly strokes of the pen, which I regret there is not space to reproduce here in full, Mr. Bass gives a vivid picture of the various engagements, and of "a background of burning villages, smoke, fire, shot, and shell, the ceaseless tramp of tired and often bleeding feet," etc. "Heroism," he says, "became a matter of course and death an incident." Finally his story pauses for a moment thus: "The natural comment is that all this is merely war--the business of the soldier. True, nor do I think Jimmie Green [Mr. Bass's name for our "Tommy Atkins"] is troubled with heroics. He accepts the situation without excitement or hysterics. He has little feeling in this matter for his heart is not in this fight." Here brother Bass's moralizing ceases abruptly, and the contagious excitement of the hour catches him, just as it always does the average man under such circumstances:

From La Loma church you may get the full view of our long line crossing the open field, evenly, steadily, irresistibly, like an inrolling wave on the beach * * *. Watch the regiments go forward, and form under fire, and move on and on, and you will exclaim: "Magnificent," and you will gulp a little and feel proud without exactly knowing why. Then gradually the power of that line will force itself upon you, and you will feel that you must follow, that wherever that line goes you must go also. By and by you will be sorry, but for the present the might of an American regiment has got possession of you.

Anybody who has ever been with an American regiment in action knows exactly how the man who wrote that felt. The American who has never had the experience Mr. Bass describes above has missed one way of realizing the majesty of the power of the republic whereof he is privileged to be a citizen. For if there is one national trait which more than any other explains the greatness of our country, it is the instinct for organization, the fondness for self-multiplication to the nth power by intelligent co-operation with one's fellows to a common end. Especially is the experience in question inspiring where the example of the field officers is particularly appropriate to the occasion. Take for instance the following, concerning the conduct of Major J. Franklin Bell in this advance on Caloocan, from the report of Major Kobbe, Commanding the Artillery:

As the right cleared the head of the ravine, I could see Maj. J. F. Bell * * * leading a company of Montana troops in front of the right * * * advancing, firing, toward intrenchments * * *. He was on a black horse to the last * * * leading and cheering the men. His work was most gallant and * * * especially cheering to me. [203]

No mere scribe can magnify General Bell's matchless efficiency in action, but it is certainly inspiring to contemplate. There are no "fuss and feathers" about him. Yet his power, proven on many a field in the Philippines, to kindle martial ardor by example, suggests the ubiquitous "Helmet of Navarre" of Lord Macaulay's poem.

A little later correspondent Bass develops what he meant by "by and by you will be sorry." You see it is not comfortable business, this of hustling about among the dead and dying. In the excitement, you are so liable to step on the face of some poor devil you knew well, maybe a once warm friend. In this connection Mr. Bass says: "There is this difference between the manner in which American and Filipino soldiers die. The American falls in a heap and dies hard; the Filipino stretches himself out, and when dead is always found in some easy attitude, generally with his head on his arms. They die the way a wild animal dies--in just such a position as one finds a deer or an antelope which one has shot in the woods."

So far as the writer is advised and believes, nobody who knows John F. Bass ever suspected him of being a quitter. He must have been reading the London Standard, which said about that time: "It is a little startling to find the liberators of Cuba engaged in suppressing a youthful republic which claims the sacred right of self-government." Bass had written his newspaper in August previous, after observing how pluckily the Filipinos had fought and licked the Spaniards: "Give them their independence and guarantee it to them." The overwhelming sentiment of the Eighth Army Corps when we took the Philippines was against taking them; and those who had kept informed knew that the Senate had ratified the treaty by a majority only one more than enough to squeeze it through, the vote having been 57 to 27, at least 56 being thus indispensable to make the necessary constitutional two-thirds of the 84 votes cast; and that Wall Street and the White Man's Burden or land-grabbing contingent--"Philanthropy and Five per cent," as Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage put it at the time--were responsible for these shambles Mr. Bass describes.

At this juncture some soft-headed gentleman asks: "What is this man who writes this book driving at? Is he trying to show that the American soldiers in the Philippines in February, 1899, all wanted to quit as soon as the war broke out?" Not at all. In the first place it hardly lay in American soldier nature to want to quit when Aguinaldo was telling us "if you don't take your flag down and out of these islands at once and promptly get out yourselves along with it, I will proceed to kick you out and throw it out." And in the next place, in the war with the Filipinos, as in all other wars, fuel was added to the flame as soon as the war broke out. Among the Americans, charges soon came into general circulation and acceptance that the Filipinos had planned (but been frustrated in) a plot looking to a general massacre of all foreigners in Manila. This alleged plot was supposed to have been scheduled to be carried out on a certain night shortly after February 15, 1899. Among the Filipinos, on the other hand, counter-charges soon followed, and met with general credence, that the Americans made a practise of killing prisoners taken in battle, including the wounded. Neither charge was ever proven, but both served the purpose, at the psychologic moment, of possessing each side with the desire to kill, which is the business of war. Let us glance briefly at these recriminations.

Between pages 1916 and 1917 of Senate Document 331, part 2 [204] may be found a photo-lithograph of the celebrated alleged order of the Filipino Revolutionary Government of February 15, 1899, to massacre all foreign residents of Manila. In his report for 1899 [205] General Otis himself describes this order as one "which for barbarous intent is unequalled in these modern times in civilized warfare," and speaks of it as "issued by the Malolos Government through the responsible officer who had raised and organized the hostile inhabitants within the city." After Aguinaldo was captured in 1901, according to an account given by General MacArthur to the Senate Committee in 1902, of a conversation with the insurgent leader, the latter was shown a copy of this document purporting to have been signed by General Luna, one of his generals. He disclaimed having in any way sanctioned it, in fact disclaimed any prior knowledge of it whatsoever, [206] a disclaimer which General MacArthur appears to have accepted as true, frankly and entirely. At page 1890 of the same volume, Captain J. R. M. Taylor, 14th U. S. Infantry, a gallant soldier and an accomplished scholar, who was in charge in 1901 of the captured insurgent records at Manila, states that he was "informed" that the document was originally "signed by Sandico, then Secretary of the Interior" of the revolutionary government. Captain Taylor made an attempt to run the matter down, but obtained no evidence convincing to him. A like investigation by General MacArthur in 1901 had a like result. [207]

On the other hand, Major Wm. H. Bishop, of the 20th Kansas, was credited in a soldier's letter written home, which first came to light in this country, with killing unarmed prisoners during the advance on Caloocan. The charges originated with a private of that regiment. Major Bishop denied the charges. [208] An investigation followed, in the course of which somebody made an innuendo, or charge--it is not important which--that other officers used their influence to prevent a full ventilation of the matter, specifically, General Funston, then Colonel of the 20th Kansas, and Major Metcalf, of the same regiment. These last two also made a most vigorous general denial, and nothing whatever was established against them. The whole matter was finally disposed of by being forwarded to the War Department at Washington by General Otis on July 13, 1899, some six months after the occurrences alleged, with the remark that he (General Otis) "doubted the wisdom of a court-martial" of the soldier who had made the charge against Major Bishop, "as it would give the insurgent authorities a knowledge of what was taking place, and they would assert positively that our troops practised inhumanities, whether the charges could be proven or not" and that they would use the incident "as an excuse to defend their own barbarities." [209] The last endorsement on the papers preceding General Otis's final endorsement was one by Colonel Crowder, now (1912) Judge Advocate General of the United States Army, in which he said: "I am not convinced from a careful reading of this report, that Private Brenner has made a false charge against Captain Bishop"; adding that "considerations of public policy, sufficiently grave to silence every other demand, require that no further action be taken in this case." [210] The "considerations of public policy" were of course those indicated in General Otis's final endorsement on the papers, already quoted. They were compellingly controlling, in my judgment, independently of the merits. Washing one's soiled linen in public is never advisable, and placing a weapon in your enemy's hand in time of war is at least equally unwise. Some shreds of this once much mooted matter doubtless still linger in the public memory. It has been thus briefly ventilated here solely to trace the genesis of the bitterness of that war, and of numerous later barbarities avenged in kind. The bitterness thus early begun grew as the war went on, until every time a hapless Filipino peasant soldier speaking only two or three words of Spanish would falsely explain, when captured, that he was a non-combatant, an amigo (friend), it usually at once filled the captor with vivid recollections of slain comrades, and of rumored or sometimes proven mutilation of their bodies after death, and these reflections would at once fill him with a yearning desire to blow the top of the amigo's head off, whether he yielded to the desire or not. Of no instance where he did so yield am I aware. But I do know that the invariable statement of all Filipinos unarmed and un-uniformed when captured, to the effect that they were amigos, became to the American soldier not remotely dissimilar to the waving of a red rag at a bull. Of course this was also due, largely, to the guerrilla practice of hiding guns when hard-pressed and actually plunging at once into some make-believe agricultural pursuit. As for Major Bishop, it is inconceivable to me that he gave any order to kill unarmed prisoners. Even admitting for the sake of the argument that he is a fiend, he is not a fool. As a matter of fact, he was a brave soldier, as all the reports show, and is a reputable lawyer, having many warm friends whose opinion of any man would command respect anywhere. The truth of the whole matter probably is that just before going into battle, when our troops were in an ugly temper by reason of the rumors of barbarities alleged to have been perpetrated by the enemy, or contemplated by him, the word was passed along the line to "Take no more prisoners than we have to," and that that thought originated with some irresponsible private soldier of the line inflamed by stories of mutilation of our dead or of maltreatment of our wounded. Such a "word," so passed from man to man, can, in the heat of conflict, very soon evolve into something having for practical purposes all the force and effect of an order.

Through the foregoing, and like causes, including the "water cure," later invented to persuade amigos to discover the whereabouts of hidden insurgent guns or give information as to the movements of the enemy, [211] our war with the Filipinos became, before it was over, a rather "dark and bloody" affair, accentuated as it was, from time to time, by occasional Filipino success in surprising detachments from ambush, or by taking them unawares and off their guard in their quarters, and eliminating them, the most notable instance of the first being the crumpling of a large command of the 15th Infantry by General Juan Cailles, in southern Luzon, and the most indelibly remembered and important example of the second being the massacre of the 9th Infantry people at Balangiga, in Samar, in the fall of 1901. Certainly more than one American in that long-drawn-out war did things unworthy of any civilized man, things he would have believed it impossible, before he went out there, ever to come to. Personally, I have heard, so far as I now recollect, of comparatively few barbarities perpetrated by Filipinos on captured American soldiers. Barbarities on their side seemed to have been reserved for those of their own race whom they found disloyal to the cause of their country. Personally I have never seen the water-cure administered. But I once went on a confidential mission by direction of General MacArthur, in the course of which I reported first, on arriving in the neighborhood of the contemplated destination, to a general officer of the regular army who is still such to-day. [212] That night the general was good enough to extend the usual courtesy of a cot to sleep on, in the headquarters building. Toward dusk I went to dine with a certain lieutenant, also of the regular army. [213] As we approached the lieutenant's quarters a sergeant came up with a prisoner, and asked instructions as to what to do with him. The lieutenant said: "Take him out and find out what he knows. Do you understand, Sergeant?" The sergeant saluted, answered in the affirmative, and moved away with his prisoner. We went in to the lieutenant's quarters, and while at dinner heard groans outside. I said "What is that, Jones?" [214] Jones said: "That's the water-cure he's giving that hombre. [215] Want to see it?" I replied that I certainly did not. Returning that night to the general's headquarters, after breakfast the next morning I met my friend Jones coming out of the general's office. I said: "What's the matter, what are you doing here," he having mentioned the evening before an expedition planned for the morrow. He said: "Well, I've just had a talk with the general to see if I could get my resignation from the army accepted?" "Why?" said I. "Well," was the reply, "that ----" (designating the prisoner of the night before by a double barrelled epithet) "died on me last night." Just how the matter was hushed up I have never known, but Jones was never punished. More than one general officer of the United States Army in the Philippines during our war with the Filipinos at least winked at the water-cure as a means of getting information, and quite a number of subalterns made a custom of applying it for that purpose. It was practically the only way you could get them to betray their countrymen. Did I report the incident to General MacArthur? Certainly not. It was the business of the general commanding the district. The water-cure, though very painful, was seldom fatal, and when not fatal was almost never permanently damaging, and it was about the only way to shake the loyalty of the average Filipino and make him give information as to hidden insurgent guns, guerrilla bands, etc. It was a part of Benevolent Assimilation.

Let us now return to the early battlefields about Manila which we left, initially, to analyze the extreme bitterness of the feeling between the combatants that very early began to develop.

We left war correspondent John F. Bass among the dead and dying on one of these fields, supposedly musing on the White Man's Burden, or Land-Grabbing, or Trust-for-Civilization theory, or whatever it was that moved the fifty-seven senators whose votes had ratified the treaty by a majority of just one more than the constitutionally necessary two-thirds.

The reason the writer lays so much stress on Mr. Bass's letters to Harper's Weekly on the early fighting in the Philippines, is because his remarks come direct from the battlefield, and are, as it were, res gestae. They were made dum fervet opus, to use a law Latin phrase which in plain English means "while the iron is hot." They reflect more or less accurately the feelings of the men whose deeds he was recording. He, and O. K. Davis, now Washington correspondent of the New York Times, and John T. McCutcheon, of Chicago, the now famous cartoonist (who was with Dewey in the battle of Manila Bay), and Robert Collins, now London correspondent of the Associated Press, and "Dick" Little of the Chicago Tribune,--a little man about six feet three,--and lots of other good men and true, were all through that fighting, and we will later come to an issue of personal veracity between them and General Otis which culminated in the retirement from office of Secretary of War Alger, and ought to have resulted in the recall of General Otis, but did not, because to have acknowledged what a blunderer General Otis had been and to have relieved him from command, as he should have been relieved, would have been to "swap horses crossing a stream," as Mr. Lincoln used to put it in declining to change generals during a given campaign. The object here is to bring out the truth of history as to how the men who bore the brunt of the early fighting felt about it. Testimony as to what the officers and men of the army said would be of no value, because a complaining soldier's complaints are too often only a proof of "cold feet." [216]

These newspaper men, not under military orders, were daily risking their lives voluntarily, just to keep the American public informed, and the American public were kept in darkness and only vouchsafed bulletins giving them the progressive lists of their dead and wounded, and this last only on demand made upon Secretary Alger by the people of Minnesota, the Dakotas, etc., through their senators. The War Department did not want the people to know, did not want to admit itself, how plucky, vigorous, and patriotic the resistance was. The period of the fighting done by the State Volunteers from February until fall, when public opinion finally forced the Administration to send General Otis an adequate force, is slurred by Secretary of War Root in his report for 1899. I do not mean that it was slurred intentionally. But the Philippines were a long way off, and Mr. Root and Mr. McKinley naturally relied for their information on their commanding general on the spot. There were gallant deeds done in the Philippines by those Western fellows of the State regiments which volunteered for the war with Spain, that would have made the little fighting around Santiago look like--well, to borrow from "Chimmie" Fadden's fertile vocabulary, "like 30 cents." But General Otis was not in a position to get the thrill of such things from his office window, so very few of them were given much prominence by him in his despatches to the Adjutant-General of the army. This was wise enough from a political standpoint, seeing that a presidential campaign was to ensue in 1900 predicated on the proposition that American sovereignty was "in accord with the wishes and aspirations of the great mass of the Filipinos," to use the words of the President's message to Congress of December, 1899.

Caloocan was taken by General MacArthur on February 10th. The natural line of advance thereafter was of course up the railroad, because the insurgents held it, and needed it as much as we would. Throughout February there were engagements too numerous to mention. The navy also entertained the enemy whenever he came too near the shores of Manila Bay. One incident in particular is worthy of note, and worthy of the best traditions of the navy. I refer to the conduct of Assistant Engineer Emory Winship off Malabon, March 4, 1899. Malabon is five miles north of Manila, on the bay, not far from Caloocan. On the day named, a landing party of 125 men from the U. S. S. Bennington went ashore near Malabon to make photographs, in aid of navy gunnery, of certain entrenchments and buildings that had been struck by shells from the Monadnock. They foolishly failed to throw out scouts ahead of their column, and were suddenly greeted with a withering fire from a whole regiment of insurgents who had seen them first and lain in wait for them. They retired with considerably more haste than they had gone forth. The insurgents advanced, firing, at double quick, toward the comparative handful of Americans, and would undoubtedly have killed the last man jack of them, but Engineer Winship, who had been left in charge of the tug that brought the landing party shoreward, to keep up steam, saw the situation and promptly met it. He unlimbered a 37mm. Hotchkiss revolving machine gun which stood in the bow of the tug, and opened up with accurate aim on the advancing regiment of Filipinos. Naturally he at once became a more important target than the retreating body. Nevertheless, he kept pumping lead into that long howling murderous advancing brown line until, when within two hundred yards of where the tug lay, the line recoiled and retreated, and the landing party got safely back to the ship. It was, literally, a case of saving the lives of more than a hundred men, by fearless promptness and dogged tenacity in the intelligent and skilful performance of duty. The awnings of the tug were torn in shreds by the enemy's rain of bullets, and her woodwork was much peppered. Winship was hit five times, and still carries the bullets in his body, having been retired on account of disability resulting therefrom, after being promoted in recognition of his work.

Soon after March 25th, General MacArthur, commanding the Second Division of the Eighth Army Corps, advanced from Caloocan up the railroad to Malolos, the insurgent capital, some twenty miles away. Malolos was taken March 31st. Our February killed were six officers and seventy-one enlisted men, total seventy-seven, and a total of 378 wounded. By the end of March the list swelled to twelve officers and 127 enlisted men killed, total 139, and a total of 881 wounded, making our total casualties, as reported April 1st, 1020. Also 15% of the command, or about 2500, were on sick report on that date from heat prostrations and the like. [217] For these and other reasons, farther advance up the railroad was halted for a while.

Meantime, General Lawton, with his staff, consisting of Colonel Edwards, Major Starr, and Captains King and Sewall, "the big four" they were called, had come out from New York City by way of the Suez Canal, bringing most welcome reinforcements, the 4th and 17th Infantry. These people arrived between the 10th and the 22d of March. What happened soon after, as a result of their arrival, must now become for a brief moment, a part of the panorama, the lay of the land General Lawton first swept over being first indicated.

Luzon is practically bisected, east and west, by the Pasig River and a lake out of which it flows almost due west into Manila Bay, Manila being at the mouth of the river. Under the Spaniards, all Luzon north of the Pasig had been one military district and all Luzon south of the Pasig another. The Eighth Army Corps always spoke of northern Luzon as "the north line," and of southern Luzon as "the south line." The lake above mentioned is called the Laguna de Bay. It is nearly as big as Manila Bay, which last is called twenty odd miles wide by thirty long. On the map, the Laguna de Bay roughly resembles a half-moon, the man in which looks north, the western horn being near Manila, and the eastern near the Pacific coast of Luzon. General Otis had learned that at a place called Santa Cruz, toward the eastern end of the Laguna de Bay, there were a lot of steam launches and a Spanish gun-boat, which, if captured, would prove invaluable for river fighting and transportation of supplies along the Rio Grande de Pampanga and the other streams that watered the great central plain through which the railroad ran and which would have to be occupied later. So as soon as possible after General Lawton arrived and the necessary men could be spared, he was sent with 1500 troops to seize and bring back the boats in question. Of course the country he should overrun would have to be overrun again, because there were not troops enough to spare to garrison and hold it. But for the present, the launches would help. This expedition was successful, leaving the head of the lake nearest Manila on April 9th, and returning April 17th. It met with some good hard fighting on the way, sweeping everything before it of course, inflicting considerable loss, and suffering some. General Lawton's report mentions, among other officers whose conspicuous gallantry and efficiency in action attracted his attention, Colonel Clarence R. Edwards, now Chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs of the War Department, of whose conduct in the capture of Santa Cruz on the morning of April 10th, he says: "No line of battle could have been more courageously or intelligently led." [218] The resistance was pretty real to Colonel Edwards then, i.e., the Benevolent Assimilation was quite strenuous, and it continued to be so until his great commander was shot through the breast in the forefront of battle in the hour of victory in December thereafter, and the colonel came home with the general's body. Since then the colonel has soldiered no more, but has remained on duty at Washington, the birthplace of the original theory that the Filipinos welcomed our rule, charged with the duty of yearning over the erring Filipino who thinks he can govern himself but is mistaken, and also with the still more difficult task of trying to live up to the original theory as far as circumstances will permit. As a matter of fact, the Filipinos would probably have gotten along much better than the Cubans if we had let General Lawton do there what he and General Wood were set to work doing in Cuba shortly after Santiago fell. Public opinion is a very dangerous thing to trifle with, and when, in September, 1899, there was a story going the rounds of the American newspapers that Lawton, the hero of El Caney, the man who had reflected more glory on American arms in striking the shackles of Spain from Cuba than any other one soldier in the army, had called the war in the Philippines "this accursed war," the War Department got busy over the cable to General Otis and obtained from him a denial that General Lawton had made such a remark. But the public knew its Lawton and what he had done in Cuba, and had a suspicion there might be some truth in the rumor. So the War Department cabled out saying "Newspapers say Lawton's denial insufficient," and then repeating the words attributed to him. So General Otis sent another denial that filled the bill. [219] Of course General Lawton made no such remark. He was too good a soldier. It would have demoralized his whole command. But I served under him in both hemispheres, and I will always believe that he had a certain amount of regret at having to fight the Filipinos to keep them from having independence, when they were a so much likelier lot, take it all in all, than the Cubans we saw about Santiago. Moreover, I believe that had it not been then too late to ask him, he would have subscribed to the opinion Admiral Dewey had cabled home the previous summer: "These people are far superior in their intelligence and more capable of self-government than the natives of Cuba, and I am familiar with both races."

After the expedition down the lake, General Lawton went on "The North Line." So let us now turn thither also. For wherever Lawton was, there was fighting.

In the latter half of April, General MacArthur advanced north along the railroad, and took Calumpit, where the railroad crosses the Rio Grande, on April 28th. This was the place where under cover of "the accurate concentrated fire of the guns of the Utah Light Artillery commanded by Major Young" [220] a few Kansas men with ropes tied to their bodies swam the river in the face of a heavy fire from the enemy, fastened the ropes to some boats on the enemy's side, and were pulled back in the boats, by their comrades, to the side they had come from; the Kansans then crossing the river under the lead of the gallant Funston, and driving the enemy from his trenches. The desperate bravery of the performance, like so many other things General Funston did in the Philippines, was so superb that one forgets how contrary it was to all known rules of the game of war. If it was Providence that saved Funston and his Kansans from annihilation, certainly Providence was ably assisted on that occasion by Major Young and his Utah Battery. [221]

Shortly after this General MacArthur entered San Fernando, the second insurgent capital, which is forty miles or so up the railroad from Manila.

During the month of May General Lawton kept the insurgents busy to the east of the railroad, between it and the Pacific coast range, taking San Isidro, whither the third insurgent capital was moved after Malolos fell, on May 17th. Here he made his headquarters for a time, as did General MacArthur at San Fernando.

It had been supposed that practically the whole body of the insurgent army was concentrated in the country to the north of Manila, but this proved a mistake. They now began to threaten Manila from the country south of the Pasig. Says General Otis:

The enemy had become again boldly demonstrative at the South and it became necessary to throw him back once more. [222]

General Lawton was directed to concentrate his troops in the country about San Isidro, turn them over to the command of some one else, and come to Manila to organize for a campaign on the south line. The details of this expedition belong to a military history, which this is not. The expedition left its initial point of concentration near Manila on June 9th. Its great event was the battle of Zapote River on June 13th. Along this river in 1896 the insurgents had gained a great victory over the Spaniards. They had trenches on the farther side of the river which they deemed impregnable. General Lawton attacked them in these intrenchments June 13th. At three o'clock that afternoon he wired General Otis at Manila giving him an idea of the battle and stating that the enemy was fighting in strong force and with determination. At 3:30 o'clock he wired:

We are having a beautiful battle. Hurry up ammunition; we will need it;

and at 4 o'clock:

We have the bridge. It has cost us dearly. Battle not yet over. It is a battle however. [223]

It was in this battle of Zapote River that Lieutenant William L. Kenly, of the regular artillery, did what was perhaps the finest single bit of soldier work of the whole war, [224] in recognition of which his conduct in the battle was characterized as "magnificent" by so thorough a soldier as General Lawton, who recommended him to be brevetted for distinguished gallantry in the presence of the enemy, with this remark:

As General Ovenshine says, speaking of Lieutenant Kenly and his battery, "This is probably the first time in history that a battery has been advanced and fought without cover within thirty yards of strongly manned trenches." [225]

For what he did on that occasion, Kenly ought to have had a medal of honor, which, except life insurance and a good education, is the finest legacy any government can enable a soldier to bequeath to his children. If the war had been backed by the sentiment of the whole country, as the Spanish War was, he would have gotten it. As it was, the only thing he ever got for it, so far as the writer is advised, was to have his name spelt wrong in an account of the incident in the only book wherein there has yet been attempted a record of the many deeds of splendid daring that marked the only war into which this nation ever blundered. [226]

While there were divers and sundry movements of our troops hither and thither, and much sacrifice of life, after General Lawton's Zapote River campaign in June, no substantial progress was made in conquering and occupying the Islands until the fall following the Zapote River campaign above mentioned, when the twenty-five regiments of volunteers were organized and sent out. All that was done until then, after the capture of San Fernando, may be summed up broadly, by saying that we protected Manila and held the railroad, as far as we had fought our way up it. It is true that the city of Iloilo had been occupied on February 11th, the city of Cebu shortly afterward, the island of Negros, an oasis of comparative quiet in a great desert of hostility, a little later; also that a small Spanish garrison at the little port of Jolo in the Mohammedan country near Borneo had also been relieved by a small American force on the 19th of May. But these irresolute movements accomplished nothing except to deprive our force at the front of about 4000 men and to awaken the Visayan Islands to active and thorough organization against us.

Preparatory to an understanding of the fall campaign, in which patchwork and piecemeal warfare was superseded by the real thing, it will now be necessary to consider the political--or let us call it, the politico-military--aspect of the first half year of the war.

General Otis's folly had led him to advise Washington as early as November, 1898, that he could get along with 25,000 troops, [227] and the Otis under-estimate of the resistance we would meet if we took the Islands had undoubtedly influenced Mr. McKinley in deciding to take them. Twenty-five thousand troops was only 5000 more than General Otis had with him at the time he made the recommendation, and signified that he was not expecting trouble. The Treaty of Paris was signed on December 10, 1898, and on December 16th, President McKinley's Secretary of War informed Congress that 25,000 troops would be enough for the Philippines. [228] When the treaty was ratified February 6, 1899, the war in the Philippines had already broken out. On March 2, 1899, two days before the 55th Congress expired, in fact on the very day that Congress appropriated the $20,000,000 to pay Spain for the Islands, an act was passed authorizing the President to enlist 35,000 volunteers to put down the insurrection in the Islands. The term of enlistment of these volunteers was to expire June 30, 1901. As the New Thought people would say "Hold the Thought!" June 30, 1901, is the end of our government's fiscal year. That date, the date of expiration of the enlistment of the volunteer army raised under the act of March 2, 1899, is a convenient key to the whole history of the American occupation of the Philippines since the outbreak of our war with the Filipinos, February 4, 1899, including the titanic efforts of the McKinley Administration in the latter half of 1899 and the first half of 1900 to retrieve the Otis blunders; the premature resumption by Judge Taft, during and in aid of Mr. McKinley's campaign for the Presidency in 1900, of the original McKinley Benevolent Assimilation programme, on the theory, already wholly exploded by a long and bitter war, that the great majority of the people welcomed American rule and had only been coerced into opposing us; and the premature setting up of the Civil Government on July 4, 1901. No candid mind seeking only the truth of history can fail to see that when President McKinley sent the Taft Commission to the Philippines in the spring of 1900, part of their problem was to facilitate Mr. McKinley in avoiding later on any further call for volunteers to take the place of those whose terms would expire June 30, 1901. The amount of force that has been needed to saddle our government firmly on the Filipino people is the only honest test by which to examine the claim that it is unto them as Castoria unto children. In February, 1899, the dogs of war being already let loose, President McKinley had resumed his now wholly impossible Benevolent Assimilation programme, by sending out the Schurman Commission, which was the prototype of the Taft Commission, to yearningly explain our intentions to the insurgents, and to make clear to them how unqualifiedly benevolent those intentions were. The scheme was like trying to put salt on a bird's tail after you have flushed him. This commission was headed by President Schurman, of Cornell University. It arrived in March, armed with instructions as benevolent in their rhetoric as any the Filipinos had ever read in the days of our predecessors in sovereignty, the Spaniards. And the commission were of course duly astounded that their publication had no effect. The Filipinos in Manila tore them down as soon as they were put up. The instructions clothed the commission with authority to yield every point in issue except the only one in dispute--Independence. On this alone they were firm. But so were the people who had already submitted the issue to the arbitrament of war. Of course the Schurman Commission, therefore, accomplished nothing. It held frequent communication with the enemy in the field and came near an open rupture with General Otis, who was nominally a member of it. But even that unwise man knew war when he saw it, and knew the futility of trying to mix peace with war. War being hell, the sooner 'tis over the better for all concerned. After Professor Schurman had been quite optimistically explaining our intentions for about three months, under the tragically mistaken notion Mr. McKinley had originally derived from General Otis that the insurrection had been brought about by "the sinister ambition of a few leaders," [229] General Otis wired Washington, on June 4th, "Negotiations and conferences with insurgent leaders cost soldiers' lives and prolong our difficulties," [230] adding with regard to the Schurman Commission: "Ostensibly it will be supported * * * here, and to the outside world gentle peace shall prevail," but intimating that he would be very much gratified if the Department would allow him to handle the enemy, and stop Dr. Schurman from having their leaders come in under flags of truce to parley. After that Dr. Schurman's activities seem to have been confined to the less mischievous business of gathering statistics. His mistake was simply the one he had brought with him, derived from President McKinley. He came back home, however, thoroughly satisfied that the Filipinos did of a verity want the independence they were fighting for, and quite as sure that republics should not have colonies as General Anderson's experience had previously made him. It has long been known throughout the length and breadth of the United States that Dr. Schurman is in favor of Philippine independence.

On June 26th, just thirteen days after the Zapote River fight had stopped the insurgents on the south line from threatening almost the very gates of the city of Manila itself, General Otis had another attack of optimism. On that date he wired Washington: "Insurgent cause may collapse at any time." [231] Finally, the war correspondents at Manila, wearied with the military press censorship whereby General Otis had so long kept the situation from the people at home, with his eternal "situation-well-in-hand" telegrams, got together, inspired no doubt by the example of the Roosevelt round robin that had rescued the Fifth Army Corps from Cuba after the fighting down there, and prepared a round robin of their own--a protest against further misrepresentation of the facts. This they of course knew General Otis would not let them cable home. However, they asked his permission to do so, the committee appointed to beard the lion in his den being O. K. Davis, John T. McCutcheon, Robert Collins, and John F. Bass. General Otis threatened to "put them off the island." This did not bother them in the least. General Otis told the War Department afterwards that he did not punish them because they were "courting martyrdom," or words to that effect. As a matter of fact, they were merely determined that the American people should know the facts. That of "putting them off the island" was just a fussy phrase of "Mother" Otis, long familiar to them. They were under his jurisdiction. But they were Americans, and reputable gentlemen, and he knew he was responsible for their right treatment. After General Otis had duly put the expected veto on the proposed cablegram of protest, the newspaper men sent their protest over to Hong Kong by mail, and had it cabled to the United States from there. It was published in the newspapers of this country July 17, 1899. A copy of it may be found in any public library which keeps the bound copies of the great magazines, in the Review of Reviews for August, 1899, pp. 137-8. It read as follows:

The undersigned, being all staff correspondents of American newspapers stationed in Manila, unite in the following statement:

We believe that, owing to official despatches from Manila made public in Washington, the people of the United States have not received a correct impression of the situation in the Philippines, but that those despatches have presented an ultra-optimistic view that is not shared by the general officers in the field.

We believe the despatches incorrectly represent the existing conditions among the Filipinos in respect to internal dissension and demoralization resulting from the American campaign and to the brigand character of their army.

We believe the despatches err in the declaration that "the situation is well in hand," and in the assumption that the insurrection can be speedily ended without a greatly increased force.

We think the tenacity of the Filipino purpose has been under-estimated, and that the statements are unfounded that volunteers are willing to engage in further service.

The censorship has compelled us to participate in this misrepresentation by excising or altering uncontroverted statements of facts on the plea that "they would alarm the people at home," or "have the people of the United States by the ears."

The men of the pen had been so long under military rule and had seen so much of courts-martial that their document savored of military jurisprudence. After making the above charges, it set forth what it called "specifications." These were:

Prohibition of hospital reports; suppression of full reports of field operations in the event of failure; numbers of heat prostrations in the field; systematic minimization of naval operations; and suppression of complete reports of the situation.

The paper was signed by John T. McCutcheon and Harry Armstrong, representing the Chicago Record; O. K. Davis and P. G. MacDonnell, representing the New York Sun; Robert M. Collins, John P. Dunning, and L. Jones, representing the Associated Press; John F. Bass and William Dinwiddie, representing the New York Herald; E. D. Skeene, representing the Scripps-McRae Association; and Richard Little, representing the Chicago Tribune. Mr. Collins, the Associated Press representative, wrote his people an account of this whole episode, which was also given wide publicity. After describing the committee's interview with the General down to a certain point, he says:

But when General Otis came down to the frank admission that it was his purpose to keep the knowledge of conditions here from the public at home, and when the censor had repeatedly told us, in ruling out plain statements of undisputed facts, "My instructions are to let nothing go that can hurt the Administration," we concluded that protest was justifiable.

Collins had written what he considered a conservative review of the situation in June, saying reinforcements were needed. Of the suppression of this he says:

The censor's comment (I made a note of it) was: "Of course we all know that we are in a terrible mess out here, but we don't want the people to get excited about it. If you fellows will only keep quiet now we will pull through in time [232] without any fuss at home!"

Mr. Collins's letter proceeds: "When I went to see him [Otis] he repeated the same old story about the insurrection going to pieces."

As to the charge of suppressing the real condition of our sick in the hospitals, Mr. Collins says that General Otis remarked that the "hospitals were full of perfectly well men who were shirking and should be turned out." On June 2, 1899, according to General Otis's report (p. 121), sixty per cent. of one of the State volunteer regiments were in hospital sick or wounded and there were in its ranks an average of but eight men to a company fit for duty. The report of the regimental surgeon stating this was forwarded by General Otis to Washington with the comment that there were few cases of serious illness; that the then "present station of these troops"--the place where the fighting was hottest, San Fernando--"is considered by the Filipinos as a health resort," and that "when orders to take passage to the United States are issued, both the Montana and South Dakota troops will recover with astonishing rapidity." [233]

This round robin of course produced a profound sensation in the United States. It was just what the American public had long suspected was the case. Shortly afterward Secretary of War Alger resigned. Coming as it did on the heels of the scandal about "embalmed beef" having been furnished to the army in Cuba, it made him too much of a load for the Administration to carry. He was succeeded by Mr. Root, an eminent member of the New York Bar, whose masterful mind soon saw the essentials of the situation and proceeded to get a volunteer army recruited, equipped, and sent to the Philippines without further unnecessary delay.