The body of Rizal was seen to waver and fall. With a last effort of his indomitable will, even in falling he turned so that he should lie with face upward.[17]
In the thirty-sixth year of his age and the twenty-fourth year of his service—poet, patriot, and martyr.
Cheers and laughter arose from the crowd as his blood was seen to be pouring upon the field. Women waved their handkerchiefs and clapped their hands; men shouted with delight. This was the end of him that had unveiled to the world the realities of their social order; that had ridiculed all their structure of rank and caste. He had died like a dog before them. [[310]]
The band played the national anthem. “Viva España!” shouted the crowd. A photographer made pictures of the scene. It was a great day for Spain. Her supremacy in the Philippines was approved and established for ever. For whomsoever thereafter might venture to question its righteousness, the same fate. Let him also die like a dog to the applause and laughter of the existing order, rock-rooted and eternal.
“Viva España!” How poor are they that will not ponder history! From the hanging of John Brown to the Emancipation Proclamation was three years and twenty-nine days. From the murder of José Rizal to the surrender of Manila was one year, eight months, and seventeen days.
The body was cast into an undesignated grave, and great care was taken to obliterate all marks by which it might be identified; for this hated enemy there should be nothing but loathing and contumely, alive or dead. The perpetrators of this last outrage believed they had managed with skill and success. Little they knew the people with whom they dealt. Into the unmarked grave were covertly introduced objects that would allow of a future identification,[18] and the dust that malice and bigotry sought to dishonor was destined to a final burial with the proud mourning of a nation and the respectful sympathy of the world.
Not even yet was satiated the hot thirst for blood that seemed to rage in this abnormal community. The jails had been stuffed with other members of the Liga Filipina, men that like Rizal had committed the crime of desiring their country’s good. On January 11, 1897, [[311]]two weeks after the sacrifice of Rizal, fourteen of his companions were led forth to Bagumbayan Field and shot, as he had been shot. Two of these were priests of the church; among the laymen were members of ancient Filipino families, and men of conspicuously blameless walk and notable attainments. Father Inocencio Herrera and Father Prieto Gerónimo led the procession of the condemned whose names were now to be added to the long roll of those that had made that one field a shrine of liberty hardly to be equaled in men’s acquaintance. Others whose blood was shed with theirs that day on that sacred spot were Domingo Franco, Moisés Salvador, Numeriano Adriano, Antonio Salazar, José Dizon, Luis Enciso Villareal, Faustino Villareal, Ramón A. Padilla, Manuel Avella, Roman Basa, Cristobal Medina, and Francisco Roxas. It was a flag dripping with blood that Spain raised to the world that morning.
Of these some had endured such torturings that death must have come as a relief. Neither age nor worth to be spared, was the ancestral precept for all such butcheries. Moisés Salvador was more than seventy years old. He had been tortured until he could no longer stand and must be carried out and laid prone on the ground when his time came to be shot. Francisco Roxas the thumb-screw, or whatever other deviltries, had made insane. He knew nothing of what was going on about him but imagined himself to be in church. When he knelt before the firing-squad he spread his handkerchief upon the ground as he would upon the church floor and began to say his ordinary prayers.[19] [[312]]
“Viva España!” There never was a grimmer irony of fate. Even as the crowds raised that cry above the blood of Rizal, in all the Far East there was no more Spain. The band that played triumphant the national anthem was in reality sounding a funeral dirge. The shots that struck down Rizal to the cheers of “broadcloth ruffians” shattered the Spanish empire. Until that December 30, 1896, there remained just basis for the ancient boast about the flag whereon the sun never set; as Rizal tottered and fell it passed among the curios of history. On the day the murderous court martial pronounced Rizal’s death the Filipinos began to slip from the city and join the forces of Bonifacio. Among them that evening went Paciano, men said with pinched lips and clenched jaws, to fight with conspicuous valor while the Spanish flag flew in his country.[20] Silently they went and by thousands. The insurgent lines swept up as close as Cavite, so strong had the uprising grown. There, in the face of all the vigilance, all the spying, all the rules and regulations, they stood in their trenches with arms in their hands. Guns came from the thickets, the roofs, the carabao stalls. Soldiers that enlisted without rifles fought with bolos until in the first encounter they could wrest guns from the Spaniards. From the waterfront of Manila one could see their flag flying. Inadequately armed, badly fed, ragged and untrained, they went into battle and overwhelmed the Spanish regulars, because they had been fired with a vision of freedom and a holy wrath against the System that had struck down their champion. Back went the Spanish regulars to [[313]]the gates of Manila, as one hundred years before the household troops of every king in Europe had bent before the citizen soldiery of France, fighting for the republic.
In a short time there was left no last doubt of the seriousness of the revolt; with reason this time the Spanish colony cowered. The thirty-fourth since the beginning of Spanish dominion in the Philippines, it threatened at last to sweep that vicious anomaly into the sea. A man had arisen capable of verifying the most sanguine of Bonifacio’s prophecies, a college-bred farmer, without military training but with a strange gift of military prescience, able with an equipment of native genius to outwit, outmanœuver, and outlast the best of the Spanish commanders. Against the skill and restless energy of Emilio Aguinaldo they seemed to make no permanent progress, and one reading the records of those days is irresistibly reminded of Francis Marion and the Carolinas. If the regulars drove him hence to-day, he would attack them there to-morrow. A union of Filipino hearts such as Rizal, living, had hardly dared to dream of had been cemented by his death. For the first time the possibility of ridding all the Islands of all Spanish power laid hold upon determined and reasoning men, and there began a life and death struggle between light and darkness, the nineteenth century and the sixteenth. [[314]]