Bullets and bayonets are integral parts of the soldier’s life. Familiarity breeds contempt for these—they are his own tools, the tools with which he blazes his own road to glory or to a hero’s death. But those terrible bolos, and the Moro swords—those cruel knives that shear a man from crown to waist, or lop off heads or limbs as though they were chalk, wielded by little brown fiends who care naught for rules of fence and are willing to mix it when you compel them to close with you, just as a rat will set his fangs in your flesh when you corner him—they are different, quite. And when your soldier boy thinks of the newspapers that are preaching the milk of human kindness at home and watching like so many harpies for the slightest mishap from which political capital may be made, whilst he is wallowing in the blood of comrades upon whom nameless mutilations have been inflicted, he has hard work to keep his courage up to the fighting pitch.
Then the dread plasmodium-bearing mosquito of the swamps, with its trail of death dealing chill and hemorrhage, the hellish amœba of the foul tropic streams, that are so often the soldier’s only source of water supply, and that awful typhoid, hovering like a somber-hued, gigantic bat over an army camp—selecting as its victims the very flower of the soldiery—these be things, not of glory, but of death, with no sublimity save that of noble self-sacrifice. And that dreadful nostalgia, that sickening yearning for home, which so often kills, or, aided by the pitiless torrid sun, beating down upon devoted heads unused to a foretaste of hell, sends men with brains awry back to Frisco by the ship load. Were not these terrors an awful crucible in which to try the metal of men whom their friends, at home, who do not know gold when they see it, are wont to call “tin soldiers?”
What a lot of maudlin sentiment the home papers and builders of political issues lavished upon those Filipino fiends who, it was alleged, were given more water than was good for them! The soldier at the front knew the mockery of it all. He had felt the bolo of the treacherous “amigo” at his back, the while he parleyed, friendly-wise, with the aforesaid amigo’s snaky comrade in front. He had seen the pitiful remnant of what were once white human forms, the forms of his own comrades and friends, still living, perhaps, fresh from the torturings inflicted by their savage captors. He had seen the dismembered bodies of children and old men who had been slain in cold blood because they or their friends had been friendly to the Americans, and he had heard the wailing of women who had suffered shameful outrage, aye, a living death, at the hands of our “little brown brother.” What wonder that the boy in khaki grew tired of making prisoners of fiends from hell, who deserved nothing better than a short shrift and a merry trip back to their father, the devil, and drove his bayonet a little deeper or emptied his magazine a bit faster than would permit him to see or heed a signal of surrender?
Of all the regiments who were sent to those far away islands, none bore itself more gallantly, none was more pertinaciously put to the fore than the —th Montana. A history of the thin, khaki-clad firing line in the Philippines that did not give more than a modest share of honor to that gallant regiment would be but a false and biased chronicle.
Johnny, the boy of the slums, may not have been so patriotically inspired as some of his comrades, but he was a fighter by instinct, and a soldier by profession. He knew his duty, fear was a thing apart from him, and he attended strictly to “business” as he understood it, namely, to obeying orders, shooting true, and keeping tab of the Filipinos he potted. There be those who say that his game bags were not only large, but of select contents. He had a keen eye for brown officers, and, as he said, there were so many Filipino generals and such folk, that there were enough for everybody, even after he had taken his multitudinous pick.
It was not long before the mighty ones at staff headquarters became quite familiar with Johnny’s ways. Our soldier soon found himself in demand, a demand which, from details of special and hazardous duty, occasional at first, but finally very frequent, won for him a sergeant’s stripes, and regrets at headquarters that it was not possible to immediately decorate his shoulders with strap and bar. Never did better man wear non-com’s stripes.
The sergeant is the pivot around which, as upon an axis, revolves the discipline and efficiency of the rank and file. He is the key-stone of both the individual and company arch of courage. Johnny was all that a disciplinarian should be, and more, he was idolized by the men. Twice was he wounded by a ball that smashed several ribs and narrowly missed taking out so much of his chest wall that, as he said, his heart and lungs would have been subject to indecent exposure. Again did the little “brown bellies” get him,—with a bolo this time. But Johnny’s bayonet was a fraction of a second too quick for the luckless Filipino who wielded the “chopper” and the heavy blade missed the vitals by a hair. A siege of typhoid followed, but Johnny said, when the surgeon wanted to have him sick-leaved home. “Hell! no. It wouldn’t be business, an’ besides, I’m at home now—anyhow, as near as I’ll ever be. Shootin’, cuttin’ and typhoid never was calculated to kill gutter snipes, an’ so long as I keep away from water, which is the only thing that I hain’t tried, I reckon I’ll pull through. Then there’s old Miss Krag, here,” and he tenderly patted his rifle, “she can’t get any furlough, cause she hain’t had any pluggin’ or boloin’, or fever, an’ she’d be lonesome.” And so Johnny stayed at the front, and shot Filipinos, swore great oaths and—got well.
The Filipinos were “pacified,” so all the home papers said, save those few that were politically favorable to the democratic “outs” and opposed to the republican “ins.” A few boloed soldiers or native women and children were not evidences of war, they were mere “local disturbances, occasional manifestations of unrest, etc.” The men at the front and the friendly brown ones thought differently, but who cares what the pig under the knife thinks? Uncle Sam didn’t seem quite so certain of himself as the papers would have us believe he was. Whilst egging the eagle on to scream peans of victory as a soothing embrocation for such as might be restive under the war tax, he kept his weather eye open just the same. To clinch the matter of pacification, troops were ordered here and there into the towns adjacent to the swamps and rocky fastnesses where lurked the more troublesome of the ladrones. Small detachments were often sent, much smaller in some instances than was safe, as the government learned to its sorrow.
Much of the outpost duty fell upon the —th Montana. K company was ordered to duty in the province of Zambales, island of Luzon, and took up its quarters at Poombato, a place which could be called a town by courtesy only. It was nothing more than a handful of palm thatched huts, inhabited chiefly by old men, women and children who couldn’t become enrolled with their “pacified” brethren who, bolo in hand, were lurking in the neighboring hills and thickets, awaiting a chance for a sudden dash upon the enemy and a merry boloing in the camp of the Americanos. The men of K company were no “kickers,” as they were wont to express it, but the idea of rotting in the wilds while trying to protect a few miserable natives from possible outlaws who were their own kith and kin, and with whom the protected ones kept in pretty close and friendly touch, was not the pleasantest.
The men of K company knew the Filipino—knew him root and branch—they had fought him long enough, the Lord knows, and had discovered that caution was the price of sound throats. Their commander, Captain Benning, was ever a discreet officer and careful of his men, above all he knew that somewhere in the vicinity hovered the worst of all the brigands and cut throats the Philippines had yet produced, “Captain” Agramonte, but the deadly monotony of their daily duties was more than the men could stand. Despite warnings and, it must be confessed, not infrequently despite strict orders, the men would stray away into the jungle, often in quest of a scrap with stray Filipinos, sometimes seeking such excitement as shooting wild game affords. These little excursions were apparently safe enough at first. No accidents happening, however, the men grew bolder, and roamed about almost at will, and then the trouble came. Man after man was found boloed, or disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him up. On one occasion a small searching party, in quest of a missing comrade, was ambushed and narrowly escaped annihilation. Captain Benning was not left long in doubt as to whom he was indebted for the loss of his men. The ghastly, recently severed head of one of his men was hurled from the brake one night into camp, rolling, as chance would have it, its bloody way to the very door of the captain’s own tent. Affixed to the awful thing was a scurrilous note signed, “Agramonte.”