Damn, damn, damn the Filipino,
Pock-marked khakiac ladrone;[1]
Underneath the starry flag
Civilize him with a Krag,
And return us to our own beloved home.
Army Song of the Philippines under MacArthur.[2]
Some one has said, “Let me write the songs of a people and I care not who makes their laws.” Give me the campaign songs of a war, and I will so write the history of that war that he who runs may read, and, reading, know the truth. The volunteers of 1899 had, most of them, been in the Spanish War of ’98. That struggle had been so brief that, to borrow a phrase of the principal beneficiary of it, Colonel Roosevelt, there had not been “war enough to go ’round.” The Philippine insurrection had already broken out when the Spanish War volunteers returned from Cuba in the first half of 1899. Few of them knew exactly where the Philippines were on the map. They simply knew that we had bought the islands, that disturbances of public order were in progress there, and that the Government desired to suppress them. The President had called for volunteers. That was enough. When they reached the islands, instead of finding a lot of outlaws, brigands, etc., such as that pestiferous, ill-conditioned outfit of horse-thieves and cane-field burning patriots we volunteers of ’98 had to comb out of the eastern end of Cuba under General Wood in the winter of 1898–9, they found Manila, on their arrival, practically almost a besieged city. They knew that the erroneous impression they had brought with them was the result of misrepresentation. Who was responsible for that misrepresentation they did not attempt to analyze. They simply set to work with American energy to put down the insurrection. Nobody questioned the unanimity of the opposition. There it was, a fact—denied at home, but a fact. In the course of the fight against the organized insurgent army they lost a great many of their comrades, and in that way the unanimity of the resistance was quite forcibly impressed upon them. By kindred psychologic processes equally free from mystery, their determination to overcome the resistance early became very set—a state of mind which boded no good to the Filipinos. The army song given at the beginning of [Chapter XI] (ante), in which General Otis is made to sing, after the fashion of some of the characters in Pinafore, that pensive query to himself
Am I the boss, or am I a tool?
the first stanza of which closes
Now I’d like to know who’s the boss of the show,