No rupture with insurgents. This is imperative. Can ask insurgent generals or Aguinaldo for permission to occupy trenches, but if refused not to use force.[27]
“I am quite unable to explain,” says Mr. Millet (p. 61), “why we did not in the very beginning make them understand that we were masters of the situation, and that they must come strictly under our authority.” The obvious reason was that a war of conquest to subjugate a remote people struggling to be free from the yoke of alien domination was sure to be more or less unpopular with many of the sovereign voters of a republic, and more or less dangerous therefore, like all unpopular wars, to the tenure of office of the party in power. So that in entering upon a war for conquest, a republic must “play politics,” using the military arm of the government for the twofold purpose of crushing opposition and proving that there is none.
The maxim which makes all fair in war often covers a multitude of sins. But let us turn for a moment from strategy to principle, and see what two other distinguished American war correspondents were thinking and saying about the same time. Writing to Harper’s Weekly from Cavite, under date of July 16th, concerning the work of the Filipinos during the eight weeks before that, Mr. O. K. Davis said: “The insurgents have driven them [the Spaniards] back over twenty miles of country practically impassable for our men. * * * Aguinaldo has saved our troops a lot of desperately hard campaigning * * *. The insurgent works extend clear around Manila, and the Spaniards are completely hemmed in. There is no hope for them but surrender.” Writing to the same paper under date of August 6th, Mr. John F. Bass says: “We forget that they drove the Spaniards from Cavite to their present intrenched position, thus saving us a long-continued fight through the jungle.” This gentleman did not tackle the question of inventing a new definition of liberty consistent with alien domination. He simply says: “Give them their liberty and guarantee it to them.” In the face of such plucky patriotism as he had witnessed, political casuistry about “capacity for self-government” would have hung its head. Yet Mr. Bass was by no means a novice. He had served with the British army in Egypt in 1895, through the Armenian massacres of 1896, and in the Cretan rebellion and Greek War of 1897. His sentiments were simply precisely what those of the average American not under military orders would have been at the time. After the fall of Manila he wrote (August 17th): “I am inclined to think that the insurgents intend to fight us if we stay and Spain if we go.”
There were 8500 American troops in the taking of the city of Manila, on August 13, 1898. The Filipinos were ignored by them, although they afterwards claimed to have helped. As a matter of fact, the Spanish officers in command were very anxious to surrender and get back to Spain. The Filipinos had already made them “long for peace,” to use a famous expression of General J. F. Bell. The garrison only put up a very slight resistance, “to save their face,” as the Chinese say, i. e., to save themselves from being court-martialed under some quixotic article of the Spanish army regulations. The assault was begun about 9.30 A.M., and early that afternoon the Spanish flag had been lowered from the flag-staff in the main square and the Stars and Stripes run up in its stead, amid the convulsive sobs of dark-eyed señoritas and the muttered curses of melodramatic Spanish cavaliers. Thanks to the Filipinos’ three and one half months’ work, the performance only cost us five men killed out of the 8500. The list of wounded totalled 43. Our antecedent loss in the trenches prior to the day of the assault had been fourteen killed and sixty wounded. So the job was completed, so far as the records show, at a cost of less than a score of American lives.[28]
As Aguinaldo’s troops surged forward in the wake of the American advance they were stopped by orders from the American commander, and prevented from following the retreating Spaniards into Manila. They were not even allowed what is known to the modern small boy as “a look-in.” They were not permitted to come into the city to see the surrender. President McKinley’s message to Congress of December, 1898, describes “the last scene of the war” as having been “enacted at Manila its starting place.”[29] It says: “On August 13th, after a brief assault upon the works by the land forces, in which the squadron assisted, the capital surrendered unconditionally.” In this connection, by way of explaining Aguinaldo’s treatment at the hands of our generals from the beginning, the message says, “Divided victory was not permissible.” “It was fitting that whatever was to be done * * * should be accomplished by the strong arm of the United States alone.” But what takes much of the virtue out of the “strong arm” proposition is that Generals Merritt and Anderson were carrying out President McKinley’s orders all the time they were juggling Aguinaldo out of his positions before Manila, and giving him evasive answers, until the city could be taken by the said “strong arm” alone. For, as the message puts it, in speaking of the taking of the city, “By this the conquest of the Philippine Islands * * * was formally sealed.”
When General Merritt left Manila on August 30th, he proceeded to Paris to appear before the Peace Commission there. His views doubtless had great weight with them on the momentous questions they had to decide. But his views were wholly erroneous, and that they were so is not surprising. As above stated, he did not even meet Aguinaldo, purposely holding himself aloof from him and his leaders. He never did know how deeply they were incensed at being shut out of Manila when the city surrendered. In his report prepared aboard the steamship China, en route for Paris, he says: “Doubtless much dissatisfaction is felt by the rank and file of the insurgents, but * * * I am of the opinion that the leaders will be able to prevent serious disturbances,” etc. (p. 40). If General Merritt had caught the temper of the trenches he would have known better, but he saw nothing of the fighting prior to the final scene, nor did he take the field in person on the day of the combined assault on the city, August 13th, and therefore missed the supreme opportunity to understand how the Filipinos felt. Says General Anderson in his report:
I understood from the general commanding that he would be personally present on the day of battle. * * * On the morning of the 13th, General Babcock came to my headquarters and informed me that the major-general commanding would remain on a despatch boat.[30]
Indeed, so reduced was Manila, by reason of the long siege conducted by the insurgents, that the assault of August 13th, not only was, but was expected to be, little more than a sham battle. Says Lieutenant-Colonel Pope, chief quartermaster, “On the evening of August 12th an order was sent me to report with two battalions of the Second Oregon Volunteers, under Colonel Summers the next day on the Kwong Hoi to the commanding general on the Newport, as an escort on his entrance into Manila. At the hour named, I reported etc.”[31] As soon as Spanish “honor” was satisfied, up went the white flag and General Merritt was duly escorted ashore and into the city, where he received the surrender of the Spanish general.
In the Civil War, General Merritt had received six successive promotions for gallantry, at Gettysburg, Yellow Tavern, Five Forks, etc., and had been with Sheridan at Winchester. So the way he “commanded” the assault on Manila is proof only of the obligations we then owed the Filipinos. They had left very little to be done.
In his account of General Merritt’s original personal disembarkation at Cavite, Mr. Frank Millet acquaints his readers with a Philippine custom we afterwards grew quite familiar with and found quite useful, of keeping your shoes dry in landing from a rowboat on a beach by riding astride the shoulders of some husky native boatman. The boatmen make it a point of special pride not to let their passengers get their feet wet. Mr. Millet tells us that a general in uniform looks neither dignified nor picturesque under such circumstances, and that therefore he will not elaborate on the picture, but that it is suggestive “more of the hilarious than of the heroic.” Presumably when General Merritt went ashore on August 13th, from the despatch boat from which he had been watching the assault on Manila, to receive the surrender of the Spanish general, he followed the same custom of the country he had used on the occasion of his original disembarkation. So that in the taking of Manila, we were probably literally, as well as ethically, like General Mahone of Virginia as he is pictured in a familiar post-bellum negro story, according to which the general met a negro on a steep part of the road to heaven, told him that St. Peter would only admit mounted parties, mounted the negro with the latter’s consent, rode on his back the rest of the toilsome journey to the heavenly gate, dismounted, knocked, and was cordially welcomed by the saint at the sacred portal thus: “Why how d’ ye do, General Mahone; jess tie yoh hoss and come in.”