“The thing is on,” said General Hughes, Provost Marshal of Manila, to General Otis, at Malacañan palace, on the night of February 4, 1899, about half past eight o’clock, as soon as the firing started.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3]
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.[4] 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.”[5]
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 dorée, as General Bell calls them in one of his early reports,[6] 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 Cæsar, 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,”[7] 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.[8]
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.[9] “We buried 700 of them.”[10] 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.[11] 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”[12]—and recommended that he be made a brigadier general, which shortly afterward was done.[13]
It would be invidious to follow the various phases of the subsequent early fighting, and single out one or more States[14] 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,[15] 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.