There was more fighting outside Manila during the next two or three days, and when that was done the somewhat shattered insurgent legions had recoiled to the distantly visible foot-hills, convinced that their notion they could take Manila was very foolish and very rash.
At the town of Caloocan, some three or four miles out to the north of Manila, were located the shops and round houses of the Manila and Dagupan Railway, which runs from Manila in a northwesterly direction about 120 miles to Dagupan, and was then the only railroad in the archipelago. It was fed by a vast rich farming country, the great plain of central Luzon. Naturally, the central plain which fed the railroad that traversed it and kept its teeming myriads of small farmers in touch with the great outside world was to be sooner or later, the theatre of war. To seize transportation is instinctively the first tactical move of a military man. Lieutenant-General Luna, commander-in-chief, next to Aguinaldo, of the revolutionary forces, the man whom later Aguinaldo had shot, was just then at Caloocan with 4000 men. So it fell to General MacArthur, commanding the Second Division of the Eighth Corps, to move on Caloocan, which he did on February 10th.
John F. Bass, correspondent for Harper’s Weekly, writing from Manila a short time after this, describes this movement. It was our first move away from the city of Manila. With a few masterly strokes of the pen, which I regret there is not space to reproduce here in full, Mr. Bass gives a vivid picture of the various engagements, and of “a background of burning villages, smoke, fire, shot, and shell, the ceaseless tramp of tired and often bleeding feet,” etc. “Heroism,” he says, “became a matter of course and death an incident.” Finally his story pauses for a moment thus: “The natural comment is that all this is merely war—the business of the soldier. True, nor do I think Jimmie Green [Mr. Bass’s name for our “Tommy Atkins”] is troubled with heroics. He accepts the situation without excitement or hysterics. He has little feeling in this matter for his heart is not in this fight.” Here brother Bass’s moralizing ceases abruptly, and the contagious excitement of the hour catches him, just as it always does the average man under such circumstances:
From La Loma church you may get the full view of our long line crossing the open field, evenly, steadily, irresistibly, like an inrolling wave on the beach * * *. Watch the regiments go forward, and form under fire, and move on and on, and you will exclaim: “Magnificent,” and you will gulp a little and feel proud without exactly knowing why. Then gradually the power of that line will force itself upon you, and you will feel that you must follow, that wherever that line goes you must go also. By and by you will be sorry, but for the present the might of an American regiment has got possession of you.
Anybody who has ever been with an American regiment in action knows exactly how the man who wrote that felt. The American who has never had the experience Mr. Bass describes above has missed one way of realizing the majesty of the power of the republic whereof he is privileged to be a citizen. For if there is one national trait which more than any other explains the greatness of our country, it is the instinct for organization, the fondness for self-multiplication to the nth power by intelligent co-operation with one’s fellows to a common end. Especially is the experience in question inspiring where the example of the field officers is particularly appropriate to the occasion. Take for instance the following, concerning the conduct of Major J. Franklin Bell in this advance on Caloocan, from the report of Major Kobbe, Commanding the Artillery:
As the right cleared the head of the ravine, I could see Maj. J. F. Bell * * * leading a company of Montana troops in front of the right * * * advancing, firing, toward intrenchments * * *. He was on a black horse to the last * * * leading and cheering the men. His work was most gallant and * * * especially cheering to me.[16]
No mere scribe can magnify General Bell’s matchless efficiency in action, but it is certainly inspiring to contemplate. There are no “fuss and feathers” about him. Yet his power, proven on many a field in the Philippines, to kindle martial ardor by example, suggests the ubiquitous “Helmet of Navarre” of Lord Macaulay’s poem.
A little later correspondent Bass develops what he meant by “by and by you will be sorry.” You see it is not comfortable business, this of hustling about among the dead and dying. In the excitement, you are so liable to step on the face of some poor devil you knew well, maybe a once warm friend. In this connection Mr. Bass says: “There is this difference between the manner in which American and Filipino soldiers die. The American falls in a heap and dies hard; the Filipino stretches himself out, and when dead is always found in some easy attitude, generally with his head on his arms. They die the way a wild animal dies—in just such a position as one finds a deer or an antelope which one has shot in the woods.”
So far as the writer is advised and believes, nobody who knows John F. Bass ever suspected him of being a quitter. He must have been reading the London Standard, which said about that time: “It is a little startling to find the liberators of Cuba engaged in suppressing a youthful republic which claims the sacred right of self-government.” Bass had written his newspaper in August previous, after observing how pluckily the Filipinos had fought and licked the Spaniards: “Give them their independence and guarantee it to them.” The overwhelming sentiment of the Eighth Army Corps when we took the Philippines was against taking them; and those who had kept informed knew that the Senate had ratified the treaty by a majority only one more than enough to squeeze it through, the vote having been 57 to 27, at least 56 being thus indispensable to make the necessary constitutional two-thirds of the 84 votes cast; and that Wall Street and the White Man’s Burden or land-grabbing contingent—“Philanthropy and Five per cent,” as Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage put it at the time—were responsible for these shambles Mr. Bass describes.
At this juncture some soft-headed gentleman asks: “What is this man who writes this book driving at? Is he trying to show that the American soldiers in the Philippines in February, 1899, all wanted to quit as soon as the war broke out?” Not at all. In the first place it hardly lay in American soldier nature to want to quit when Aguinaldo was telling us “if you don’t take your flag down and out of these islands at once and promptly get out yourselves along with it, I will proceed to kick you out and throw it out.” And in the next place, in the war with the Filipinos, as in all other wars, fuel was added to the flame as soon as the war broke out. Among the Americans, charges soon came into general circulation and acceptance that the Filipinos had planned (but been frustrated in) a plot looking to a general massacre of all foreigners in Manila. This alleged plot was supposed to have been scheduled to be carried out on a certain night shortly after February 15, 1899. Among the Filipinos, on the other hand, counter-charges soon followed, and met with general credence, that the Americans made a practise of killing prisoners taken in battle, including the wounded. Neither charge was ever proven, but both served the purpose, at the psychologic moment, of possessing each side with the desire to kill, which is the business of war. Let us glance briefly at these recriminations.