Jack Ballington, Forester

by John Trotwood Moore

There is one great thing about war, the steel it puts into the heart to stand things, to die smiling and unafraid, to take life as a battle, and fight it out on the firing line. There are many living, but few on the firing line of life. They think they are soldiers, but they are sutlers.

In a short time we sighted Cebu. Our General, Hawthorne, and a battalion of us were there, as I wrote you before, sent to help out the Regulars. We were ordered to pick up this battalion; it completed what was left of the First Tennessee, for some would sleep forever under far-off Pacific skies.

Cebu is a little city on the island of the same name in the center tier of the Archipelago. Bitter and desperate are the inhabitants and savage in the extreme, and to take the place has cost us a hard battle; and to hold it almost cost the life of the Twenty-third, for they had been cut off in the mountains and all but lost when Hawthorne came to their aid, three months before.

It is a long narrow island with a backbone of volcanic mountains, in the recesses of which live a race of savage fighters who do not quibble to rush, half naked, and with bolos and spears, upon lines of steel and Gatlings.

Their mountain fastnesses are all but impregnable. The volcanic mountains run sheer up straight and the level plateaus yawn with the most dangerous and sudden chasms.

Here were the forts and fortifications of the savage Insurgents, and here they had again threatened portions of the Sixth, Nineteenth and Twenty-third Regulars under General Snyder.

It was night when we heard it; we had anchored and prepared to take General Hawthorne and our boys on the homeward journey.

Then like a bolt came the news: portions of the Nineteenth Regulars were surrounded and cut off in the mountains by ten thousand yellow savages. They were doomed.

And Hawthorne and his battalion, instead of being on the beach to embark for home, had already gone back to the mountains to fight.

I drew up our men in line of dress parade on the Indiana's decks. "Men," I said, "we have been mustered out! We are no longer soldiers but citizens of the Republic, homeward bound, with all it means to every man of you who has done his duty as you all have. No man of you may be ordered to go one step from this transport's deck till you reach your own land. But news has come that the enemy has attacked and cut off our comrades. Our General and a small battalion have already gone to their aid. I ask no man to follow me. I am going, and every man who would go with me take two steps forward."