The bullets were falling thick about them. They whizzed through the bushes, they cut into the thatched huts, they flung swirls of dust on the little line of brave soldiers, they poured like stinging sweeps of hail, volley after volley, along the Tondo road. When the lantern flashed again, 316 sixteen bullets riddled it, and without its help the big gun was useless.
“Poor lantern! It fell on the firing line, brave to the last,” Thaine declared as the smoke lifted.
But the loss of the cannon only doubled the insurgents’ efforts, and they threshed at the invincible little band with smoking lead. On the one side was a host of Filipino rebels, believing by the incessant firing of the Kansans that it was facing an equal host. On the other side were sixteen men who, knowing the odds against them, dared the game of war to the limit.
“How many rounds have you left?” Captain Clarke asked.
“Only one,” came the answer.
“Give it to them when I give the word. We won’t run till our guns are empty,” the captain declared grimly.
The last shot was ready to fly, when a wild yell burst from the darkness behind them, the shouts to “remember the Maine,” mingled with the old university yell of “Rock Chalk, Jay Hawk, K. U. oo!” and reinforcements charged to the relief of the invincible sixteen.
What disaster might have followed the capture of the Tondo road and the attack upon the bridge is only conjecture. What did happen is history—type henceforth of that line of history every company of the Twentieth Kansas was to help to build. When daylight came, Thaine Aydelot saw the frontier line that he had proudly felt himself called hither to push back, and the reality of it was awful. He had pictured captured trenches, but he had not put in their decoration—the prone forms of dead Filipinos with staring eyes, seeing nothing earthly any more forever. 317
Beyond that line, however, lay the new wilderness that the Anglo-American must conquer, and he flung himself upon the firing line, as if the safety and honor of the American nation rested on his shoulders alone; while all his dreams of glorious warfare, where Greek meets Greek in splendid gallantry, faded out before the actual warfare of the days and nights that followed.
Thaine’s regiment, not the “Kansas Scarecrows,” but the “Fighting Twentieth” now, was one of the regiments on which rested the brunt of driving back and subduing the rebellious Filipinos. Swiftly the Kansas boys pushed into the unknown country north of Manila. They rushed across the rice fields, whose low dykes gave little protection from the enemy. They plunged through marshes, waist deep in water. They lay for hours behind their earthworks, half buried in muddy slime. They slept in holes, drenched to the skin. With the University yell for their battle cry of freedom, they tore through tropical jungles with the bullets of the enemy cutting the branches overhead or spattering the dirt about their feet.