The American regiments were six days in reaching Caloocan, a prosperous town only six miles north of Manila; a mile a day, every foot stubbornly contested.
On Sabbath morning in the first day’s struggle, Thaine was running in a line of soldiery toward the Filipino fortification, when he was halted beside a thatched hut that stood between the guns of both armies and was riddled with bullets.
“Help the corporal here, Aydelot, then double quick it ahead,” Lieutenant Krause commanded.
Thaine followed the corporal inside the hut where, shot 318 to pieces, lay the mangled forms of women and children who had caught the storm of bullets from both firing lines. Through a gaping hole in the wall beyond, he saw a shallow pit where wounded and dead men and women were huddled together.
“Help me get out the live ones and send them back to Manila, and we’ll cover the others right here,” the corporal declared.
It was the neighborhood custom of the Grass River Valley for young men to assist at every funeral. Thaine had jokingly dubbed himself “official neighborhood pall-bearer,” and had served at so many funerals that the service had become merely one of silent dignity which he forgot the next hour. He knew just how to place the flowers effectively, when to step aside and wait, and when to come forward and take hold. And these were the only kinds of services he had known for the dead.
As he bent over the blood-smeared bodies to take up the wounded and dying now, the horror of war burst upon him, and no dead face could be more ashy gray than the young soldier’s face as he lifted it above a dying Filipino woman whom he stretched tenderly beside the hut. The next victim was a boy, a deserter from Manila, whom Thaine recognized by a scar across his cheek as the young Filipino whose wound Doctor Carey had dressed.
“You poor fellow!” Thaine said softly.
The boy’s eyes opened in recognition.
“For liberty,” he murmured in Spanish, with a scowling face. Then the scowl faded to a smile, and in a moment more he had entered eternal liberty.