Part 19 (1/2)

In volume i., part 5, War Department Report, 1899, at pages 5 et seq., may be found a journal ill.u.s.trating the nature of the ”police” work done by the volunteers of 1899, in 1900, and at pages 5 et seq. of the same report for 1900 (volume i., part 4) may be found a similar diary carried up to June 30, 1901. Throughout the period covered by those reports, scarcely a day pa.s.sed without what the military folk coolly call ”contacts” with the enemy.

The Visayan Islands were in course of time duly organized, as Luzon had previously been, departmentally and by military districts. The Visayan Islands became the Department of Visayas, divided into districts commanded either by regimental commanders having a regiment or more with them, or by general officers. For a long time no attempt to make military occupation effective in these various islands, save in the coast towns, was attempted. However, the indicated disposition of troops completed, technically at least, the American occupation of the Visayan Islands.

Pursuant to the plan followed, as we have hitherto followed the army in our narrative, first throughout northern Luzon and later through southern Luzon, some data are now in order concerning the Visayan Islands.

As already made clear, there are but six of the Visayan Islands with which any one interested in the Philippines merely as a student of world politics or of history need bother. The area and population of these are as follows: [295]

Island Area (sq. m.) Population

Panay 4,611 743,646 Negros 4,881 460,776 Cebu 1,762 592,247 Leyte 2,722 356,641 Samar 5,031 222,090 Bohol 1,441 243,148

Whenever, if ever, an independent republic is established in the Philippines, the six islands above mentioned could and should const.i.tute self-governing commonwealths similar to the several States of the American Union. The rest of the islands lying between Luzon and Mindanao could easily be disposed of governmentally by being attached to the jurisdiction of one of the said six islands.

Mindanao and the adjacent islets called Jolo were organized as the Department of Mindanao and Jolo, under General Kobbe, with the 31st Volunteer Infantry, Colonel Pett.i.t's regiment, the 40th Volunteer Infantry, Colonel G.o.dwin's regiment, and the 23rd Regular Infantry. Thus the archipelago was completely accounted for, for the time being, just as all the territory of the United States was long accounted for by our military authorities at home, with the Department of the East, headquarters Governor's Island, New York; the Department of the Lakes, headquarters Chicago; the Department of the Gulf, headquarters Atlanta, etc. In this state of the case, General Otis re-embraced his early pet delusion--if it was a delusion, which charity and the probabilities suggest it should be called--about the insurrection having gone to pieces; and decided to come home. Possibly, also, he was homesick. General Otis was a very positive character, a strong man. But even strong men get homesick after long exile. When you hear the call of the homeland after long residence ”east of Suez,”

you must answer the call, duty not forbidding. General Otis had stood by his ink wells and the Administration with unswerving devotion for twenty months, and was ent.i.tled to come back home and tell the public all about the fighting in the Philippines, and how entirely over it was, and how wholly right Mr. McKinley was in his theory that the visible opposition to our rule and the seeming desire to be free and independent did not represent the wishes of the Filipino people at all, but only the ”sinister ambitions of a few unscrupulous Tagalo leaders.” Accordingly on May 5, 1900, he was relieved at his own request, and departed for the United States. He was succeeded in command by a very different type of man, Major-General Arthur MacArthur, upon whom now devolved the problem of holding down the situation and of actually getting it stably ”well in hand” by June 30, 1901, the date of expiration of the term of enlistment of the twenty-five volunteer regiments organized under the Act of March 2, 1899.

CHAPTER XIII

MACARTHUR AND THE WAR

d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n the Filipino, Pock-marked khakiac ladrone; [296]

Underneath the starry flag Civilize him with a Krag, And return us to our own beloved home.

Army Song of the Philippines under MacArthur. [297]

Some one has said, ”Let me write the songs of a people and I care not who makes their laws.” Give me the campaign songs of a war, and I will so write the history of that war that he who runs may read, and, reading, know the truth. The volunteers of 1899 had, most of them, been in the Spanish War of '98. That struggle had been so brief that, to borrow a phrase of the princ.i.p.al beneficiary of it, Colonel Roosevelt, there had not been ”war enough to go 'round.” The Philippine insurrection had already broken out when the Spanish War volunteers returned from Cuba in the first half of 1899. Few of them knew exactly where the Philippines were on the map. They simply knew that we had bought the islands, that disturbances of public order were in progress there, and that the Government desired to suppress them. The President had called for volunteers. That was enough. When they reached the islands, instead of finding a lot of outlaws, brigands, etc., such as that pestiferous, ill-conditioned outfit of horse-thieves and cane-field burning patriots we volunteers of '98 had to comb out of the eastern end of Cuba under General Wood in the winter of 1898-9, they found Manila, on their arrival, practically almost a besieged city. They knew that the erroneous impression they had brought with them was the result of misrepresentation. Who was responsible for that misrepresentation they did not attempt to a.n.a.lyze. They simply set to work with American energy to put down the insurrection. n.o.body questioned the unanimity of the opposition. There it was, a fact--denied at home, but a fact. In the course of the fight against the organized insurgent army they lost a great many of their comrades, and in that way the unanimity of the resistance was quite forcibly impressed upon them. By kindred psychologic processes equally free from mystery, their determination to overcome the resistance early became very set--a state of mind which boded no good to the Filipinos. The army song given at the beginning of Chapter XI (ante), in which General Otis is made to sing, after the fas.h.i.+on of some of the characters in Pinafore, that pensive query to himself

Am I the boss, or am I a tool?

the first stanza of which closes

Now I'd like to know who's the boss of the show, Is it me or Emilio Aguinaldo?

was a point of departure, in the matter of information, which served to acquaint them with all that had gone before. They resented the loss of prestige to American arms and desired to restore that prestige. While engaged in so doing, they became aware, during the Presidential year 1900, that the campaign of that year in the United States was based largely upon the pretence that the majority of the Filipinos welcomed our rule. Naturally, their experience led them to a very general and very cordial detestation of this pretence. For one thing, it was an unfair belittling of the actual military service they were rendering. People hate a lie whether they are able to trace its devious windings to its source or sources, or to a.n.a.lyze all its causes, or calculate all its possible effects, or not. The real rock-bottom falsehood, not as fully understood then as it became later, consisted in the impression sought to be produced at home, in order to get votes, that the great body of the Filipino people were not really in sympathy with their country's struggle for freedom, and would be really glad tamely to accept the alien domination so benevolently offered by a superior people, but were being coerced into fighting through intimidation by a few selfish leaders acting for their own selfish ends. While our fighting generals in the field,--General MacArthur, for instance, whose interview with a newspaper man just after the fall of Malolos, in March, 1899, subsequently verified by him before the Senate Committee of 1902, has already been noticed--at first believed that it was only a faction that we had to contend with, they soon discovered that the whole people were loyal to Aguinaldo and the cause he represented. But, while the point as to how unanimous the resistance was remained a disputed matter for some little time among those of our people who did not have to ”go up against it,”

the most curious fact of that whole historic situation, to my mind, is the absolute ident.i.ty of the disputed suggestion with that which had previously been used in like cases in all ages by the powerful against people struggling to be free, and the cotemporaneous absence of any notation of the coincidence by any conspicuous spectator of the drama, to say nothing of us smaller fry who bore the brunt of the war or any portion of it.

Those men of '99 in the Philippines realized in 1900, vaguely it may be, but actually, that they were waging a war of conquest after the manner of the British as sung by Kipling, but under the hypocritical pretence that they were doing missionary work to improve the Filipino. They did not know whether the Filipinos could or could not run a decent government if permitted. It was too early to form any judgment. And even then there was no unanimous feeling that they could not. Brigadier-General Charles King, the famous novelist, who was in the fighting out there during the first half of 1899, was quoted in the Catholic Citizen, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in June, 1899, as having said in an interview given at Milwaukee: