Part 25 (2/2)
Though Section 17, General Orders 100, authorizes the starving of unarmed hostile belligerents as well as armed ones, provided it leads to a speedier subjection of the enemy, it is considered neither justifiable nor desirable to permit any person to starve who has come into towns under our control seeking protection.
This order goes on to direct that all food supplies encountered be brought to the towns. Of course this does not mean supplies captured from the enemy's forces, which may lawfully be destroyed at once. To those not familiar with reconcentration tactics it should be explained that reconcentration means this: You notify, by proclamation and otherwise, all persons within a given area, that on and after a certain day they must all leave their homes and come within a certain prescribed zone or radius of which a named town is usually the centre, there to remain until further orders, and that all persons found outside that zone after the date named will be treated as public enemies. General Bell's order of December 20th, provided that rice found in the possession of families outside the protected zone should, if practicable, be moved with them to the town which was the centre of the zone, that that found apparently cached for enemy's use should be confiscated, and also destroyed if necessary.
Whenever it is found absolutely impossible to transport it [any food supply] to a point within the protected zone, it will be burned or otherwise destroyed. These rules will apply to all food products.
No person within the reconcentration zones was permitted to go outside thereof--cross the dead line--without a written pa.s.s. The Circular Order of December 23d, apparently solicitous lest subordinate commanders might become infected with the Taft belief in Filipino affection, directs that after January 1, 1902, all the munic.i.p.al officials, members of the police force, etc., ”who have not fully complied with their duty by actively aiding the Americans and rendering them valuable service,” shall be summarily thrown into prison. [395]
Circular Order No. 19, issued on Christmas Eve, 1901, provided that,
in order to make the existing state o war and martial law so inconvenient and unprofitable to the people that they will earnestly desire and work for the re-establishment of peace and civil government,
subordinate commanders might, under certain prescribed restrictions, put everybody they chose to work on the roads. [396] This was an ingenious blow at the wealthy and soft-handed, intended to superinduce submission by humbling their pride. Note also the seeds of affection thus sown for the civil government under the reconstruction period which was to follow. In one of d.i.c.kens novels there occurs a law firm by the name of Spenlow and Jorkins. Mr. Spenlow was quite fond of considering himself, and of being considered by others, as tender-hearted. Mr. Jorkins did not mind. When the widow and the orphan would plead with Mr. Spenlow to stay the foreclosure of a mortgage, that benevolent soul would tell them, with a pained expression of infinite sympathy, that he would do all he could for them, but that they would have to see Mr. Jorkins, ”who is a very exacting man,”
he would say. In the dual American politico-military regime in the Philippines of 1901-02, Governor Taft was the Mr. Spenlow, General Chaffee the Mr. Jorkins. But the former always seemed to harbor the amiable delusion that the Filipinos did not at all consider the firm as the movants in each proceeding against them, and that on the contrary they were sure to make a favorable contrast in their hearts between the kindness of Mr. Spenlow and the harshness of Mr. Jorkins. He seemed blind to the fact that the Filipinos, in considering what was done by any of us, spelled us--U. S.
General Bell's Circular Order No. 22, also a Christmas Eve product, re-iterates the usual purpose to make the people yearn for civil government, and the usual warning that none of them really and truly want the blessings of American domination and Benevolent a.s.similation as they truly should, and adds:
To combat such a population, it is necessary to make the state of war as insupportable as possible; and there is no more efficacious way of accomplis.h.i.+ng this than by keeping the minds of the people in such a state of anxiety and apprehension that living under such conditions will soon become unbearable. Little should be said. The less said the better. Let acts, not words, convey intentions. [397]
Under date of December 26, 1901, General Bell reports:
I am now a.s.sembling in the neighborhood of 2500 men, who will be used in columns of fifty each. I expect to accompany the command.
* * * I take so large a command for the purpose of thoroughly searching each ravine, valley, and mountain peak for insurgents and for food, expecting to destroy everything I find outside of town. All able-bodied men will be killed or captured.
Such was the central idea animating the Bell Brigade that overran Batangas in 1902. The American soldier in officially sanctioned wrath is a thing so ugly and dangerous that it would take a Kipling to describe him. I have seen him in that mood, but to describe it is beyond me. Side by side with innumerable ambuscades incident to the nature of the field service as it then was, in which little affairs the soldier above mentioned had lost many a ”bunkie,” there had gone on for some time, under the McKinley-Taft peace-at-any-price policy, whose keynote was that no American should have a job a Filipino could fill, much appointing to munic.i.p.al and other offices of Filipinos, many of whom had at once set to work to make their new offices useful to the cause of their country by systematic aid to the ambuscade business. With this and the Balangiga ma.s.sacre ever in mind, the men of General Bell's brigade began their work in Batangas in a mood which quite made for fidelity in performance of orders to ”make living unbearable” for the Filipino ”by acts, not words.” Also, the American soldier can sing, sometimes very badly, but often rather irrepressibly, until stopped by his officer. Also, whether justly or unjustly is beside the question, he considers a politician who pets the enemy in the midst of a war a hypocrite. So General Bell's 2500 men began that Batangas campaign on New Year's Day, 1902, giving preference, out of their repertoire, to a campaign song whose ominous chorus ran:
”He may be a brother of William H. Taft But he ain't no friend of mine,”
and between songs they would say purringly to one another, ”Remember Balangiga.” And their commanding officer was the very incarnation of this feeling. So listen to the stride of his seven-league boots and the ring of his iron heel:
I expect to first clean out the wide Looboo Peninsula. I shall then move command to the vicinity of Lake Taal, and sweep the country westward to the ocean and south of Cavite, returning through Lipa. I shall scour and clean up the Lipa mountains. Swinging northward, the country in the vicinity of [here follows a long list of towns] will be scoured, ending at [a named mountain], which will then be thoroughly searched and devastated. Swinging back to the right, the same treatment will be given all the country of which [two named mountains] are the main peaks.
And so on ad libitum. General Bell's course in Batangas was commended in the annual report of his immediate superior, a very humane, as well as gallant, soldier, General Wheaton, as ”a model in suppressing insurrections under like circ.u.mstances.” [398] The Batangas programme was approved by General Chaffee, the commanding general. In 1902 the United States Senate rang with indiscriminate denunciation of the Batangas severities and the Samar ”kill and burn” orders. I tried in 1903, without success, to satisfy my distinguished and beloved fellow-townsman, Senator Bacon, that at the time it was adopted it had become a military necessity, which it had. The fact was that the McKinley-Taft policy of conciliation, intended to gild the rivets of alien domination and cure the desire for independence by coddling, had loaned aid and comfort to the enemy, by creating, among a people used theretofore solely to force as a governmental agency for making sovereignty respected, the pathetic notion that we were afraid of them, and might be weakening in respect to our declared programme of denying them independence. The Bell opinion of the Commission's confidence in Filipino gladness at its advent among them is sufficiently apparent in his orders to his troops. On May 23, 1902, Senator Bacon read in the Senate a letter from an officer of the army, a West Point graduate and a personal friend of the Senator's, whose name he withheld, but for whose veracity he vouched, which letter alluded to ”a reconcentrado, pen with a dead line outside, beyond which everything living is shot”; spoke of ”this corpse-carca.s.s stench wafted in” (to where the letter-writer sat writing) as making it ”slightly unpleasant here,”
and made your flesh crawl thus:
At nightfall clouds of vampire bats softly swirl out on their orgies over the dead.
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