The guerrilla is like a poet
Keen to the rustle of leaves
The break of twigs
The ripples of the river
The smell of fire
And the ashes of departure.
The guerrilla is like a poet.
He has merged with the trees
The bushes and the rocks
Ambiguous but precise
Well-versed on the law of motion.
José Maria Sison
FARM BOYS FROM KANSAS were the most backward, prairie boys so green they’d never ridden a train, or used a napkin, and their training and drilling at the Presidio in San Francisco, waiting to be shipped out to the Philippines, was the first time they’d been away from home for more than a night. With the American frontier disappearing faster than the buffalo, there was not much chance at honour and glory and adventure except the army for these small-town boys.
There were church send-offs, marching bands accompanying them to the train depot, parades and bunting and flags flapping. It would be better than the circus, and over just as quick, the generals promised. Hymns, ancient and modern, were sung with timpani to a military beat. Young girls at home wore red, white and blue hair ribbons with the words, Remember THE MAINE, woven into the grosgrain. That July of 1898 as they left, the most popular toy in Redemption, Kansas, was a tin replica of The Maine. Boys sailed it in muddy creeks and, at the touch of a metal prong, it sprang apart into eight pieces, as if blown up.
In 1911, a commission would determine that The Maine was destroyed by an explosion in its own engine room; nothing linked this to the Spanish. By then the United States of America had Cuba and the Philippines.
And Lieutenant Alford Snow, beloved son of Sadie Snow, was dead.
6 February 1899
Private Tagg Cession of the Kansas Twentieth lay silent under his army blanket, listening to the humidity, gazing up at an overarching blue dome of sky, a lone raptor beating its wings for home with a twisting black snake in its claws.
Yesterday, the battle, when God blinked, once, and Cession’s best friend, the man who loved him most in the world, was gone. You’re scared without him, Cession had to admit to himself at least, your courage rusted, and at home it’s yesterday and the bank is just closing and the mercantile exchange is selling corn seed for spring planting. The coldest February in memory, they’ll say. In Memory. Here, on a damp morning, a bugle blows reveille. There must be some old Greek elegy for the first man killed in a war about sugar. And hemp, coffee, gold, tobacco, mahogany. Last night, Company K planted Alford’s remains at Caloocan, near Manila. He imagines there will be a memorial service once the people at home get the telegram that Captain Boltwood has already sent. The Congregational church at home and the choir and preacher and the public pronouncements will mourn the town’s golden boy, the young lawyer, the scholar; my Patroclus, thinks Cession, I his.
He remembers the limestone walls of the church basement, of the university museum on the hill where Snow said the Sternberg fossils lay as proof of deep time; limestone walls made of so many sea creatures and ferns hold damp grief.
To the east, outlined by the sun, hollow shells of old volcanoes tooth the horizon.
Snow was buried with two of his books; he took to reading from the start and Cession remembered an indoors boy, hair so blond and skin so pale everyone called him Snow White. He hated us for that, Cession recalled.
The village of Maypajo, where they’d done their first fighting on the fifth of February, had five thousand people in it that day. Of the buildings, only the battered walls of the great church and the bars of the dismal prison remained. Like locusts, Cession thought, we’ve brought desolation. Now they were encamped about two miles on, in Caloocan, close to where Snow had died.
Snow had a political future at home, if he had stayed. But he wanted out. He would flee the town, he wanted to travel, Reverend Cordley counselled to let him go. His friends were the cooper, who was also a minister for the coloureds’ church, a worker at the barbed-wire factory along the river, and a man who taught at the local Indian school. He didn’t have a girl, which caused his mother some agitations, less so his sister. She knew him better. Nothing bad ever happened to Snow in his lucky life, all twenty-two years of it, and Cession, whose mother cooked in the Snow family house, knew he was in love with him, his best friend.
Maybe Snow knew he would never fit in Redemption, Kansas. Only his sister understood this, and she’d urged him to go to a big city far away from small-town strictures.
Cession had studied at the university with him; it was allowed. There were five coloured men in the law school enrolment, others in classics and education. Cession and Snow took pleasure in each other’s company. Snow was like the small statue of Antoninus in the classical studies department, perfect marbled muscles.
* * *
This is what Cession knew: Snow couldn’t bear to see the Filipino boy suffer and it was the right thing to do.
Sige, sige, Snow said – okay, okay – and, lifting him by his armpits, half dragged and half carried the boy to the ample shade of an acacia. Camp Acacia, the Americans had named the area with its proliferation of flat-topped, bottle-green trees. There was no wind and the white sun was like a furnace burning away a man’s shadow. The ripped-grass smell was from paddies’ worth of crushed green rice stalks.
The boy’s loose white tunic was covered in blood that spouted from the deep wound on his thigh – Snow would have guessed the bullet had broken the bone, severed the femoral artery.
There were no orders for this; the wounded insurrecto was a child. Snow used his neckerchief as a tourniquet for the boy’s leg, made him as comfortable as possible, and left him to rejoin the line as it advanced through the paddy.
But he felt a blow from behind and the wind was knocked out of him, as sometimes happened when he and Cession wrestled, and he gasped and fell, and then everything was golden and green, like in the wheat fields back home and he saw the long waves of grass in the dry Flint Hills go blue, the blue of deep water, and he listened to the wind in the chaff and it whispered I Am.
Did he hear Cession’s long cry of ‘No’, see Cession’s face over his own, feel the man’s lips on his own? Cession believed he felt no pain, just an urgent struggle for breath, is all, a breath that would not come.
Lips tender, then, and warm.
Please, said Cession, this isn’t your day.
‘You …’
‘I know.’
Cession smoothed his forehead, pushed back the straw-coloured hair, touched his lips there. Kissed his eyes closed.
* * *
At sunset, they put the body of Alford Snow in a box made of narra and hauled it on a cart pulled by a single white ox to the church. The rising moon as they dug his grave in the hard-baked earth looked like an overcooked head of white cabbage – soft, dull; even the air smelled of cabbage, the only food Cession positively despised, for some men had found some of the Chinese variety and had been cooking it with everything.
They buried Lieutenant Alford Snow next to a chapel, and in their silence the men of Company K vowed their cold revenge.
Goddamn niggers, one man began, but shamedfacedly stopped himself for Cession’s sake. Goddamn goo-goos. Shows the brutal nature of these people, he said, looking Cession square in the eye as if challenging him to contradict. They don’t deserve to …
Company K burned houses, overturned vegetable carts. When Major Metcalf gave orders to take no prisoners, Cession decided he had to leave.
Major Metcalf ordered them into Caloocan. He said it was the insurrecto rebel’s connection with supplies from Manila. Caloocan was supposed to have about 17,000 inhabitants, he said, but the civilians will have gone if they’ve got any sense between them. By evening, there was not one living thing left in Caloocan, not one stone left atop another. Cession thought how golden the morning had started and imagined the women calling for their children, the smell of cooking rice coming from the iron pots, the sound of water flowing from a well into large red clay jars carried so elegantly by the girls on their heads.
Cession knew Snow would have stood up to the Twentieth, even the Major, and said, no, not this sort of killing. He forbade his men to loot. So he decided to do what Snow would have wanted to do, out of love for him, and waited, got ready.
He began by working with his shirt off, his light brown skin quickly growing darker. He scavenged the white loose shirt and pants, the straw hat, of a dead goo-goo, a gook. His feet would still give him away; the soles were pink, not yellow, and soft, not toughened by going barefoot as many of them did. He got some of the thick oil used on the guns from the supply wagon and rubbed it on his feet, his palms also darkening as he worked.
He could pass.
Cession found it easy to slip by the drowsy sentries and headed north, to the mountains, the cool pined Cordilleras, away from the American fighting, and there he joined the guerrillas, became an insurrecto. Snow would have expected no less.
8 February 1899
‘Bolt! Bugle call,’ someone called from outside his tent.
He raised up. Damn, it was light out. All night he’d been fighting at Chickahominy again, along the river in Virginia, his young self leading his troops into the rebel guns. Captain Cyrus Boltwood was exhausted, his hand bloody from the mosquitoes he had fought with in the night.
He was too old for this sleeping on the ground and the tropical mildew dampness that creeps into a man’s bones. In the night’s heat, he sweated, and then got chilled. The western horizon to Manila Bay was flat and wide; to the east, the rising sun haloed the jagged distant hills, which made their clusters of tents and fires seem small. The musky smell of cloves mixed with the smell of the cook’s morning fire. They’d been in this camp for two nights, just two miles from the walled city of Manila. Juan, the camp’s boy, brought in his polished boots. Boltwood gave him a slight nod and continued to shave, being careful of his iron-grey moustache.
Already the guns from a warship in the bay were heaving shells toward where they guessed the nocturnal Filipino rebels had stopped, which for the spotters usually meant the most convenient native houses.
Was it only yesterday that Snow had died? Boltwood mumbled at the mirror; his own fault, his own fault.
Juan brought him the native coffee, which was excellent. He sat down to write. He had to write the letter that followed the telegram. The letter to the Reverend, who would be consoling Sadie Snow. He would try to explain:
Dear Reverend Cordley,
You have by now heard news of Officer Alford Snow’s death. I curse God.
Sadie’s boy will never be twenty-three. I am already imagining that she cannot bear it. I fear she rolls on the floor and howls. Can her heart beat? Can she breathe? Not without effort, without willing it, I imagine.
I fear she will blame herself. She will realize that the nobleness of a compassion that has sustained her, and that she taught Alford so well, is the cause of his young, foolish and vainglorious death.
I suppose there are ideas worth dying for. But not worth killing for. That’s the problem with Major Metcalf and these generals – they don’t have ideas, ideals, worth dying for.
As Mark Twain has been saying – At two dollars a head, since we paid the Spanish only twenty million dollars for all the islands and their ten million people, it would be cheaper to kill them all, round them up and exterminate them. This may be General Otis’s plan.
Who would have thought that our Alford would be the first Kansas boy to die? It was his own dang-blamed fault. He came across a wounded native boy outside Caloocan and checked on him. He bent down over him. Seeing the boy was still alive, he pulled him into shade, gave him water from his own canteen. Then he turned and left him there, having disregarded orders. The bleeding bastard raised up and shot him with a Mauser and caught him square in the lungs. I should have been there, knowing he would do something kind and stupid.
He lifted his pen. People at home would likely be seeing the pictures sent by that photographer, J. Freemont Rockett, out of San Francisco, or reading what had been sent by the man from Harper’s, John Bass. They had been following the Twentieth, Rockett making a big show of taking the men’s pictures with his camera – a handsome wooden box about five by seven inches, with brass fittings and, Boltwood noticed, an expensive Scovill Waterbury mark. They would all surely be celebrating early victory …
This is a land of high profit; don’t fool your Congregational church people that we’re saving people here. The people here want to be left alone, far as I can tell. There is no victory here worth celebrating.
I need counsel, my friend. What happens when a half-old soldier goes to a war and finds he can’t believe in it when he gets here? I have not been a great man, even a good man, always. Somehow I always thought Sadie could redeem me. Now I have let her son get killed. I thought I had nothing to lose, I am getting old, and I wanted glory. Maybe we all do.
You know I didn’t hide from you that she and I became lovers. You know I would have married her if I were free. She hated me for going to war, for encouraging Alford. We parted on that, ending it.
She will hate me for losing him, her golden boy. You make it as soft as you can for Sadie, I beg you. Your heathen friend (only type of friend a minister should have),
Boltwood
He sealed the letter and put it in the despatch bag with the other outgoing mail and papers. Juan brought him kalamansi – lime juice – and water. The slight, malnourished boy had adopted the company and had taken from the men many small tasks – making coffee, cleaning boots – in exchange for coins and rations. When the men complained about the US Army’s embalmed beef, Juan helped them trade it to the Chinese grocers for fresh vegetables and chickens. The rations of rusty canned sardines were especially popular with the natives – they were so oily as to be inedible, but they burned a long time as fuel.
* * *
It had started, the first fighting, from a simple mistake, like The Maine itself.
American officers and enlisted men had been given leave on Saturday night. The circus out of Singapore had taken a train from the harbour to Paco, which was then still inside American lines. The Nebraska, Oregon, and Kansas regiments got passes, and all had left only sentries.
England’s diplomatic representative, Barrister Sheridan, invited some of the officers to join his party there for the show, and Boltwood did so with thanks.
They saw ponies run around the rings with half-naked ladies on them. This circus had the proper three rings, but its creatures were not the usual lions and bears, rather a more Asiatic fare. There were temple monkeys from India, several wearing the black, three-cornered hats and miniature robes of the Spanish friars, and a sad panda from the bamboo hills of China; it walked upright, on its hind legs, with a limp like an old merchant marine. There was a touring group of midgets from right there in Manila, just home from their travels, who sang in their local dialect, to the delight of the Tagalogs; twin sisters from Ceylon who were joined at the hip leered at the men from behind their veils of hair; and Chinese acrobats who could contort themselves into jars. In the centre of the main ring that photographer, Rockett, took pictures – a flash, then smoke. The big tent could hold about a thousand; 600 free tickets were allotted to the American troops, first come, first served.
The smells, of animal dung, wet wool from sweating men, green hay, and burnt sugar, grew noxious and Boltwood took a turn outside to get some air. He noticed two white oxen outside the tent, wheezing. Rinderpest, a disease of oxen that killed by collapsing the lungs; some here thought it could be cured with holy water. The Spanish considered rinderpest to be a disease of social values, as if lazy Filipinos caused it. Nearby, you could have your picture taken sitting on a carabao, a picture to send home.
About ten o’clock it started to rain, but the men were okay to sit it out dry under the big tent. He thought he heard thunder, when in ran one of the corporals. They’ve started it, he shouted. For weeks the Filipinos and the Americans had been waiting it out, waiting for something to happen. They wanted action. Late that night, he had his men eat some hardtack and bacon. By Sunday morning the area of Tondo was burning.
General Funston was encamped in a church in Caloocan as his headquarters. There were already stories, one that he took a jewel from the altar, and, true enough, his wife, still with the American ladies in the Oriente Hotel, was wearing it within a week.
Boltwood gathered, after this initial fighting, that General Aquinaldo, the Filipino commander, had sent word to his American counterpart, General Otis, that he was ordering his troops to stop firing; the skirmish with a Nebraska sentry had been a mistake. He appealed for diplomacy. Otis replied that the thing had started and he would see it through to the end. Not that he could have stopped it even if he wanted. His was a volunteer army of 25,000 men from all parts of the country, but mainly west of the Mississippi, and men of every class, ruffians heavily outnumbering the rest. Many were dirty, drunk, and sometimes shoeless.
These were ‘desperados’, travelling men, who lounged in coffee shops, and the younger officers had made no effort to break them in or teach them obedience. Boltwood could do nothing when the enlisted men called on the houses of some rich Spanish-Filipino, or foreigner, British or French, and claimed they were looking for people of immoral character and proceeded to take the tapestries, paintings and other valuables, if there was no resident male to put them off. Boltwood had recognised Lieutenant Alford Snow as above the rest, a decent man whose uncle had offered him a European grand tour if he would forgo the crazy idea of signing up, but he wanted the Orient. Anyway, he didn’t expect it to take long and promised to meet his sister in Constantinople.
Boltwood had the lookout raise a red flag, so the telescopic sights of gunships in the bay would see it and lob their fusillade beyond them, into the enemy. They were sending up a military observation balloon, to get a sight on the Filipino lines.
* * *
At midday, when the heat pressed heaviest, Boltwood drove a calesa wagon into the city. As he turned into traffic along the Luneta, he tried to remember the balance needed to drive a buggy; a two-wheeler was always trickier than four, but there were none to be had. The Spanish friars had taxed the Filipinos on their wagons by the number of wheels, so the people had adopted two-wheelers like the calesa. Then the Spanish taxed by the number of spokes.
He turned up Dresidia Street toward Intermuros, the walled city. The vinegary smell of rank greens mixed with the nutty smell of rice cooked to almost burning signalled dinner time. He passed huts where children called ugly words at him, thin dogs bared the sharpness of their canines. He bought flowers from a street vendor, white waxy flowers that smelled sweet. Gardenia, he guessed. At a pretty two-storey house along Pasong Tamo, he stopped. A fire burned in a grate outside, an old woman cooking rice with seawater in a black kettle. The putrid smell of decay from sun-dried fish caught the back of his throat.
She called him manong – old man – out of respect, not insult, and offered him a cool drink or a fresh buko pie. He politely declined, and declined again, and for a third time lest he be in debt to her for some later favour, something he had learned in the eight months since he arrived with his troops, only to wait and wait for Spain and the US to settle their differences, or rather haggle over price – while the American boys wanted only to get at the rebels who did not appreciate swapping one set of masters for another.
Boltwood beat the dust from his clothing and looked up at the balconied window above them, where arched bougainvillea fronds quivered and the branches of a tamarind gave shade. Eldora had arrived with some American missionaries and schoolteachers from San Francisco. Within a week it was clear that girls of her kind – dance girls, call girls – were more sorely needed than schoolteachers for children who had no wish to learn the new English, nor the Spanish of their former masters for that matter.
The old woman, perhaps sixty and with a silver tooth, had the carriage of one who had once been beautiful. She said the lady was not back yet from wherever she had gone, so he went up the wooden stairs and let himself in, as was his custom.
Eldora owned two white cockatiels she liked to take into the bath with her and they watched him, their eyes like black polka dots in the pure white plumage. He noted she had acquired a black mynah bird, clearly the one from the church in Taal, south of the city, where they flocked. One of the boys in the Twentieth had brought it back and tried to teach it English. But it would only whisper the Latin mass, or curse at them in Spanish. Now at home with Eldora, it looked at him and called him handsome. Hello handsome, it repeated, and it was her voice, but with the bird’s rough-tender tone. She had never said those words to him.
He dozed on her fine bed, its silk coverings from China, and his wandering mind took him again to the Chickahominy, where, at eighteen, he had commanded negro soldiers as Grant’s army met head-on with Lee’s near a place called Cold Habor – the Confederates had the smaller force but were well entrenched and the Union was driven back, leaving the ground covered in dead. Then was conjured up his medical practice and a former patient, a young woman who’d tried to take her own life after her recourse to old-wives remedies failed to end her pregnancy. She wasn’t very far along. Just bear it, he said, I know plenty of families who might want a newborn, and he helped her to full term and an uncomplicated birth. Most of his patients, though, were well-to-do nervous, achy, hypochondriac ladies who only wanted to be coddled with prescriptions and nerve medicines. Instead, he’d suggested activity – horseback riding, bicycling, vigorous walks, winter and summer. They resented him for that, and they specially resented his asking them, directly, to fill out a questionnaire: the last time you felt physical arousal; what brought it on; if married, do you desire physical relations; how long does your husband take in arousing you before the act; have you ever desired a Boston marriage of two women. They got their revenge under the new Comstock Morality Law and its prohibitions on any discussion, even by a medical practitioner, of intimate female problems, be it birth control or pregnancy or even incontinence.
He had to go before a judge in Amherst, to the shame of his parents and family name, though they were all of liberal mind and progressive disposition. Massachusetts had turned puritanical with Comstock and even the details of birth and conception were forbidden. He called the law ridiculous. That was the end of it. He spent some three months in prison and after his release gave up his practice, left Massachusetts, and, at age thirty-four, headed out to Kansas where anti-slavery Congregationalists, his own kin among them, had moved when he was a boy. He became an animal doctor. Now he was fifty-nine, three marriages gone and nothing to show for any of them but one son who moved away to Oklahoma territory. When the Spanish-American War began in 1898, there was nothing to keep him home, so he’d agreed to lead a company of Kansas volunteers.
Boltwood felt the floorboards move, and came fully awake. Filipino guerrillas, sometimes dressed as women, were infiltrating the Old City and killing American officers in their beds. It was Eldora, already at her dressing table. The triptych mirror she sat before gave him six or nine of her. He felt another in the room. His camp boy, Juan, who was becoming more and more of an assistant in his animal doctoring, stood off to the side. He was smiling. The boy had pulled Boltwood’s boots off him while he slept and stood at guard until Eldora’s quiet return.
How did the boy find him? The pony, Juan said, had come back to barracks pulling an empty cart, and she seemed to know her way back to Eldora’s house. So you caught me, Boltwood said, and was surprised when Juan asked him why he preferred a white woman when ours are so much prettier. They all laughed at that, Eldora too, though she tried to hide it as she went on with her business in front of the mirrors.
The truth was, Eldora had held little appeal for him, until he’d learned she was from Amherst, too, had grown up there. They spent much of their time together just talking about home. He had not been with a woman in eleven months.
I’m not like you, she had said as she finished buttoning her blouse, and don’t go thinking I am. She was short and red-haired, pink-skinned, too young for him. At five o’clock he sent Juan on ahead, with the calesa cart, and he walked back alone.
Passing the Nebraska regiment, he stopped out of habit to check its dozen horses, then walked on, all the while trying to reconcile experience with his suspicion and dislike of these people. They are a cruel people, his soldiers said, and they fight dirty.
Just before dark – the sun always setting at around six o’clock, going out in a quick blaze of purples and oranges – he saw a native woman walking toward him with her load of firewood foraged far from the city and for sale in its market. There were many such foragers, but she was late in returning. He tried to think of her as a person, a young woman like Eldora, a sweet bird, swaying her bound hips, her little wood-heeled slippers clopping a pony’s graceful gait.
Boltwood touched the edge of his wide-brimmed hat. She looked away. Then she looked back and in the Filipino manner of a young man lifted her chin in greeting. And by damn, he saw that it was a young man. He knew some were getting into the city this way, to ambush the Americans; and wearing the long skirts and wooden shoes of a woman to do it, wrapping their heads in long cloth like a peasant.
His hand dropped to the revolver holstered at his hip, and he ordered her to drop the bundle of sticks. Drop it, he motioned. She did, and showed him her empty hands. He walked right up to her and looked at her chin and saw dark hairs, whiskers, closely shaved. He brushed his hand across her chin and asked what kind of woman are you that needs to scrape your chin and she said, a Moro, from the South, which meant she was a Moslem. Still, he lifted her skirt and put his hand there, like checking a horse. She was bare, and female. She clenched her jaw, submitted.
Now she stooped to gather up her bundle of wood, stick by stick, her legs were shaking beneath her skirt. Boltwood bent to pick up a few pieces for her, but she made what sounded like a wavering low hum, her forearms bent, palms out, in front of her breasts, to fend him off. He got up, waited. He stayed still until she resumed walking. How could he have treated her like an animal? He was aware that he had examined her like a horse-doctor, not as the trained physician he had been, the one who swore to do no harm. He feared now for his humanity at having treated her so, but the soldier in him knew the rules of survival and the old man wanted only to grow older and to know love again.
* * *
15 May 1899
My Dear Reverend Cordley,
Please get this information to the Senate Lodge committee hearings on the war here. It’s what our camp boy Juan Guadinero told me. I wasn’t there, but he is a good and honest boy:
Moros were attacking our troops in the southern island. We shipped down there for a time, the Twentieth; I stayed behind. Our own Major Metcalf captured fifty of them and had them tied to fence posts. While the men of the Twentieth waited, he had two pigs – wild pigs – brought in and in front of the captives had the pigs’ throats cut. Such a squealing the things set up, their screams bounced off the stone walls, flew out on the wind to the sea and back again. The sound was horrific. The Moro prisoners slumped to the ground to pray.
Why’s he doing that? They’s Muslims, Private Hoyt said. Why can’t they be men; why are they afraid of little piggy squeals? They believe the pigs are filthy, unholy, some won’t even touch a pig or even a gun holster if they think it’s made of pig’s hide, or they’ll be barred from paradise.
Then Major Metcalf told a few men to remove four bullets from their cartridges. The men put down the Springfield rifles, and waited. As the prisoners watched, the men dipped their bullets in the pig’s blood. Then they lined up the prisoners by sevens and seven at a time they shot them. Metcalf asked for volunteers for the firing squad. There was no shortage. Seven times this happened, until there was one Moro left. He stood, saying prayers. Shut up your filthy language, someone hollered at him.
Then they took this last man with them as Metcalf had them load the bodies and took them across the square and dumped them in a shallow grave and dumped the pigs on top of them, blood and entrails.
That last man, he just stood watching.
Then, Metcalf said to the translator, tell your people: this is what we’ll do if they bother us again.
And they let that man go.
Juan, our camp boy, was the one who told me this. For a while he’s become Metcalf’s own scout, but has grown afraid of him. I have decided he will come home with me, if he will come. Let Sadie know.
Boltwood
The epigraph is from ‘The Guerrilla Is Like a Poet’, written by Jose Maria Sison in 1968 and included in Prison and Beyond (Asphodel Books, Quezon City, 1984), for which he received the Southeast Asia Write Award for Poetry in 1986. Used with the kind permission of the poet.
