| An American general and his troubles—The Filipino refuses to be a man and a brother— Rifles in the thatch—The Americans plucked a plum—Or it may be a lemon—Schoolteacher that was first in the water. |
It is hot enough here, for we are just north of the line, and there is nearly as much moisture in the air as in the sea. The engineer says that the people of Manila use a four-hundred-gallon tank as a rain-gauge. All the islands are green as emeralds set in a turquoise sea. The frontage of each island consists of a flat beach, in some cases four miles deep, packed with coconut-palms—thousands of them—as close as they will grow. Behind the flat land the hills rise up for about twelve hundred feet, all rich volcanic soil; and every mountain-side is terraced with plantations of coffee, spices, and so on, growing in orderly rows like orange-orchards or maize-fields seen from a distance.
Mile after mile along the coast it is the same—the coconuts on the foreshore, the plantations on the hillsides, and above them a dense wall of timber reaching to the top of the mountain; and always a snow-white cloud hangs over the mountain-tops. Our Australian foreshores are mostly barren and forbidding, but this country had its jewellery in the shop window.
The chief engineer came on deck and waved his hand at this panorama.
“There y’are,” he said, “there’s a nice bit o’ proputty to pick up, jist for the trouble o’ knocking holes in a few Noah’s Arks that they called the Spanish navy. As fast as one ship was sunk, the poor old Dons scuttled out of it and got on to another. Ye’ll see the corpses o’ their ships lyin’ on the beach. But y’unnerstan’ the Yankees had pluck. They took their ships in through a strait only five miles wide, wi’ a forrt each side. A handful o’ real gunners could ha’ sunk them, but the Dons in they forrts were an ondeesciplined rabble.”
Here the doctor chipped in with the sequel to the victory.
“I was in Manila,” he said. “When the Spaniards were licked, the British consul got the wind up, and thought the Filipinos would rise and murder all the foreigners. So he wired for the Powerful, and she came like a floating castle, seventeen knots an hour, cleared for action. That settled any rebellion. And then the Yanks decided to uplift the Filipinos. What do you think was the first cargo they brought over? A cargo of six hundred school-teachers! Every school-teacher in the lot wanted to be the first to land in Manila, and when the tender came alongside they shoved each other into the water. One woman was picked up very nearly drowned, and when they got her to the ship’s hospital she said: ‘Well I won’t be the first to land, but anyway I was the first in the watta!’”
“And now,” the doctor went on, “these Filipinos are so grateful at being freed that they are shooting at the Americans in the streets at night. This war between the Americans and the Filipinos has a comic opera skinned to death. When you get ashore you go and see old General Chaffee, and ask him whether he’d sooner fight Boers or fight Filipinos.”
On landing at Manila we saw some hustle. The streets were packed with people, mostly Filipinos. Some of the little bronze-black women were very fresh and attractive looking. A few of the men were very muscular, probably men that worked cargo on the ships, but most of them had no more physique than a lot of schoolboys. There were Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, American soldiers and civilians, poor whites of all nations—one might have been back at Thursday Island only for the uniforms in the streets. Indescribable bustle and hurry and fuss pervaded all, and the restaurants, photo-shops and squash-shops were crowded. Money was being turned over all right.
But I met a drunken English ship’s captain out of a job who said: “There’s nothing in the place for the likes of you and me.” I asked him to have a drink and he invited three friends to join in. Then I found that the sale of liquor was forbidden unless a meal was purchased at the same time, as I didn’t feel like buying meals for four disreputable strangers I was wondering how to get out of it when the ship captain said that the meals were just a joke:
“They’ll hand you a dried-up sardine on a plate with your drink and that’s your meal. Take it or leave it. They haven’t got to make you eat the meal. The Yankee soldiers were gettin’ tight and passin’ remarks about the women goin’ around with their officers. Their wives—I don’t think. So they brought in this meal dodge, to keep the soldiers sober. But you can’t keep a soldier off drink, nor a sailor neither.”
Sure enough, we entered a packed bar and, after a long wait, we were each served with a drink, and a plate with one sardine on it was pushed over to me. I was a stranger and might be an informer, but the others were well known and had their exemption certificates.
The American soldiers were fine men physically, and about as hard-featured as our own Australian lot. Their horses were mostly American, and would have compared well with anything we had in South Africa. However, they were not doing any hard work, for a mounted regiment in this campaign would be about as much use as a navy in Switzerland. Their equipment for the mounted men was a little lighter than ours, in fact all American gear seems to be lighter than English. But if the American troop horses were doing nothing the little local ponies were doing plenty, and doing it well. One would see a couple of these midgets harnessed to a horse tram, and when they wanted to start it they had to bend their backs like ferrets and tug and strain till they got the unwieldy thing under way.
All were stallions; for castration was not practised and the mares were kept out of the town lest they should distract the stallions from their jobs of shifting tram-cars and pulling vehicles. The work done by those Lilliputians, and by the Basuto ponies in South Africa, opened my eyes considerably; and when I became a remount officer in Egypt I had no hesitation in advising the officers to take ponies from our depots in preference to horses. But nobody believes anything that a man says about a horse. I only created the impression that I was trying to get rid of the ponies and to keep the horses for my friends.
However, all this is taking us a long way from General Chaffee and the American war against the Filipinos. Knowing from my South African experience that a general officer commanding in the field is about as accessible as the Grand Llama of Tibet, I armed myself with a letter of recommendation from Sir John See, Premier of New South Wales. This letter, by the way, I had used once, and once only, in South Africa. I had showed it to a railway staff officer in support of a plea that I should be allowed to go to the front. After reading it, and studying the government seal and the beautiful gold-lettered heading, he tossed it back with the remark:
“What the hell do I care for the Premier of New South Wales!”
So it was without any great hope that I took it along to try it on the American.
The General’s quarters were in a beautiful old Spanish hacienda, with palm-trees in front and magnificent creepers growing over the stone gateway. I had expected the usual crowd and bustle about a headquarters, sentries everywhere and staff officers hurrying about as though they were going to do a spot of work. Here everything was peace, and there was not even a sentry in sight. I thought I had come to the wrong place till I made out a man in uniform sitting in a rocking-chair under the shade of the creepers and smoking a big cigar. A rifle lay across his knees and his cap was tilted well over his face to keep off the sun. I could have sneaked up to him and either shot him or brained him with a club, and he would never have known the difference.
I said to him: “Are these General Chaffee’s quarters?”
“Waall,” he said, “they might be, at that. There’s stacks of generals in here. So many of ’em I’ve lost interest in ’em.”
“Can I go up and see him?”
“Sure, brother. What’s to stop you?”
After passing this rag-time sentry I expected to find a rag-time aide-de-camp, one of these raw-beef and-blood-gravy boys of the American Press; a man who would draw his scalping-knife and give his college yell at sight of a stranger; but the aide-de-camp went back on me, so to speak.
He might have come straight off Lord Roberts’s staff, where they were mostly young soldiers of title.
The young American said he had fought in Cuba, Manila and China, but hadn’t got any medals yet—they were slow about medals. I handed him my letter from the Premier of New South Wales recommending me as a correspondent. Instead of telling me to go and eat cake or any wise-crack of that sort, he said:
“Sure, the General will see you.”
Then I remembered that the American is afraid of only one thing—his own Press. Did not an American correspondent in Cuba hit a general on the nose because he (the correspondent) was not allowed to hoist the flag over a captured city? When an American millionaire refused to allow reporters into his house to interview the Prince of Wales, did not the American Press publish the dread sentence of excommunication by saying that never again would that millionaire’s name appear in their social columns? Whereupon, one supposes the American millionaire went out and wept bitterly.
When I got in to see the General I found a kindly and much-worried veteran who seemed quite glad to hear about somebody else’s troubles in South Africa. When I told him about the trouble we had in getting the Boers to stand still long enough to be shot at, he spoke his piece like a man and a brother:
“Say,” he said, “you’ve seen this country, all mountain and jungle that a dog couldn’t open his mouth to bark in? You’ll understand the trouble. They don’t understand it in the States. They don’t understand why I don’t get this war over with and came home. Do you know who are shooting my men? The wharf-labourers that are loading your ship! They’ve all got rifles hidden in the thatch of their houses and they take them out of a night and shoot into my camp. I can’t burn all the thatched houses in Manila. Our people wouldn’t stand for it. And those Moros back in the hills! If we go up there after them all we see is the butt of a cigar lying in a little narrow goat-track through the jungle; and all we hear is a bullet coming from way off through the scrub.”
“If we catch any of ’em all we can do is to tie them down and fill ’em up with watta till they show us their villages. I’ve got most of the generals, that there is anything to, cleaned up right now. But we daren’t go away. If we went away there’d be hell with the lid off here in a week. I’d look well if I took the boys away and landed in the States with the bands playing ‘Johnny Comes Marching Home,’ and a wire came through of a lot of Spaniards and Americans being killed here.”
I asked him how the Filipinos got that way; and why they wanted to murder their rich Uncle Sam instead of behaving themselves.
“They’re like children,” he said. “When we beat the Spaniards the Filipinos said: ‘Here’s happy days at last. Here’s all these plantations, and all these shops and all these banks, and they’re all going to belong to us.’ And when we said: ‘Not so Bolivia,’ they turned nasty. They dug out the rifles and took to the jungle. No, we’ve put our hand to the plough, and if we let go, it will give us a jolt in the jaw. We daren’t leave all these nationals at the mercy of a lot of excited children like the Filipinos. No, sir!”
The General, in some vague sort of way, suggested Mark Twain, both in appearance and manner of speech. He had the same clear-cut jaw, heavy eyebrows, and grizzled moustache, and he spoke, as Mark Twain always did, like a man rehearsing a lecture. Perhaps he was getting himself word perfect before he went back to the States to explain why he took so long over his job.
That night there was a rattle of rifle-shots on the wharf alongside our ship. It turned out that some Filipinos had sneaked down in the darkness and set fire to a mountain of forage, enough to have burnt the town down.
A sentry had seen the flames and had shot two of the Filipinos with his heavy Krag-Jorgensen rifle before they could get round the corner—not much rag-time army about that! But there is nothing that keeps sentries so much on the alert as the knowledge that they may be fired on at any time, and from any direction.
After leaving the General I ran against the sergeant-major of a black regiment. I had seen the Life Guards and the gilded popinjays of the English staff; but for a ball of style, commend me to a black sergeant-major. Everything about him, even his face, shone in the sun, and he moved with the dignity of an elephant at the head of a procession. I told him I had been with the British Army in Africa, and he seemed politely interested.
“Yo mustn’t jedge ouah ahmy, sah, by dese recruits,” he said, waving his hand with infinite scorn in the direction of a white American soldier who was leaning against a fence in a humped-up attitude. “If we had that man in ouah redg’ment we’d just nacherally tie him to a post to take the hump offen his back.”
I asked him what the fighting was like, He said:
“It’s not essackly fightin’, sah; it’s just plain ’sassination. They pours lead into us out’n the jungle, and when we catch them we just pours watter into them. Did yo ahmy pour watter into the Boers, sah?”
I wondered to myself what sort of a letter the German Emperor would have written, if we had captured General Botha and filled him with water. But à la guerre comme à la guerre, and water seemed to be the only thing for the Fllipinos.
August 22nd—Met an Australian named Allen who is carrying on a stevedore’s business here. He says that he landed here about five years ago with three dollars in the world and a gold watch. He pawned the gold watch to pay his landing-fee, and started a bum-boat carrying supplies out to ships, and worked himself up till he owns three or four launches. He says this shipping trade is the same all the world over: it requires a lot of oil.
When I asked him what sort of oil, he said, “Palm oil.”
The Americans, he added, work everything on the “pull” system, and he had to get a “pull” with the officials before he could get along at all. They stopped him tying his boats up to the wharves until he saw the man on top and came across with something substantial. Even at that, they were children compared to the Russians.
“There’s a Russian warship at Port Arthur,” he said, “that only exists on paper. The contractors were paid about a million for building her; money is sent out every month for wages and supplies—and there is no such boat.”
When I asked him who got the money he said:
“It never gets out of Russia. I suppose some of the heads get it. Fancy the Russians being smart enough to put a thing like that over! People think they are slow in the uptake, but they’re smart enough at uptaking any money. I supplied a big Russian vessel with beef, and when I went to get paid the officer said, ‘How many casks of beef?’ I said eight. But the officer said, ‘No, my manifest says eighteen.’ Then he looked pretty hard at me. I got paid for eighteen casks of beef and I gave him back the price of ten. Then he wanted to charge me ten per cent baksheesh on the price of the eight casks, but I couldn’t stand that. They don’t care what you charge them so long as they get their cut out of it. Give me a Russian to do business with every time. The English warships are the only ones where they bar highway robbery.”
I asked him what he thought of the American Army.
“Good boys, all right. Good tough sorts like our own boys; but there’s a lot of them dying with dysentery. They will drink bad water. This place is Uncle Sam’s hard bargain, if you ask me. The Yanks are paying all the expenses of keeping up this army and they ain’t getting any of the business. It’s mostly English and Continental capital in these tobacco factories and plantations. The Yanks haven’t got anything out of it yet.”
We had a look at the Manila races where there were nearly as many breeds of horses as of humanity. Tiny little Manila ponies like microscopic thoroughbreds, China ponies as sturdily built and of much the same shape as hogs, American and Australian horses of every class from thoroughbreds to nondescripts, were ridden by wizened little black boys perched like monkeys up on the horses’ necks. They could ride, too. But a lot of them carried long whips like cart-whips with which they sometimes hit the pony over the tail, making him tuck in his tail and go like a scared rabbit for a few strides.
Our racehorses did not thrive up there, or so the American trainers told me. The thoroughbred has been so long in England that he is no longer a tropical animal. The mules looked well. I was to learn a lot about mules later on.
We left Uncle Sam and his problems, and steamed north over a sleepy sea, while behind us the life of Manila still went on: the rush and crowd of the streets, the caribous (buffaloes) in carts toiling slowly along like barrels on four feet, the Manila men and Chinese sitting in their tiny little shops in the bazaars, often with a gamecock tied by the leg to the counter waiting for an opponent to come along; and towering up above everything the jungle peaks, full of Moros only waiting to get a shot at the soldiers who had come to uplift them and make them men and brothers.