Chapter IV

       Table of Contents

Merritt and Aguinaldo

       Table of Contents

      There are no tricks in plain and simple faith.

      Julius Cæsar, Act IV., Sc. 2.

      Major-General Wesley Merritt’s account of the operations of the troops under his command in the First Expedition to the Philippines may be found in volume i., part 2, War Department Report for 1898. He left San Francisco accompanied by his staff, June 29, 1898, arrived at Cavite, Manila Bay, July 25th, received the surrender of the city of Manila August 13th, and sailed thence August 30th, in obedience to orders from Washington to proceed without unnecessary delay to Paris, France, for conference with the Peace Commissioners. According to General Merritt’s report, about the time he arrived Aguinaldo had some 12,000 men under arms, with plenty of ammunition, and a number of field-pieces. The late lamented Frank D. Millet has preserved for us, in his Expedition to the Philippines, some valuable and intimate studies of this army of Filipino besiegers whom our troops found busily at work when they arrived in the Islands:

      It was an interesting sight at Camp Dewey to see the insurgents strolling to and from the front. Pretty much all day long they were coming and going, never in military formation, but singly, and in small groups, perfectly clean and tidy in dress, often accompanied by their wives and children, and all chatting as merrily as if they were going off on a pigeon shoot. The men who sold fish and vegetables in camp in the morning would be seen every day or two dressed in holiday garments, with rifle and cartridge boxes, strolling off to take their turn at the Spaniards.

      The reader will readily understand that there were many times as many volunteers as guns. Mr. Millet continues:

      When they had been at the front twenty-four hours they were relieved and returned home for a rest. They generally passed their rifles and equipments on to another man and thus a limited number of weapons served to arm a great many besiegers. They had no distinctive uniform, the only badge of service being a red and blue cockade with a white triangle bearing the Malay symbol of the sun and three stars, and sometimes a red and blue band pinned diagonally across the lower part of the left sleeve. * * * Many of them * * * had belonged to the native volunteer force. * * * The recruits were soon hammered into shape by the veterans of the rank and file. * * * Their men were perfectly obedient to orders * * * and they made the most devoted soldiers. There was no visible Commissary or Quartermaster’s Departments, but the insurgent force was always supplied with food and ammunition and there was no lack of transportation. The food issued at the front was mostly rice brought up in carromatas to within a few hundred yards of the trenches, when it was cooked by the women. * * * Each man had a double handful of rice, sometimes enriched by a small proportion of meat and fish, which was served him in a square of plantain leaf. Thus he was unencumbered with a plate or knife or fork and threw away his primitive but excellent dish when he had “licked the platter clean.” It was noticeable that the insurgents carried no water bottles nor haversacks, and no equipments indeed, but cartridge boxes. They did not seem to be worried by thirst like our men.

“Although insignificant in appearance, they are fierce fighters,” wrote General Anderson to the Adjutant-General of the army in July.1

General Merritt states in his report that Aguinaldo had “proclaimed an independent government, republican in form, with himself as President, and at the time of my arrival in the Islands the entire edifice of executive and legislative departments had been accomplished, at least on paper.”2 Of course at that time we were still officially declining to take Filipino aspirations for independence seriously, and preferred to treat Aguinaldo’s government as purely a matter of stationery. As a matter of fact, an exhaustive examination of the official documents of that period, made with a view of ascertaining just how much of that Aguinaldo government of 1898 was stationery fiction and how much was stable fact, has absolutely