Kings of the Sea

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by Van Every Frost, Joan


  “Firsthand I can’t say, sir, since Victoriano and I entered Manila ahead of the rest, but from experience I can tell you that they won’t like it.”

  “Enough to start shooting?” The generals were all watching David intently.

  “I don’t think so,” he answered slowly, forgetting the sir in his concentration. “My guess would be that Aguinaldo will do his best to get along with us for the time being, since he thinks we’ll sail off soon and leave the islands to the insurgents. It’s when or if he realizes we aren’t going to do so that we’re going to have to worry.”

  “Worry?” MacArthur asked. “They don’t seem a very disciplined or well-armed force from my observation.”

  “Perhaps not, sir, but they are brave and determined, as I’ve already had occasion to see. Unlike our troops, they have had little illness for all that they don’t dig proper latrines and the like, and they know the country. I’d like to see them kept on our side, but if you refuse to let them into the city at all, they’re likely to fight, Aguinaldo or no Aguinaldo. They fought the Spaniards for years, and to them we’ll have become just another invader.”

  “I see.” MacArthur turned to Merritt. “What about allowing them in tomorrow or the next day, but unarmed? That ought to make them think twice about looting.”

  “I say don’t let them in at all, Wesley,” General Otis advised. “They’re nothing more than a mob of riffraff. The Spaniards may have been afraid of them, but we shouldn’t be. If they are silly enough to cause any trouble, we could squash them like flies.”

  David opened his mouth to protest, but Merritt forestalled him. “A classic military mistake, gentlemen, is to underestimate the enemy. I intend to keep them as happy as possible while at the same time keeping their armed men out of Manila.”

  The enemy. So even Merritt considered them as such.

  Poor little devils, they had only traded Spain for an even more powerful force.

  “Lieutenant Hand, I want you to return to Aguinaldo with our proposal for his presence at the capitulation tomorrow. Come into the city with him and watch for his reactions. Meanwhile, make as careful an assessment as you can of the insurgents’ possible willingness to fight.”

  It took them several hours to find Aguinaldo, who had set up a command post not far from the city walls. The streets outside the walls had become a subject of controversy between the insurgents and the Americans, and only the good feeling prevailing because of the Spanish surrender prevented altercations from turning into armed battles.

  “Emilio,” Victoriano said when they found the insurgent commander, “you and your staff officers are invited to the signing of the capitulation tomorrow.” There was a tone of irony in his voice. “The good General Merritt has kindly arranged for our being allowed into our own capital to watch the Spaniards surrender to the Americans.”

  Aguinaldo regarded him calmly. “So. I thought they would continue to pretend that we didn’t exist. How noble of them to include us now.”

  “Please, general,” David interrupted. “I know it looks like condescension on our part, but you must realize that our military are rough men who have been picked for their ability to fight, not for their manners.” He would have gone on to say that things would no doubt improve in the future, but knew that he could make no promise. If Merritt left, he hoped that MacArthur and not Otis would succeed to the military governorship.

  Aguinaldo’s face softened. “I know you have been a good friend to us, David, or I wouldn’t have allowed you to be here. You know what they all say of me, that I am uneducated, a clod good for nothing but to wage war. If my own countrymen say this, what do you think your generals say?”

  David felt a surge of affection for the little man whose natural dignity made you forget his size. Among a people who were uneducated, illiterate, and therefore difficult to hold to a cause, he had singlehandedly organized a guerrilla force that had harried the Spaniards unmercifully for the two years since the great Rizal’s execution. Proud, stubborn, gallant, possessed of an organizational genius far beyond any training he could have had, Aguinaldo was a strange combination of suspicion and trust, toughness and compassion.

  Ironically they learned that very day that the Spanish government in Madrid had sued for peace several days earlier, making the fall of Manila a mere formality. David wondered what Manuel of the bird calls, he who had bled his life away from his shattered throat, would have said could he have known that he died for nothing.

  On the 17th of August, orders came from Washington: “The President directs that there must be no joint occupation with the insurgents …”

  By the 25th of August, Merritt had forged an agreement with Aguinaldo as to which streets and districts outside the walled city would be occupied by the Americans and which by the insurgents. However, the Americans insisted upon sole occupation of the inner city. Merritt saw that if he could keep Aguinaldo and his men even reasonably satisfied for a time, the insurgent force would simply melt away as boredom set in, and the situation would eventually solve itself without bloodshed.

  Tragically, Merritt, a shrewd military man and along with it something of a humanitarian, was sent off to the peace talks with the Spaniards in Paris. In his place was appointed General Otis, inflexible, unimaginative, convinced of the essential inferiority of the Filipinos as a people and as a potential military enemy. He was the very man guaranteed to ensure that far from disbanding, the insurgent forces would be goaded into committing themselves irrevocably to a devastating guerrilla war.

  “Emilio, how can you stand by and be treated like some kind of servant? I don’t understand you.” Victoriano was almost pleading, and David knew that he was only voicing what most of the insurgents were thinking.

  Aguinaldo answered readily. “How long do you think we would last if we came to an open battle with the American force? They have all of the arms and supplies and training that we lack. If we fight them, we only make it certain that they will never leave.”

  While the insurgents, whose trenches were in places within pistol shot of the American lines, grew increasingly restive, David found himself an unneeded interpreter at the six agonizing conferences between Aguinaldo and Otis, conferences that led nowhere as Otis merely reiterated his demand that the insurgents disband and submit themselves unconditionally to the Americans.

  One day David sat reading a letter from Janice for the dozenth time in a small house that had been assigned to him in Malolos, where Aguinaldo had moved his headquarters. Through the doorway, open to collect any vagrant stirring of air, he could hear two of the new recruits talking quietly in Tagalog about their families.

  “The children and I miss you very much,” Janice wrote. “Francis fell off his scooter and broke a front tooth — lucky that it happened to his baby tooth! Elisabeth has fallen in love with our mailman and has to be watched lest she follow him down the block. His name is Mr. Messner and he has a granddaughter he says is about her age. I am wondering about getting a puppy or a kitten for the children, but perhaps they are too small …”

  This reminder of everyday life in a different world was disturbing. The soft murmur of Tagalog outside was now his reality, and he realized that between letters he thought of Janice and the children not at all. If she were suddenly and miraculously to appear before him, he would have far less to say to her than he had to say to Victoriano, for example. Was there something wrong with him that his own family failed to occupy any significant place in his feelings? He shifted uncomfortably and abruptly decided to seek out Victoriano for another practice session in Tagalog.

  On February 4, just two days before the date of the senate vote on annexation of the Philippines, an insurgent officer with a detail of men tried to force his way past the American sentinel at the San Juan bridge. The outcome was that the insurgent officer, after being warned repeatedly, was shot dead. The men with him fired on the Americans and retreated, but the exchange of fire resulted in rockets being sent up by the Filipinos and firing s
tarting along the entire line from Caloocan to Santa Mesa. The war was in that hour unofficially declared, ensuring the senate’s subsequent vote for annexation. The issue had irrevocably been joined.

  Chapter IV

  “I am sending you back to Malolos under escort,” Aguinaldo said.

  “Then I am a prisoner?” David asked.

  “Yes and no. If you were an army officer, I would not hesitate, but your navy has always been fair to me. Were it not for them, I should still be in exile in Hong Kong. To be honest with you, I haven’t yet made up my mind just exactly what to do with you. For your own protection you must be gotten out of the midst of my men, however. I want your parole that you will stay where we put you until I can talk to you again. That could be some time in the future.”

  They were talking on the morning after the outbreak of hostilities at Aguinaldo’s new headquarters at Caloocan, which was taking a tremendous shelling from Dewey’s ships. David could see columns of weary, bloodied insurgents pouring into Caloocan from the abandoned outposts of Paco and Santa Ana. At Paco the insurgents had holed up in a church along with a number of terrified civilians. The naval guns and then the American advance had demolished the church along with most of those inside. The advance of the Americans was marked by lines of burning villages, and houses not already destroyed had hung out white flags hoping to escape the holocaust.

  “Very well, general. Since I naturally have no orders to return to the fleet or even to Manila, I can give my parole with a clear conscience.”

  Aguinaldo gave him a wintry smile. “And besides, if you stay with us you may be able to pick up useful information. Right, lieutenant?”

  David grinned. “Wouldn’t you in my place?”

  Aguinaldo laughed. “I am sending you with Victoriano and a detail of men. They will take you where you are going outside Malolos and leave you there. Remember, you have given your word not to escape. I do not think you will find your stay there onerous.”

  “Believe me, general, I wish things could have been different.”

  Aguinaldo’s expression softened, and he looked suddenly younger. “I know you do, David. I wish there were more like you on the American general staff, believe me. We may not win, but before they are through they will know they have been in a war. Good luck to you.”

  As they trotted up the unpaved road paralleling the railroad, David was glad that he had taken part in the training exercises. The Tagalogs, who had been on foot all their lives, had a deceptively relaxed distance-eating run that they could keep up for hours. Another hour farther on, almost within sight of Malolos, they turned off on a dirt track that cut through a stand of twelve-foot high cogon grass and emerged in a seemingly endless grove of abacá trees whose fiber would be twisted one day into Manila rope. The abacá grove turned into another endless grove of banana trees. They crossed a small stream running even at this time of year, passed through a stand of sugar cane, and found themselves on a drive lined on either side by royal palms. He thought briefly of the approach to Ofelia’s house.

  By the time the estate house came into view, David no longer cared what it looked like or even who lived there. A sixteen-mile run on top of a sleepless night left him a stumbling wreck. As long as the house had a place to lie down, he didn’t care if he ever left it. He noticed then with chagrin that Victoriano and his men seemed hardly to be breathing hard. They grinned at him sympathetically.

  “Your new home,” Victoriano said with an extravagant gesture of his arm.

  “About time, too,” David managed to gasp.

  As they mounted the steps up to a wide shaded veranda, the front door of teak swung open to reveal a woman clad in an embroidered version of the white shifts that the village women all wore. On her feet were thong sandals. Her long dark-blond hair was drawn back and caught simply with a clasp at the back of her neck — it easily reached her waist behind.

  “Well?” she demanded of Victoriano. “Have you forgotten how to introduce people?” She turned to David. “I am Valerie Pryce. My husband and I came out from England some fifteen years ago and built all of this from scratch.” She gestured at the house and groves around. “I’ve lived through the Spaniards, I’ve lived through the insurgents, and I imagine I’ll live through the Americans as well.”

  “You say ‘I,’” David said. “Your husband is, er, no longer with you?”

  “No, David Hand, he is no longer with me.” She went no further, nor did he have the nerve to inquire more.

  “You know my name?”

  She smiled. “A Gulliver among the Lilliputians? Of course I know your name. Come in. Are you hungry?”

  Victoriano broke in, “He can go in, but we can’t. We are to begin setting up defenses in Malolos.”

  “And where, may I ask, are the first-aid supplies and the two doctors you promised? If you have many wounded, the sheets I have won’t last a day for bandages.”

  “The doctors are at Caloocan now, but I think they will be moving north soon. I’m afraid you’ll be seeing them and the wounded besides within a few days. What few medical supplies we have are with them. The only wounded we got out of that church in Paco were walking wounded, because we had no transport, but from now on we’ll be able to bring them back.”

  She put a hand on Victoriano’s arm. “I’m sorry it had to come to this. I was hoping —”

  “Yes,” Victoriano said gently, “we were all hoping. Our only prayer is to harass them enough to make them want to go home. It will be a long year, this one, for us and for them both.” He turned to go.

  “Goodbye, Victoriano. Que le vaya bién — go well.”

  The inside of the house was paneled in yacal wood, the staircase to the upper floor made of teak. Several other woods he saw too that he couldn’t recognize. She saw him looking at the walls and furniture.

  “The islands are a paradise of hardwoods,” she said. “I don’t know them all by any means even after all of these years.”

  How incongruous, he thought, to shift so readily from concern with the wounded, with perhaps a final farewell to a friend, with probable defeat even, to a polite discussion of hardwoods. “They are very handsome,” he agreed, equally polite.

  “What do you want me to say?” she asked unexpectedly, as if she had been reading his mind. “You are looking terribly disapproving. Should I speak instead of my sureness that they will be defeated — that they will defeat themselves? Should I tell you how despicable I find your government’s stance that these islands are nothing more than a pawn in some dreadful game of power?” She gestured impatiently with her hands. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve seen this coming ever since that crafty admiral of yours brought Emilio back to be used. Christ, I’m surprised you haven’t brought in the Spanish army on your side.”

  David watched her intently, noted the gleam of indignation in her blue-gray eyes, the fine long fingers of her gesturing hands, the set of her wide, thin-lipped mouth. Taken one by one her features were quite imperfect, but together they conveyed a startling and completely unconventional beauty. She was obviously committed to the insurgent cause, a strange stance for a British lady, chatelaine of what was obviously a large and rich plantation. In the ordinary course of events she should have viewed men like Victoriano as servants, not as friends with whom to jest.

  “As you may have gathered from Victoriano’s attitude,” he replied carefully, “I am not entirely out of sympathy with Aguinaldo’s cause, even though I think it is doomed. If it weren’t the Americans ready to do him in, however, it would be someone else.”

  “Poppycock! You could have had a people falling all over themselves to give you whatever commercial concessions you wanted, and instead you chose to face years, generations perhaps, of implacable enmity.”

  “I don’t agree. There are more than a few Filipinos of means and property in Manila who are as against Aguinaldo as we are.”

  She laughed shortly. “Of course there are. They are the same ones who toadied to the Spaniards
, or they wouldn’t have their means and their property. They view Aguinaldo as an uneducated, dangerous upstart, and they are right. He would redistribute their property fast enough once he got his hands on it.”

  “Why are they so tolerant of you, then?” he asked rudely. “I should think that a large plantation like this fairly cries out to be redistributed.”

  “I pay my workers well, better than they could hope to get from trying to tend a small patch of their own, and they know it. If this land were ever divided among them, they would all have to go back to making do with a diet of rotten fish and rancid sweet potato wrapped in a banyan leaf. The insurgents have no quarrel with the British; as long as we stay friendly or even neutral, they leave us alone. Now that the workers are all gone off with Aguinaldo, however, I don’t know what will happen here.”

  “Well, like it or not I’m afraid the Americans are here to stay.”

  “You don’t think they will tire of fighting and go home?”

  “That is wishful thinking. They are winning and will continue to win, especially since Aguinaldo’s arms and supplies will become shorter and shorter.”

  “Wishful perhaps, but there are many of your countrymen who are apparently violently opposed to forcible annexation, and the powers that be can hardly pretend it is anything else, with a full-scale war now being waged.”

  “The administration can’t afford to back down and admit now or ever that a little band of gugus, as the Americans call them, could lick the United States Army. The sooner Aguinaldo calls it quits the better for everyone.”

  “Perhaps, but they said the same about your revolution against the British. Aguinaldo can’t afford to back down either. That’s what wars come down to, don’t they, that no one wants to back down.”

 

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