Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

That night after dinner, served by a handsome Filipino boy of about twelve, she played chess with him and trounced him thoroughly two games out of three. He drew the third only because she took a wild gamble that didn’t come off and they were left at a stalemate.

  “You’re very good,” he conceded gracefully. “You must play a lot.”

  “Not anymore. I used to play all the time with Richard, who was fortunately much better than I was.”

  “Fortunately?”

  “He didn’t like losing at anything to anyone.”

  He was silent, wondering if she would go on.

  “Richard was a big man, too heavy by far for these little native ponies, and he imported an Irish hunter, a big brute of a horse that would jump anything in sight. Finally Richard got a bet on with Harry Rowe, who raised sugar cane and rice over near Malabon. Harry was crazy about steeplechasing, and he set up a point-to-point course across his land that had some of the wickedest jumps outside of the Grand National. To make a long story short, Richard came a cropper over one of those big walls and ended up paralyzed from the waist down. It only took him three months to put a pistol to his head and blow his brains out.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. If he hadn’t done it, I might have. He was one of those big confident men who go all to pieces if things don’t go their way. He made my life hell with his temper and his demands, and I couldn’t even protest. Do you have any idea what frightful tyrants invalids can be? I’m not looking forward to setting up as a hospital, I can tell you, though I doubt any of these patient gentle little men will hold a candle to Richard. Anyway, in those three months I did little but wait on him and play chess with him. I’m glad I can still give you a decent game.”

  David was completely disarmed. It had been his experience that women were both romantic and devious — perhaps the two always went together, since romanticism always implied a certain rearrangement of reality. This woman was both direct and realistic to the point where she made him distinctly uncomfortable. Further, she had a shrewd, observant mind and didn’t hesitate to use it in an age when women were supposed to be dependent and helpless and endearingly vapid. He wondered what other talents she had besides running a large plantation, apparently successfully, and playing a good game of chess. “Do you ride?” he asked idly.

  A faint smile touched her lips. “I won the point-to-point that crippled Richard. I was young then and would never have presumed, only the mare I borrowed from Harry had a mouth of iron, and short of piling us up as well, I couldn’t get her stopped.”

  *

  It was two days later that the wounded began to arrive. Some of them walked, but most came in creaking wooden carts pulled by caribao, the ubiquitous water buffalo. The wounded were piled in three and four deep, and often by the time they pulled them out they were dead. One of the doctors had been killed when the Monadnock shelled Caloocan, forcing the rebels to withdraw northward, and the other was so tired he was out on his feet. Luckily Victoriano had sent bolts of cloth for bandages from Malolos, but they had nothing else except regular soap, conventional needle and thread, and cane alcohol. There was no carbolic, no morphine, no operating equipment except for the single doctor’s couple of scalpels. The remaining doctor promptly came down with a severe case of dysentery, and David and Valerie and the wives and daughters and mothers of the plantation workers were left to sew up the wounds, do the nursing, and bury the dead. Before long there were wounded, sick refugees trailing in as well, and David, who helped to separate out the arrivals and examine them thoroughly, became conversant to the point of boredom with the female anatomy. He told them all cheerfully that he was a doctor, and they made no protest.

  The whole episode took on a dreamlike quality. Like the rest, he never got enough sleep, and as the stream of wounded increased, he stood at the dining-room table cutting and sewing until his ankles swelled and his legs and back turned to aching stone. It was Valerie who kept them all going, though toward the last she began to look her age and then some. She coaxed and cajoled and jested and pushed them all into doing more than they were capable of. She oversaw the cooking, directed the nursing, and held the hands of the dying, in between carrying bedpans and cleaning up the incontinent with a cheerful matter-of-fact attitude that quenched all embarrassment.

  Against all odds, February passed and early March with no sign either of the Americans or of the insurgents except for the dreadful columns of wooden oxcarts drawn by the patient buffalo. The wounded told them of the progress of the war, all bad. The day David had arrived at the plantation, Gagalanging had fallen, and the next day Malabon and Caloocan. The insurgent army was retreating slowly, bloodily, and at last the oxcarts were almost hidden by the streams of refugees as the Americans came on, burning what villages the insurgents had left as they came.

  Reluctantly Valerie turned away any refugees not sick or wounded who followed the oxcarts to the plantation. The house and stables were carpeted with the wounded, and there was a constant chorus of groans and cries, punctuated now and then by screams from the operating room, where there was no ether, only cane alcohol. The doctor, worn out past any resistance to his dysentery, had died, and there were several cases of what Valerie thought was typhoid. These she had put out in one of the deserted worker’s houses under the care of two women who had had typhoid. There seemed no end to the work. Some were too badly wounded to tinker with, and they had to lie there and die as best they could. Others went septic, and everyone’s discomfort was increased by the incredible stench of gas gangrene. If the infection set in on an arm or a leg, it was possible to take it off — David couldn’t help thinking of his grandfather Gideon — but elsewhere on the body there was nothing to be done.

  “We would do them a favor to kill them,” Valerie said wearily.

  “You can’t mean that!” David exclaimed automatically.

  “Well, would you like to die, as die they surely will, with your flesh rotting off your bones and a fever cooking the brains in your skull?”

  David had no answer.

  When Victoriano appeared one night, they knew it was all over. He looked as tired as they, and there was little vestige of his ready wit.

  “We held them at Polo and Novaliches against your General MacArthur and his three brigades of cavalry and artillery, but we paid an awful price. In the end we had to retreat anyway. Malolos is as good as lost. Emilio plans to fall back clear to Calumpit and direct the fighting from there. God knows how we’ve managed so far — there’s not one in twenty of the recruits who can hit the side of a barn with a rifle, and we haven’t rifles enough for most of them at that. Have you ever tried to come up against artillery with bolo knives?”

  “What about the wounded?” Valerie asked.

  Victoriano looked at her steadily. “We will only try to take those who can walk.”

  “But — but what of the others?”

  Victoriano shrugged wearily. “What would you? Taking them clear to Calumpit by oxcart would kill most of them. Let the Americans worry about them.”

  “And David? Should he wait here for his countrymen, or are you going to keep him with you?”

  Victoriano wouldn’t look at him and went on speaking to Valerie as if he weren’t present. “Emilio says he may leave any time he wants to. He might be in a better position with the Americans if he crosses our lines and makes contact with them now, as if he escaped.”

  “Your men would shoot me on sight!” David protested.

  “Not if you keep to the road. I brought a pony for you, and here is a safe-conduct from Emilio.”

  David got his small bag of personal belongings and came downstairs again. Valerie was still standing there looking a little dazed. He put out his hand.

  “I guess this is goodbye for now,” he told her. “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever met.”

  “Thank you, David. You’re all right yourself. You needn’t have involved yourself in all this blood and horror, I know.” She smiled. “I’m only s
orry I was too busy to seduce you.”

  Victoriano grinned. “Next time, eh? Well, it won’t be long before you see each other again. The Americans are coming fast.”

  David shook hands with Victoriano and mounted the pony. With a last wave at the house he set off in the night toward the battle lines, only to find that there weren’t any. He heard some skirmishing off to one side, but even the artillery was still. He passed a single outpost that showed no curiosity about him, probably because he was coming from behind their own lines. He rode for another hour before he heard a peremptory “Halt! Who goes there?”

  “An American,” he called. “Lieutenant Hand, USN, lately of the flagship Olympia. I’m on special orders from General Merritt.”

  After his military pass was examined, he was passed up the line and finally as dawn was breaking brought to MacArthur himself, who cross-examined him thoroughly.

  “They’re falling back to Calumpit, you say? I don’t believe it. They’ve fed you that story to make us think Malolos won’t be defended. But Malolos is their capital city — of course they’ll defend it.”

  David shrugged. “You may be right, sir. They wouldn’t have much reason to trust me, and I was surprised they turned me loose. Should I report to General Otis?”

  “Since General Otis thought you were dead, he won’t miss you, and right now I can use you. Otis said you speak some Tagalog?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Good. We’ve picked up some prisoners who claim to speak no Spanish, and I want them interrogated. We lost our Filipino interpreter back at Malabon.”

  “I don’t suppose I could have a couple of hours sleep first?” David asked hopefully. “I feel as if I hadn’t slept for a month.”

  “Yes, yes,” Mac Arthur said impatiently. “Otis and Wheaton are moving out first this time, and we’ll flank them this afternoon on our way to Marilao tomorrow.”

  The prisoners proved to be a disheartened lot, a few of them wounded lightly but most showing remarkably little sign of having fought. He soon found out why when he discovered from them that they had not been armed with rifles. How in the hell did Aguinaldo expect to hold anything with unarmed men? MacArthur had told him that in the fighting thus far the enemy casualties had been heavy compared to the American ones. For instance, at Paco there were 4,000 Filipinos killed as against only 175 Americans. The prisoners were ready enough to talk, but in truth they knew nothing. There were no officers among them, and David doubted that most of them could even read or write.

  MacArthur’s division pressed on north in the morning. This was not like the taking of Manila with only occasional sniper fire to deal with. The two forces fired solidly at each other’s lines until they were not more than fifty yards apart. After three hours the Americans fell back to allow their artillery a clear field of fire, and with horror David saw the advanced breastworks of the insurgents literally pulverized, along with the men behind them. It suddenly occurred to him that this was what happened on a ship when shells exploded, except that in place of the dirt there would be lethal slivers of metal and wood. Where was his vision now of the stately maneuvers of graceful ships of war?

  The insurgents broke then, and after a brief stand in some bamboo thickets scattered and fled. As they ran through Marilao, they burned the town to the ground and headed north for Malolos, leaving a rear guard to contest the river crossing at Guiguinto so successfully that they held up the Americans’ advance for a day. The American artillery had to be pulled across the river by hand on the railroad bridge, all the time under a withering fire by the insurgents entrenched on the other side. As David looked around in surprise, the staff aide standing next to him clutched his face and fell writhing on the ground. David knelt to minister to him and found that part of his face was shot away. Mercifully he died within minutes.

  Until that time, David had watched the action with no thought of his own safety. His position as observer, unarmed, uncommitted, had seemed to confer upon him automatic invulnerability, like the cloak of invisibility in the fairy tales of his childhood. He had spoken with the dead aide only that morning, a young second lieutenant with a slow smile and a blond cowlick, called Billy Anderson. Like himself, Billy was unarmed, his duty mainly passing messages from MacArthur to his commanders.

  Suddenly David realized that had the insurgent rifle barrel swung only slightly to the right, it would have been himself whose shattered head lay there in the dirt. For the first time in his life he felt a cold coil of fear writhe inside him. He was afraid not so much of dying, though to be honest of that too, but rather of being terribly mutilated. He thought of Valerie’s husband imprisoned helplessly in his wheelchair, of the hideously maimed wounded he had seen at the plantation, and he went cold. He had experienced enough of the broken bodies of the insurgents to know what bullets and shrapnel could do to a human being. He stood up and swallowed dryly, by an effort of will refusing to allow himself to flinch. He had lost his innocence in battle.

  MacArthur, Wheaton, and Otis were all three jubilant, for they expected the insurgents to have fallen back on their capital, Malolos, where they would make a last and desperate stand. Once Malolos fell, Aguinaldo would have to sue for peace, his seat of government captured and his army destroyed. David thought of what Victoriano had told him of Aguinaldo’s plans and wondered.

  He found himself torn even after having seen the fighting through American eyes from the American lines. On the one hand he would like to see the killing stopped, but on the other he had come to admire the determination in the face of all odds of this underarmed, undertrained, underdisciplined, undersupplied rabble of an army. The Filipinos obviously knew little of the science of warfare and were therefore forced to buy every delay in the American advance with their very flesh and blood. Was it so wrong to wish to rule their own country after spending hundreds of years under the thumb of Spain and a not very benevolent Catholic Church? He was beginning to understand what a blow it must have been to Aguinaldo to find that he had only traded a weaker oppressor for a stronger one.

  That night David had difficulty getting to sleep. The hardtack and bacon which the army insisted upon feeding its soldiers even in a tropical climate weighed heavy in his stomach. In anticipation of the battle in the morning, most of the men remained dressed, although it meant that they sweated in their bedding. When he finally slept, he had a vivid, startling dream of the hospital at the plantation.

  He was arguing with Valerie against the removal of a wounded man’s leg, and to emphasize what he was saying had grasped her by the shoulders. Suddenly they were lying naked on the operating table amid the old bloodstains, and they were doing to each other all of those things that had so appalled him when proposed by Ofelia. As he buried his face between her legs, he came awake with a jolt in an agony of desire and disgust. Afraid of experiencing a similar dream, he furtively stroked himself to a climax before falling into a seemingly dreamless sleep. It was only the next morning that he remembered he had still been thinking of her as he relieved himself after the dream.

  The morning, as most mornings in the hot season of the year, dawned bright and clear. The men were nervous and yet cheerful, for they too looked forward to settling this uncomfortable war once and for all. Nothing they had seen of the insurgents thus far had led them to be anything but confident about the outcome. Before seven the artillery started up again, even as the men were finishing their inevitable hardtack and bacon. Already it was hot, with swarms of large iridescent green flies buzzing lazily about. By seven the brigades of dismounted cavalry were ready to go, while the artillery behind and on both sides of them belched forth a constant rain of exploding shells.

  As they advanced through the battered environs of Malolos, they saw occasional bodies of insurgent soldiers, but except for some scattered firing off to the right where Hale and Wheaton were advancing, there was no opposition. A mixed column of Otis’s infantry and artillery was swinging left to cut off any flanking movement on the part of the insurgents an
d would, David realized, pass through the plantation. The Americans would hardly harm an undefended hospital, he reasoned, and no doubt MacArthur had informed Otis of the plantation’s status.

  As they approached the town proper, the men braced themselves for the barrage. Aguinaldo’s men had more discipline than anyone thought, for not a shot was fired. It would be in the deadly streets of the town that the lethal hail of bullets would scythe them down from the barricaded houses on either side. They would have to fight their way through the back gardens and corrales as they had in Manila.

  In an eerie silence they cautiously infiltrated streets lined with burned-out houses. There was not even a dog or a pig in sight as they advanced toward the center of town, where the insurgent flag hung limply from the flagpole in the deserted plaza. As they eyed each other in growing doubt and dismay, they came to the farther limits of Malolos. There was no enemy — no enemy and no capitulation. It was clear now at last that they would be fighting their way north in the months to come as they had fought from Manila: a skirmish here, an ambush there, a fortified river crossing, an abandoned town. MacArthur’s grim expression was hardly in keeping with the jubilation that should have accompanied the taking of the enemy’s capital city.

  As soon as it became apparent that the city was empty, David went back for his pony, which along with the officers’ horses was being guarded back by the field kitchens. He cantered off on the side road that led to the plantation, but before long was having to skirt shell holes left by Otis’s cannon. The drive that led to the house was a desolation now of broken palms, forcing him several times to dismount in order to find a way around them. He began to have a cold feeling of foreboding, and at once realized that he should have been able to see the house from where he was.

  Recklessly he kicked the pony into a canter once again and jumped the last several palm trunks in his way, seeing now that the smoke he had assumed came from the kitchen chimney and from the workers’ houses in truth came from a blackened rubble that was all that was left of the teak staircase and yacal paneling and the hardwood floors. Otis’s artillery had systematically shelled that beautiful house into a smoking ruin, and with it no doubt Valerie, the; faithful Filipino nurses, and the helpless wounded. To his surprise he found that he was close to tears.