Characters

"I have seen my own soldiers die without affecting future events... enough of blood, enough of tears and desolation."

Emilio Aguinaldo was mayor of Kawit at 26, the military genius of the 1896 revolution against Spain at 27, and president of Asia's first constitutional republic at 29. Exiled to Hong Kong under the Pact of Biak-na-Bato, he returned aboard an American warship in May 1898, declared Philippine independence from the window of his Kawit home on June 12, and built a functioning government at Malolos — only to watch his ally become his conqueror. When the war he had dreaded broke out in February 1899, Aguinaldo fought it first with a conventional army and then, after its destruction, as the hunted head of a guerrilla state, fleeing north through the Cordillera while lieutenants like del Pilar died to cover him. Captured at Palanan in March 1901 by Funston's ruse, he took the oath of allegiance and called on his commanders to lay down their arms. He lived another sixty-three years — long enough to run for president of the Commonwealth in 1935, to be arrested for collaborating with the Japanese in 1945, and to see the independent Philippine flag he had first raised in 1898 flying officially over Manila. He died in 1964 at 94, the last surviving president of the First Republic.

"If the enemy is at the gates, there is no time for anything but to fight."

Antonio Luna was a chemist, a champion fencer, and the most brilliant — and most impossible — soldier the Republic had. Educated in Manila and Madrid, he studied military science in Europe after his imprisonment for the 1896 revolution and returned to build a professional army: he founded a military academy, drafted regulations, planned a fortified line across Luzon, and enforced discipline at gunpoint on officers who recognized no authority but their home provinces. He commanded the defense of the Manila lines and the fighting retreat up the railway through Caloocan and Malolos, repeatedly attempting counterattacks that his feuding subordinates failed to deliver. His volcanic temper made enemies everywhere — he arrested generals, slapped officers, and disbanded units loyal to rivals. On June 5, 1899, summoned to Cabanatuan by a telegram from Aguinaldo's headquarters, Luna arrived to find the president absent — and the presidential guard, men he had once disciplined, waiting on the stairs. They shot and stabbed him more than thirty times. No one was ever tried. With him died the Republic's last hope of a conventional army worthy of the name.

"I am surrounded by fearful odds that will overcome me and my gallant men, but I am pleased to die fighting for my beloved country."

Gregorio del Pilar joined the revolution against Spain at twenty and was a general at twenty-two — the 'boy general,' vain about his uniforms, beloved by his men, and personally fearless. A protégé and favorite of Aguinaldo, he fought through the conventional war from the Manila lines to the delaying actions on the railway north, including the stubborn stand at Quingua that killed Colonel Stotsenburg. When the Republic's army disintegrated in November 1899 and Aguinaldo fled into the Cordillera, del Pilar chose the ground where the pursuit would be stopped: Tirad Pass, a 4,500-foot saddle reachable only by a zigzag trail. With sixty men he held Major March's battalion for hours until a local guide led the Texans around the position. Del Pilar stayed with the rearguard and was shot dead in the saddle at twenty-four. American soldiers buried him where he fell; an officer kept his diary and later returned it to his family. The last entry, written the night before, was the quote that made him immortal.

"The Filipinos will win their independence not by force of arms, but by deserving it."

Apolinario Mabini rose from a peasant family in Batangas to the finest legal mind of the revolution — and did his greatest work after polio paralyzed both his legs in 1896. Carried in a hammock to Aguinaldo's side in 1898, the 'Sublime Paralytic' became the intellectual architect of the Republic: he drafted its decrees, designed its government, and as first prime minister fought to keep the revolution honest against the landowners who dominated the Malolos Congress. He opposed premature war with the United States but, once it came, became the Republic's most unbending voice against surrender. Captured in December 1899, he refused the oath of allegiance and kept writing from Manila until the Americans deported him to Guam in 1901 with the other 'irreconcilables.' He finally swore the oath in February 1903 — only so he could come home to die. Cholera killed him three months later, at 38. His memoir, written in exile, remains the revolution's most searching self-criticism: it blames the Republic's fall less on American guns than on its own leaders' ambition.

"Forward, without turning back... all wars of independence have been obliged to suffer terrible tests."

Miguel Malvar was a prosperous orange farmer and town captain in Batangas who became one of the revolution's steadiest soldiers — and its last general in the field. He fought Spain from 1896, led troops in the Cavite campaigns, and commanded the Republic's forces in southern Luzon through the conventional war and into the guerrilla years. After Aguinaldo's capture in March 1901, Malvar assumed leadership of what remained of the resistance, issuing manifestos as acting head of the Republic and keeping Batangas ungovernable through 1901. It took General J. Franklin Bell's reconcentration of the province — the entire rural population herded into garrisoned zones while columns burned everything outside them — to break his base of support. With his people starving and his own family in the zones, Malvar walked out of the hills and surrendered on April 16, 1902, the last Filipino general to lay down arms. He refused every American offer of office, went back to his farms, and died in 1911 — remembered in the Philippines as the man who held out longest.

"The Filipino people need... the substantial benefits of a free government under American sovereignty."

Arthur MacArthur won the Medal of Honor at eighteen for seizing the colors at Missionary Ridge, and spent the next three decades in the frontier army waiting for another war. It came in 1898: he led a division in the capture of Manila from Spain, then commanded the decisive fighting of the Philippine war's conventional phase — the Battle of Manila, Caloocan, and the drive up the railway that took Malolos. As military governor from May 1900 he ran the counterinsurgency at its hinge point, pairing amnesty offers and civic programs with the hard policies of General Order 100 — deportations, detentions, and destruction of guerrilla-supporting villages. It was under his command that Funston captured Aguinaldo. His governorship ended in a bitter public feud with William Howard Taft, whose civilian commission MacArthur treated as an intrusion into a war zone; Washington sided with Taft. He died in 1912, mid-speech at a reunion of his Civil War regiment. His son Douglas would accept Japan's surrender forty-three years later — and preside over the Philippine independence his father had fought to postpone.

"I am afraid that some people at home will lie awake nights worrying about the ethics of this war."

Frederick Funston stood five foot four, failed the West Point entrance exam, and became the most famous American soldier of the war. A botanist and adventurer who had rafted the Yukon alone, he learned soldiering as a filibuster artillery officer with the Cuban rebels before talking his way into command of the 20th Kansas Volunteers in 1898. In the Philippines he made his name by swimming rivers under fire — winning the Medal of Honor for crossing the Rio Grande de la Pampanga at Calumpit clinging to a raft rope — and cemented it in March 1901 with the war's most audacious stroke: the Palanan expedition, in which he and four other Americans posed as prisoners of their own Macabebe Scouts to walk into Aguinaldo's headquarters and seize him. His blunt public defenses of harsh war methods made him a lightning rod — Mark Twain devoted an entire essay, 'A Defence of General Funston,' to dismantling him. As commanding general in San Francisco in 1906 he took charge of the earthquake response, and he was the presumptive commander of the American army for the European war when he dropped dead in a hotel lobby in February 1917 — leaving that command to John J. Pershing.

"You can't beat these people with paper plans. You must go where they are and stay there."

Henry Lawton was the Army's beau ideal of a fighting general: six foot four, a Civil War Medal of Honor at Atlanta, and the man who led the expedition that ran Geronimo to ground in 1886. He commanded a division in Cuba in 1898, taking El Caney at heavy cost, and arrived in the Philippines in 1899 with a reputation as the hardest driver in the service. He proved it, leading amphibious and overland expeditions across Luzon in all weather — Santa Cruz, San Isidro, the great autumn campaign that broke the Republic's army. His men worshiped him; correspondents made him the war's most vivid American figure. He argued, presciently, that garrisoning the countryside and staying was the only way to win a guerrilla war. On December 19, 1899, directing a skirmish line before San Mateo in a rainstorm — refusing as always to take cover, unmistakable in his white raincoat — he was shot through the chest by a sharpshooter under General Licerio Gerónimo. The press could not resist the coincidence: the captor of Geronimo, killed by Gerónimo. He was the highest-ranking American to die in the war.

"We hold the Philippines for the benefit of the Filipinos, and we are not entitled to pass a single act or to approve a single measure that has not that as its chief purpose."

William Howard Taft, a 350-pound federal judge who wanted nothing in life but a seat on the Supreme Court, was talked into heading the Philippine Commission by President McKinley in 1900. To general surprise — including his own — he became the war's most consequential American civilian. Calling Filipinos his 'little brown brothers' (a phrase that embarrassed even his contemporaries and enraged the soldiers), Taft championed civil government while the war still burned: courts, schools, roads, a civil service open to Filipinos, and negotiated purchase of the Church friar lands whose abuses had helped fuel the revolution. His running battle with military governor Arthur MacArthur over authority ended with Washington backing Taft, and on July 4, 1901 he became the islands' first civil governor. The Philippines made Taft. He rode the governorship to Secretary of War, the presidency in 1908, and finally — the job he had always actually wanted — Chief Justice of the United States in 1921. He remains the only person to have led two branches of the American government, and Philippine policy bore his stamp for a generation: benevolent in intention, colonial in fact.

"I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn... The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness."

Jacob Smith was a Civil War veteran of Shiloh with a checkered record — lawsuits, a fraud scandal, a reputation for brutality in the Indian campaigns — who by 1901 had risen to brigadier general largely by longevity. After the Balangiga attack killed 48 Americans in September 1901, Smith was given command of Samar and issued the orders that made him infamous. He told Marine Major Littleton Waller that he wanted the interior of Samar made 'a howling wilderness,' that he wanted every person capable of bearing arms killed, and — pressed for a lower age limit — set it at ten years old. Waller, to his credit, refused to pass the order on as given, but the campaign that followed burned villages, destroyed food stores, and killed civilians in numbers that have never been reliably counted. When the orders surfaced during Waller's own court-martial in 1902, the scandal reached the White House. Smith was court-martialed — convicted only of 'conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline' — and quietly retired by order of President Roosevelt. American newspapers had already given him his permanent title: 'Howling Wilderness' Smith.