Then came the awful tragedy of Balangiga. It happened only a few days after the President died, while our nerves were still taut, and filled us all with unspeakable horror intensified by the first actual fear we had felt since we had been in the Philippine Islands. Company “C” of the 9th Infantry, stationed at the town of Balangiga on the island of Samar, was surprised at breakfast, without arms and at a considerable distance from their quarters, and fifty of them were massacred. About thirty fought their way bare handed through the mob, each man of which had a bolo or a gun, and lived to tell the tale. It was a disaster so ghastly in its details, so undreamed of under the conditions of almost universal peace which had been established, that it created absolute panic. Men began to go about their everyday occupations in Manila carrying pistols conspicuously displayed, and half the people one met could talk of nothing else but their conviction that the whole archipelago was a smouldering volcano and that we were all liable to be murdered in our beds any night. Of course this made the Army officers more certain than ever that the Islands should have remained under military control indefinitely, and I cannot deny that, at the time, their arguments seemed to have some foundation.

It was a frightful nervous strain and it took several months of tranquillity to restore confidence. If it had been a regular engagement in which the Americans had sustained a reverse it could have been accepted with some philosophy, but it was a plain massacre of a company of defenceless men by many times their number who had gotten into the town with the consent of the American authorities, and in conspiracy with the local headman and the native parish priest, on the pretext of bringing in for surrender a band of

insurrectos .

The man, Lucban, who was in command of the Samar ladrones who committed this atrocity, is now a prominent politico in Manila, and it is interesting to know that only last year, in a campaign speech, he referred with dramatic intensity to “our glorious victory of Balangiga.” He was appealing to an ignorant electorate, many of whom, as he knew, wore the scar of the awful Katipunan “blood pact,” but it is just to record that the average Filipino is not proud of the Balangiga “victory.”