Post #39 — Sunday, 28th September 1901
This morning, at approximately twenty minutes past six, in the town of Balangiga on the southern coast of the island of Samar in the Philippines, the church bells began to ring.
The seventy-four American soldiers of Company C, 9th Infantry Regiment, were eating breakfast. Most were unarmed. Their rifles were stacked in their quarters. The morning was warm. The mess tent smelled of coffee and salt pork. Captain Thomas Connell — twenty-nine, West Point, devout Catholic, spoke fluent Spanish, had fought at San Juan Hill — was at his table.
The bells rang. Conch shells blew from the treeline. And then the town rose.
Valeriano Abanador, the police chief, grabbed the rifle from Private Adolph Gamlin, one of the American sentries, and struck him across the head. This was the signal. From the plaza, from the streets, from the church itself — where men had entered dressed as women, carrying coffins they said held children dead from cholera, coffins that actually held bolos and machetes — the people of Balangiga attacked.
The soldiers were hacked where they sat. Some fought with kitchen utensils, with chairs, with steak knives. Captain Connell was killed. Both his lieutenants were killed. Of seventy-four men, forty-eight died. The rest — all but four of them wounded — escaped in overloaded fishing canoes, paddling twenty-five miles up the coast to the nearest garrison while the attackers followed along the shoreline, marking their progress with signal fires.
The townspeople captured a hundred rifles and twenty-five thousand rounds of ammunition. It was the worst defeat for the United States Army since the Battle of the Little Bighorn, twenty-five years ago.
I need to go back. I need to go back to the beginning.
Aguinaldo surrendered in English. I told you that in Post #16, and I told you to notice. He surrendered because General Funston captured him in March, because the war was officially winding down, because civilian rule was officially beginning, because William Howard Taft took his oath on the Fourth of July and called the Filipinos his little brown brothers. The war was over. The resistance was collapsing. The Philippines were being pacified.
That word again. Pacified. Added to the catalogue: camps of refuge, surplus, opening, civilising. Pacification. From the Latin pax, peace. To pacify is to make peaceful. The word implies that the violence originates with the people being pacified — that they are the disturbance, and the army is the calm.
But in Balangiga, the American garrison had been there since August. They closed the port. They confiscated the rice. They ordered every man over thirteen to clear brush at gunpoint. They occupied the houses. A soldier assaulted a girl in a palm wine shop. Her brothers beat him, and for this the captain punished the town. The bolos were confiscated. The food stores were destroyed. The men were penned in open wooden enclosures at night.
The people of Balangiga did not need to be pacified. They needed to be left alone.
But they were not left alone, because the hemp trade — Manila hemp, the fibre that made the ropes for the American Navy and the baling wire for American cotton — ran through Samar, and the port at Balangiga was part of the supply chain, and the supply chain was financing the resistance, and the resistance was an obstacle to the trade, and the trade was the reason the Americans were there in the first place. Follow the fibre. Follow the money. The money leads to the port and the port leads to the garrison and the garrison leads to the confiscation and the confiscation leads to the bells.
The bells rang because the hemp was worth more than the town.
What comes next is worse.
The newspapers in America will call this the Balangiga Massacre. They will compare it to Custer’s Last Stand. The nation, still grieving its murdered president — McKinley is two weeks dead — will be furious. Roosevelt, barely settled into the White House, will order the pacification of Samar. He will send Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith.
Smith will issue his orders to Marine Major Littleton Waller. I will quote them exactly, because they should not be paraphrased, because paraphrasing is a kind of euphemism and I am done with euphemisms:
“I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me. The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.”
Waller will ask for clarification. He will ask what age the general considers capable of bearing arms.
“Ten years,” Smith will say. “Persons of ten years and older.”
Kill everyone over ten. The order will be given. The campaign will be executed. Towns will be burned. Crops will be destroyed. Civilians — men, women, children over the age of ten — will be killed. The estimated death toll among Filipino civilians on Samar will reach into the thousands. Smith will eventually face a court-martial, not for the killing, but for “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.” He will be found guilty and sentenced to a reprimand. A reprimand. For ordering the murder of children.
The soldiers who carried out the campaign will take the church bells of Balangiga as trophies. They will ship them to their next posting — Fort Russell, in Cheyenne, Wyoming — where they will remain for over a century, the sound of a town’s resistance locked in American bronze, silent, far from the sea.
I said in the first month of this journal that empires are funny things. So large on the map. So completely absent from a woman’s kitchen.
In Balangiga, the map is the kitchen. The empire is inside the house, confiscating the rice, penning the men, closing the port. The people fight back with bolos and church bells and coffins full of machetes, and the empire calls it a massacre, and the reprisal kills more people than the attack by a factor of forty, and the reprisal is called pacification, and the bells are shipped to Wyoming, and the century moves on.
Three republics, I said. Born, killed, leashed. The Philippine republic was killed in April when Aguinaldo surrendered. But the dead republic’s body is still twitching on Samar. The people of Balangiga did not read the surrender document. They did not accept the sovereignty of the United States. They accepted the presence of the Americans in their town for six weeks, playing baseball and drinking palm wine, until the Americans destroyed their food and jailed their men and assaulted their women, and then they rang the bells.
I do not glorify the killing. Forty-eight men died at breakfast, hacked with machetes, and many of them were young and far from home and did not choose to be in Balangiga any more than the townspeople chose to have them there. Private Gamlin, the sentry who was struck first, was somebody’s son. Captain Connell spoke Spanish and was sympathetic to the Filipino people, and his sympathy did not protect him, because sympathy is not the same as leaving.
But I notice who names the massacre. The people who won the war name it. The people who lost forty-eight soldiers name it, not the people who will lose thousands. The word massacre attaches to the morning of the bells, not to the months of fire that follow. This is how language works in empires: the violence of the occupied is a massacre. The violence of the occupier is a campaign.
Every euphemism is a small act of violence. I will keep saying it until the century stops proving me right.
The century is thirty-nine weeks old. A new president sits in the White House — it is called the White House now, remember — and his first foreign crisis is a bell ringing on a tropical island seven thousand miles away, and his response will be the same response empires always give: more force, more fire, more burning, more wilderness.
The bells are silent now. The town is ash. The soldiers are coming. And in a harbour in Cavite, the armoured cruiser USS New York is loading marines and ammunition for the voyage to Samar, where the interior must be made a howling wilderness, where everyone over ten must die, where the pacification — the peace-making — is about to begin.
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