Chapter VI The Battle in the Bacaue Mountains
I wrote you last from Iloilo, but no word has come back to me. And toward the late fall, our term of service having expired, and so many others crowding for a chance to serve, we were mustered out and ordered home. The big transport Indiana stood by for our home-taking.
It was good news for the boys, but sad for me. They were going home to wife or sweetheart, but I had no home.
There is one great thing about war, the steel it puts into the heart to stand things, to die smiling and unafraid, to take life as a battle, and fight it out on the firing line. There are many living, but few on the firing line of life. They think they are soldiers, but they are sutlers.
In a short time we sighted Cebu. Our General, Hawthorne, and a battalion of us were there, as I wrote you before, sent to help out the Regulars. We were ordered to pick up this battalion; it completed what was left of the First Tennessee, for some would sleep forever under far-off Pacific skies.
Cebu is a little city on the island of the same name in the center tier of the Archipelago. Bitter and desperate are the inhabitants and savage in the extreme, and to take the place has cost us a hard battle; and to hold it almost cost the life of the Twenty-third, for they had been cut off in the mountains and all but lost when Hawthorne came to their aid, three months before.
It is a long narrow island with a backbone of volcanic mountains, in the recesses of which live a race of savage fighters who do not quibble to rush, half naked, and with bolos and spears, upon lines of steel and Gatlings.
Their mountain fastnesses are all but impregnable. The volcanic mountains run sheer up straight and the level plateaus yawn with the most dangerous and sudden chasms.
Here were the forts and fortifications of the savage Insurgents, and here they had again threatened portions of the Sixth, Nineteenth and Twenty-third Regulars under General Snyder.
It was night when we heard it; we had anchored and prepared to take General Hawthorne and our boys on the homeward journey.
Then like a bolt came the news: portions of the Nineteenth Regulars were surrounded and cut off in the mountains by ten thousand yellow savages. They were doomed.
And Hawthorne and his battalion, instead of being on the beach to embark for home, had already gone back to the mountains to fight.
I drew up our men in line of dress parade on the Indiana’s decks. “Men,” I said, “we have been mustered out! We are no longer soldiers but citizens of the Republic, homeward bound, with all it means to every man of you who has done his duty as you all have. No man of you may be ordered to go one step from this transport’s deck till you reach your own land. But news has come that the enemy has attacked and cut off our comrades. Our General and a small battalion have already gone to their aid. I ask no man to follow me. I am going, and every man who would go with me take two steps forward.”
The First Tennessee to a man moved two steps forward on the deck.
At daybreak we were off for the mountains eight miles away. All forenoon we marched under the hot sun, passed mango trees and squalid huts over ashes of dead volcanoes. We established headquarters on Elpado Mountain across the Labanyon Valley. Along the low mountains in our front ran the forts of the Filipinos, a rude fringe to the crest of the hills.
A detachment of the Sixth and Nineteenth Regulars had been over-daring. They had got in behind the enemy, and being a new regiment sent to relieve us, they had not known the true situation. They were surrounded in front and rear. It was for us to cut through to them.
They are peculiar little mountains. Volcanic in origin they have been shaken by earthquakes until often their sides are precipices; on top there are narrow plateaus, and along their whole length bristle the savage fortifications.
There we found old Hawthorne waiting for us. He knew we would come!
At his word we began the ascent. It was a hand over hand climb, from rock to rock, from scrub to scrub, with a spear or a bolo at any time from above or behind any rock. And at unlooked for intervals would come avalanches of rock and volcanic stones, rolled down by the savages above.
It was five hundred feet up, but it took us all the afternoon to reach the first plateau, and half the night to derrick our cannon up with rope and pulley. The tired men had had no sleep for eighteen hours and at daylight they must fight. We camped within three hundred and fifty yards of their fortifications, with all lights out. We made the assault at daylight.
Our guns knocked their forts down around their ears and when we charged they went over the other ridge to the last line of what was left of the forts.
At the bloodiest angle of it when I came back to report to the General our burying squad was already busy:
“This,” said a tough old sergeant to me as he pointed to their dead piled up, “is a cordwood of good Filipinos.”
Such are the genialities of war.
Our fiercest fighting was before us. Hand over hand and holding to trees we went up to the next fort in an avalanche of stones, arrows, bolos, and spears.
We fought from rock to rock. Often a Krag or a Colt would speak straight up, and a dead Filipino would come vaulting down to our feet.
Again came the derricking of guns. Then we went through a deep aisle where only one man could rush in at a time, with Filipino sharp-shooters above us. But our last fight cut them from our front and we reached the Regulars. They had held their place and escaped death only because they had lain for two days in an old fissure with empty shells beside it and canteens as dry as the old volcano. But weak as they were they charged with us after the Filipinos, scattering them like mountain goats over the hills.
There was a tropic moon that tropic night. The Mango trees circled the farther mountain sides and the bamboos stood in groups in the valley below. The kingly palms towered high over all. The weird tropic night sounds were borne to us on the breeze. The tired battle line of my brave boys lolled by camp fires in one long line of sentinel light with the last wrecked forts of the beaten enemy at their backs. The field guns, rapid of fire, poked their long blue noses out into the night. “Still smellin’ for the varmints loike blood houns for nagurs,” said Moriarty, our fighting Irishman, and the wit of the regiment.
Then he would walk over and pet the blue steel beauties, for they were his. Moriarty it was who had brought them over mountain side and crevasses where no man dreamed they could go.
“An’ it’s aisy it is,” he would laugh and say when I praised him to his face. “It’s aisy, Cap’n; I’ve done nothin’ but pet ’em, an’ so they jus’ foller me loike dogs.”
Half a mile out a line of pickets faced the way the beaten enemy had fled. Our fighting was over. Cebu’s island would no longer be troubled with Insurgents. And the next day would be the Indiana and home!
Our General had thrown off his sword belt and come over to my camp, and together we had smoked and talked of home and the war, of everything but you, sweetheart. But when he left he smiled and said a puzzling thing to me. “I’ve a surprise for you to-morrow, at Cebu, Jack, that will knock the war and even the homegoing out of your head.”
Then he twisted his gray mustache and smiled delightedly. Had the old man, as we all loved to call him, received word of another promotion for me, I wondered. For myself I wanted no more war. I wanted only you, Eloise, somewhere, somehow, living; or the memory of you amid my own Tennessee trees.
“General,” I said, “there are worthier men here than I for any promotion you may have. I will go back to my land and my work; but if you could arrange for Moriarty here—” I added, pointing to the game little Irishman.
“Oh, Pat’s fixed already,” he answered. “He has brought these guns over hills, through fissures, and the walls of hell. He’ll be First Lieutenant in the regular army as soon as I can wire this day’s work to the President. But you, Jack,—”
I pressed his hand. “General, dear General, believe me, I want nothing more, nothing but a chance to work and make a home in Tennessee.”
I was serious almost to that old gripping in the throat. But he laughed and pressed my hand.
“To-morrow, Jack, to-morrow! You are tired now; I want you to sleep. You have earned your reward this day, my boy, and it shall be yours to-morrow, a promotion that you will love.”
I followed him to his own tent door. A black horse stood haltered near by, saddled as he had been for two days and nights.
I took the General’s whistle, the one I had used to train Satan to my call in the old days, and which on the firing line the General himself used in calls for his aides and orderlies. I blew softly the three blasts I had taught him to know in the forest. He had not seen me for months. He did not know I was there; but his head went up quickly with the old devil fire in his eyes. The next minute he had thrown his great weight back on the halter, snapping it.
His head was on my shoulder, and he was whinnying.
The General laughed. “It beats the world, Jack, that horse’s love for you. Take him to your own tent to-night, he’ll rage like a hyena around here all night, now that he knows you are here.”
It was true. But tethered at my own camp he was quiet. The confusion had been so great and my men were so scattered that when I came back I ordered Moriarty to call the roll before taps. He came back quickly with word that Ross and Billings of our company were absent. I was surprised. Investigation among the men, tired and half asleep, showed that they had not stopped when we took the last fort, but had been swept on with a squad of the Regulars after the flying Filipinos, carried away with the excitement of it.
I went quickly to the bivouac of the Regulars. They remembered the two men, but thought they had returned, as they went off toward the right of the little village Colena, two miles in our front and through which the enemy had fled.
“If they aren’t here now,” said an old sergeant, “no use to look for ’em again; when we come back through that village, there wasn’t a sound, not a kid, nor a chicken, nor a coon, nor a dog; and when you don’t hear nothin’ in a Filipino village, when you go through, look out for hell when you come back.”
I looked at my watch. It had been full three hours since the Regulars had returned.
“I am going after them,” I said, turning to go.
“Ballington,” it was the swarthy old Captain, of the Nineteenth who spoke, “you’d be a fool to risk it.” He pointed silently to a faint glow across the valley on the side of the mountain beyond. I had thought it was a rising star. “Yonder,” he said, “see that other one on the mountain top, that’s the signal fire of the little yellow hyenas, that means guerrilla bands in them mountains, they go in packs like wolves, and the night is their time. They know every foot of the mountain, every gorge, valley and crevasse. Why, two men lost over there ain’t got no more show than a pair of fool goats in a jungle. Why, if them little hyenas couldn’t see ’em, which they can—for they see better by night than by day—they can smell ’em, like all jungle breeds.”
“Boy,” he said again, looking at me kindly and smiling an apology for the title which we both bore, “I wouldn’t let you go. I’d go to old Hawthorne and have you arrested first. You Tennessee fellows,” he said, laying his big rough hand on my shoulder, “have done the whitest thing ever done in this war. It ain’t often we old Regulars that never go home and have to serve ’till the last taps, takes much notice of you volunteer fellows that fights awhile for fun and quits when the time is up; but when you biled out of that transport and came over them mountains an’ cut through to us, you done a thing that’ll warm the cockles of our boys till the last tattoo and the taps. Now I ain’t goin’ to let you go out there in no such fool thing. I’m an old soldier, I fought with Miles and Cook on the plains, and I tell you now, Sitting Bull and his Sioux were lambs to them little mountain savages. You go back now,” he said kindly, taking my hand in his own, “go back and go to sleep. You are a boy yet, though you proved you are full grown to-day, my lad, and ain’t even got up a beard. Of course you have got a sweetheart waiting in Tennessee. Go back to her, and the next year send old Brawley of the Nineteenth a picture of her and the kid. He ain’t never had no time to marry, it’s been fighting all his life with him from hell to breakfast.”
I smiled, saluted, and went back to camp.
Moriarty was waiting for me, and, when Moriarty does not smile, I know what to expect.
“Cap’n,” he said, “it’s not Moriarty that can sleep peaceful the night till we find them, dead or alive.”
“And I, too, if you please, Cap’n,” said Davis, my corporal, who had been listening.
“There is no need for a call then, men,” I said, “we three will go down to the village, we will doubtless find them near it. A Krag for rapid firing and two Colts each,” I added, “and plenty of shells. Don’t let the other men know; we’ll be back by midnight.”
As we slipped out of the lines of camp I saw a thing that touched me. Moriarty had stopped at the long, slim, blue-barreled rapid fire and for a moment, lingering over it, one arm around it, he laid his cheek against its lips. It was Moriarty’s farewell kiss to the only bride he had ever known.