RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
that there might not be any delay or radical change in carrying out the plans which had been adopted and put in operation under his direction. All activities suffered a sort of paralysis from the crushing blow of the President's assassination, but the press of routine work continued. We were very much interested in learning that a great many Filipinos, clever politicians as they are, thought that after Mr. McKinley's death Mr. Bryan would become President, and that, after all, they would get immediate independence.
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
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