Our Supervisor had been a captain of volunteers in a Minnesota
regiment. He was a thoroughly interesting talker, and an inimitable
story-teller, a man who did not lose his sense of humor when the
joke turned on himself. I heard him tell one or two stories well
worth repeating.
Our valorous Supervisor was stationed in Antique province, while
in Capiz was a detachment of the regular army. And in full sight
of both on the top of a precipice, an insurrecto flag flaunted its
impertinent message.
The Supervisor said he waited a decent length of time to give the
regulars a chance to pull down the flag, as it lay in their province,
but when they failed to act, he went out, full of hope and good United
States commissary valor, to destroy the insurrecto stronghold and
to give an object lesson in guerilla warfare to the regulars. His
men hacked and hewed their way through the jungle and cogon grass,
with never a shot from the insurrectos. Then at the last they
came to a clear slope, and when they were about half-way up this,
the insurrectos opened fire, not only with rifles but with great
boulders. The Supervisor said it took them over two hours to get
up, and they went down in less than twenty minutes. One little Dutch
private was in so much of a hurry that he punched him (the officer) in
the back with a gun butt and said, "Hurry up! get out of the way.
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