"Patrols should often make use of some ruse such as starting in one direction
and afterward doubling on their trail, in order to deceive accomplices
of ladrones who may be watching them."
--Constabulary Manual

THE story of the conquest of the Philippines is also a chronicle that is concerned with the lives and deaths of Magnificent Youngsters. There in the Philippine jungle the old law of the bolo--that decrees that the man with the longest reach shall survive--was the final measure of any man. By the law of the bolo these youngsters grew full man-size--and yet the grisly combat records show that they were hardly more than martial infants.

The balance between survival and a grave in the Samar jungle was delicate and expressive. "Kill or be killed"--that was the code of the bush. And death was ever present--waiting to be dealt by corded krismen, by maniacal pulajan, or by cobra and malaria.

And so glittering youngsters, half a world from home, became the instruments, as usual, for graybeards at Washington, D. C. The young officers of that poorly paid, poorly equipped force, the Philippine Constabulary, were not barracks soldiers. They were patrolmen--and that black jungle was their beat. Their domain and their service precluded the possibility of the companionship of a wife. Indeed, the junior officers who led the patrols were forbidden to marry until they rated a Captaincy. Sometimes they came from their own jungle world to another world where U. S. regulars danced with their wives at post formals ... it was then that the young Constabularymen realized to the full the antisocial aspects of chasing Moros.

White women were something precious and perfect and wholly unattainable to these bush youngsters as they came in, dazed from solitude, after months in the jungle. Occasionally they attended dinner parties to enjoy, for an evening, the conversation of a woman of their own race. Beaten by the bush and monosyllabic in speech, their very incoherence was at once amusing and pathetic.

These young Constabulary lieutenants could drink all day and never become drunk at all. In like manner, they could apparently fight all day and never experience the chill emotion of fear. Their monumental drinking awes an investigator--for most of them it was the one surcease from slaughter.

Oscar Preuss, the eminent Moro killer, lived several lifetimes in the span of his short, hard-bitten life. As a fighter he was a cold-blooded genius--as a drinking man he was super-colossal. At 4:30 in the afternoon he began on a quart of Gordon's Gin--at midnight it was finished and Preuss was deadly sober. He was a great soldier--and almost too rough for Mindanao. His career had included a term as a Sergeant in the German Lancers during the Boxer Rebellion in China. He had then crossed to East Africa as a Lieutenant of Infantry. Various South and Central American revolutions saw him in action, and he had ridden for Uncle Sam as a cavalryman.

He made few military mistakes. One of them had been the time he disarmed a Moro and neglected to search the natives' hair for a dagger. He bashed out the Mohammedan's brains when the knife flashed into view, but not before the Moro had slashed the cheek of Preuss and pierced the roof of his mouth.

No man of the corps had greater stock of bush lore than Preuss. He believed in long marches before noon--with long rests in the afternoon. The Junior officer who learned from this Prussian was fortunate. Preuss was educated, and a marvelous linguist. He spoke English without a trace of accent. His short, stocky frame seemed impervious to fatigue.

Preuss is admitted to have been the greatest Moro killer of them all. They say he was called to Manila to justify his ruthless slaughter in Mindanao. A Colonel of the Board of Inquiry questioned him, "Captain Preuss, it is said that you, personally, have killed 250 Moros. What is your statement, sir, to that report?"

Preuss drew himself up, and officers say his tone was placid and yet discontented: "The report is in error, Colonel; my count places the total at 265."

In 1911 Preuss won a Medal of Valor at Mailog Cotta in Lanao. He was then a First Lieutenant of Constabulary, with four years' service. It was his sixth or seventh war, though Preuss was then but thirty-three.

Leonard Furlong was another who piled endless years into his short span of life. He wore the Medal of Valor for the Taraca campaigns at thirty: a quick-tempered flashing fighter who was burning up inside. At fifteen Furlong was a Naval Cadet; at twenty-one he was fighting Indians in Minnesota; at twenty-two he was in the Philippines in the first American expedition to Mindanao; and at thirty-four he was dead by his own hand. He was but one of that pageant of magnificent youngsters that was the commissioned force of the Philippine Constabulary.

One of the most dashing of the officers of the days of conquest was Vernon L. Whitney. His biography, written by his mates, lies before me. "Six-footer," they said; "a big overgrown boy. Splendid rifle and pistol shot and a fine drinking man" Another mate writes, with affection in every line: "Bad about borrowing money, spending it, and forgetting it. Liberal with his own and everybody else's money. That was Whitney and it was about his only fault."

Few men could fill Whitney's shoes figuratively--no one in the corps could hope to occupy them literally. In one of the Moro campaigns Lieutenant Tiffany had crossed over the Kulingtang mountains with a strong party of Lanao Constabulary in search of outlaws. They came to an old campground, littered with rusty cans, in an isolated section. There was great speculation as to who had made the camp. Some expressed the thought that Fort had passed that way; others considered it a former camp of Furlong or Preuss. A Constabulary private settled the argument; he emerged from the bush with a howl of laughter crying "Teniente Whitney." He was holding by the laces a moldy outworn shoe--size 14.

Whitney, the ham-fisted, was strong as Sandow and huge in frame. He was accustomed to swell his chest and pop all the buttons from his uniform coat. For amusement, he would put his fist through a door. He was a terror to the Moros, and after that sanguinary battle at Sahipas cotta in which Whitney received a bullet that severed a sciatic nerve, he was selected by General Pershing as a fitting Governor of Sulu. His Medal of Valor had been earned at twenty-six at Mailog; in 1916, when he retired, he was thirty-one years of age. Behind him were eleven years of battle!

James L. Cochrun was one of the most popular officers ever to wear the khaki and red uniform. "Gentlemen Jim" to all his mates; tall and spare, susceptible to women, a man who could pack his liquor. At twenty-one, fresh from school, he crossed the Pacific to join the Constabulary. At twenty-eight he was winning a Medal of Valor before Sahipas Cotta on the island of Jolo. Left arm smashed by a bullet, he pushed on until he fell, drilled through the abdomen. With seven years of jungle warfare behind him, he retired in 1914 on two-thirds disability. A veteran at the age of twenty-nine.

Samuel T. Polk of the fiery temper was a lank Mississippian who would fight anything--anytime. Medal of Valor at twenty-five; retired veteran at thirty.

And then there was Donald Root, youngest of all winners of the Medal of Valor. At twenty-one he was at the head of a patrol in the dense bush near Mamaya Peak, Lanao. Wounded in the left side, swarmed over by the hostile Moro force of Raja Muda Randi, this boy grown suddenly to full man-size, extricated his patrol and accomplished his mission. He resigned at twenty-six, to wander away to the war in France.

Another magnificent youngster was John R. White, who had been in the Greek Foreign Legion at eighteen, in the American infantry at twenty, in the Philippine Constabulary at twenty-two. For fourteen years he fought Moros and jungle, and his Medal of Valor was won at Bud Dajo when he was hardly more than a boy. At thirty-five, he was retired a Colonel, with a lifetime of crowded hours to mark his combat service.

The list is so long. Gary Crockett at Bulao, in Samar, winning his medal at twenty-six; Fort, a regular Daniel Boone who spoke every native dialect of Mindanao. "Old Susan," his Winchester, was notched with a record of his victims.

John Fawcett, secretive, cool, efficient and loyal, one of the best all-around officers in the Corps; Ernest Johnson, dead on a Moro spear in his twenties, a boy from the University of Oregon who failed to come home; J. C. Tiffany, an Oregon State College youngster and one of the finest fighting men in the Mohammedan country, for whom there were eight years of combat against the Moros until his retirement in 1917 to engage in the greater war in Europe.

Among the romantic youngsters who wrote their names permanently into the records of the Philippine wars was the "Red Lieutenant," James L. Wood. Wood had been ranking cadet in his class at Culver Military Academy, and as such rated a commission as Second Lieutenant in the regular army. But life in a military post was not to his liking, and this restless fighting man turned across a far horizon to take on with the muddy riflemen of the jungle patrol.

In 1904 he came to Manila, where he became a Third Lieutenant in the Philippine Constabulary with a service assignment in Mindanao. He was remarkably equipped for his job. He spoke Spanish fluently, and during his Philippine service he learned eighteen of the native dialects. By birth, education, and ability, Wood was certainly one of the highest type men to seek action in the Constabulary.

In appearance he was striking. Six feet one inch in height, he weighed 180 pounds. Wood had been an all-around athlete, and some of his records at Culver still remain to be broken. He is credited with knocking out a former world boxing champion in a single round. He was a born horseman, sitting his mount like a Cossack, and capable of performing startling feats of trick riding.

Among the Moros, Wood was known as the "Red Lieutenant" because of his thatch of red hair, and they said of him that his hair gave off sparks when he was angry.

Wood was a ballistics expert. He had carried with him to the Islands a Winchester .45-70 rifle, complete with bullet molds and reloading equipment. As a result of this interest in preparing his own loads, he developed a unique bit of strategy that was most effective in recovering outstanding rifles in Moro hands. Major Wise of the Scouts had used the device casually in Samar, but Wood put it to positive use as an effective means of discouraging the use of rifles by the Moros.

He was ordered shortly after his arrival in Mindanao into that endless and tiresome duty of rounding up firearms in outlaws' possession. Wood was quick to note the fact that the Moros carefully followed Constabulary details in the hope of finding lost cartridges. Even with the greatest care, bodies of men on the march were constantly losing bits of equipment. Occasionally a cartridge would fall from a loop, to be swooped upon by the Moros, for cartridges were worth their weight in gold in Mindanao and Sulu.

It was soon noted by the Moros that Wood's detail was downright careless in this matter of losing shells. A visit to his abandoned camp sites always resulted in the finding of six or eight cartridges.

And then one day, a malignantly unfriendly Datu sent an emissary to the Constabulary post stating that he desired peace and was willing to turn in a rifle, . . in bad condition. It seemed that the Datu also wished to come in for hospitalization . . . having met with a serious accident. He was brought to the post with the entire right side of his face missing. His rifle barrel was split and the entire bolt action was missing.

Rifles lost face in the vicinity of Iligah, with the result that a Krag, in first-class condition, once a priceless commodity, would no longer make even a first payment on a third-class Moro wife. Wood had seen to that. He had loaded several hundred government cartridges with dynamite, and conveniently dropped them to be found by the Moros.

Wood's first experiment in the field of ballistics encouraged him to try another. He evolved a special "Wood's bomb" for use against the cottas. It consisted of two tin cans, one within the other. The inner can was packed with white nitro, and the outer with carriage bolts, nuts, scrap iron, and nails. One night he had his first opportunity to try the weapon. Approaching with his men, he hurled the bomb over a cotta wall and waited developments. He had not long to wait . . . within ten seconds the bomb was lying sizzling at his feet, hurled back by the defenders. Hastily Wood threw it over the walls again--just in time. Thereafter he experimented in detail with fuse lengths, and in time developed a bomb that was the equal in every respect of the grenades of the doughty Conway of the Scouts.

The Moros, ever ready to learn from an ingenious foe, developed Mohammedan improvements to combat Wood. On one occasion the Lieutenant approached a cotta wall with a patrol, when suddenly a number of Moros appeared with a bamboo tube twelve feet in length and four inches in diameter. This had been stoutly wrapped with wire and half filled with scrap iron and powder. It was fine in theory, and the Moros lighted the slow fuse and braced the cannon with their shoulders. The Constabulary took temporary cover, and when the explosion came at last there was a shattered cotta, a few rifles--but no Moros.

Wood was the trail companion of Leonard Furlong in many of the latter's most stirring campaigns. On one of the campaigns in Lanao the two officers, with their respective detachments, were driving through the jungle through two converging trails, hoping to flank the Moros at a point where a bridge crossed a waterway. The Moros reached the bridge a short stride ahead of Furlong--he was able to capture one straggler.

When Wood came up with his detachment he saw a curious sight. Furlong was directing the operation of lowering the captive Moro by means of a rope attached about his middle, into the deep water beneath the bridge. The Lieutenant had seen the fleeing Moros throwing their rifles into the water and was determined to recover them, As Wood approached, Furlong looked over his shoulder, and then spoke to his Sergeant as the dripping Moro was hauled up with a rifle he had retrieved from the deep water: "All right, Sergeant, bait him up again and send him down after another one.

A great deal has been indicated of the amount of gunfire it takes to kill a Moro ... not so much has been written about the amount of hanging a good Moro can stand. While Wood was acting as Chief Justice of the Tribal Ward Courts of Lanao Province he had occasion to sentence a Moro to be hanged. Without delay the Moro was hanged. . . hanged for a good long time. The attending physician pronounced the Moro dead, the clerk of the Court recorded the undeniable fact, and a member of the family of the late lamented was allowed to cut the victim down. After a few minutes of lying flat on his back to give dignity and a certain suspense to the occasion, the Moro sat up. He was officially dead, and he couldn't be hanged again unless he committed another murder or two, for legally he no longer existed. And possibly to this day he lives there in Mindanao, telling his grandchildren about that day when his breathing had been slightly impeded by process of law.

James L. Wood, the "Red Lieutenant," remains one of the fascinating characters of the age of the American conquest of the Philippines. He lived many lifetimes in his comparatively short span of years, for the Philippine wars were but a warming-up process for a strenuous career at arms.

Fabulous youngsters, living each day for the day--and careless of tomorrow. Hurrying down the beds of foaming rivers deep in the jungle; facing a bush that was flecked with blood and flame and flashing cold steel; leading their patrols against impossible odds--to return to fight again. Restless, gallant, always on the move--always in a hurry. Too often hurrying away to die.

Sometimes they gathered in their barracks and in the villages for a brief moment of relaxation with battle song before duty recalled them to the bush. Living in every sense the words of that poem by Bartholomew Dawling which is known to every officer of Constabulary. "Stand by your glasses steady."

These youngsters invested their years and the best of their lives in the Philippine jungle. Their reward has been pitifully small, for few came home unscathed. But they served their god of battle well, and possibly with that they are content.

In the Moro country five names stand out to head the list of truly great combatants. Fort, Furlong, Tiffany, Whitney, and Preuss. "Quintuplets of Death" they might have been called, for individually they killed more Moro outlaws than any other Constabulary officer in Mindanao and Sulu.

These youngsters engaged in the fiercest hand-to-hand combat that is to be found in the combat records of America. No journal of the Indian wars contains the note of horror that was injected by the pulajans and the Moros of the Philippines. No terrain of battle is more terrible than the Philippine jungle. It was fighting that took toll of life and limb and health--it was a job for magnificent youngsters.

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Original publication © 1938 E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.

Filipiniana Reprint Series © 1985 Cacho Hermanos, Inc.

This publication (HTML format & original artwork) © 2001 Bakbakan International.

Transcription courtesy of Ashley Bass.