"Detachments marching where attack from bolomen is to be
apprehended should have the column absolutely
closed up so that in the event of attack the men
will be able to render mutual support. . ."
--Constabulary Manual

NEAR Dolores, in the Province of Tayabas, there is a sacred rock to which the hillmen have gone for worship for many generations. As part of the simple ritual of their services, they wore red sashes. In the early days, it had been the simple religion of a simple, childlike people.

A people called pulajans. . . .

We have reserved for final consideration, that native movement of pulajanism, which was the most formidable of all and, in a manner, a coalition of all of the sects. These red-garbed mountaineers, with white flowing capes and crescent blades, were contributory to one of the most ferocious eras of guerrilla warfare that our arms were to experience. Not even the Indian campaigns of the old West, fought in open country, could compare with the rushing, jungle-shielded tactics of the pulajans. For ferocity in battle, possibly only the Moros were their equals.

When the army completed what they thought was the pacification of Samar, the Constabulary took over responsibility for the law and order of the island. It was a demand beyond their limited strength, for Samar, with its pulajans, became too hot for the thin-laid patrols of the jungle police.

Today, we think of the word pulajan as descriptive of a clan of mountain bandits. Actually, the pulajans, in their beginning, were no organization at all. They obtained the name from their distinctive dress, the word pula in Visayan meaning red. The pulajans had been simple highlanders, cultivating the mountain clearings in peace. Without exception, the hillmen of the Philippines are timid and peaceful, unless prodded.

The pulajans were the Babaylan of Negros, the Colorum of Batangas and Tayabas, the Santa Iglesia of Nueva Ecija and Bulacan, and the Guardia de Honor of Pangasinan and the Ilocos.

The pulajans had been forced into banditry by a combination of vicious circumstances. From time immemorial the hillman has raised his crops of rice and hemp, and borne them laboriously on his shoulders to the sea settlements for barter and trade. The hillman is a retiring creature and not too well understood by his sophisticated cousins of the cities. His religion has no complicated ritual; it involves the flowers and the trees and the inanimate figures of Nature about him. He knows little of the arts of trade and finance and commerce.

Too often the hillman is made the victim of shrewd merchants of the coast. Such had been the experience of the pulajans. The report of Governor-General Smith, as late as 1908, confirms that the pulajan was a victim of circumstances beyond his control. The Governor-General writes:

"The pulajan is not a robber or a thief by nature -- quite the contrary. He had his little late of hemp on the side of the mountain, and breaking out his picul of the product he carried it, hank by hank, for miles and miles over the almost impassible mountain trails, to the nearest town or barrio. There, he offered it for sale and if he refused the price tendered, which was generally not more than half the value, he soon found himself arrested on a trumped-up charge and without hemp or money."

The original pulajan trouble that flared in Samar and Leyte had its beginnings in financial transactions between the highlander and the coast merchant. The robbing tactics of the latter brought on retaliatory pulajan raids. The raids increased in frequency and severity, and the glow flamed to a blaze with a hitherto peaceful people suddenly aware of their capabilities and in command of the island. In turn, the lowlanders became the victims.

As the pulajan movement grew in strength, it became impregnated with a tone of religious ritual and frenzy. It came, too, under the influence of unscrupulous native leaders who saw in the hillmen the agents for their own personal advancement. Samar and Leyte became filled with crusading "Popes" who were self-appointed "Messiahs" and who soon impressed their influence upon the childlike mountaineers. The seeds sown by the "Popes" began to bear fruit, and the pulajans now became militant crusaders with a developed hatred to law and order, and an homicidal intent toward their own countrymen in the lowlands. Their red tribal costumes became bedecked with white crosses, and the raids grew into ferocious forays that were out of all proportion to the original grievances of the mountaineers.

From sympathetic figures, the pulajans developed into inhuman monsters.

Probably no white man can write with authenticity of the pulajan movement and of its meanings. What peculiar form of religious fanaticism caused these natives to gather at designated places for prayer and preparation for battle cannot be told with certainty. But gather they did, groups numbering sometimes as many as a thousand fighting men. The number of organized pulajans eventually to assume virtual charge of the island of Samar has been estimated at from 7,000 to 10,000 warriors.

Their weapon was a heavy, crescent-shaped bolo with which they could decapitate a man at a blow. Their battle preparations consisted of bottles of holy oil, prayer books, consecrated anting-antings, and other religious paraphernalia. Their mode of attack was a massed bolo rush. Their battle cry was that dreadful "Tad-Tad" which means "Chop to pieces," and they moved into action behind waving banners.

From a military viewpoint, their tactics were unsound, as they gave no thought to casualties. They were contemptuous of death, and they rushed without thought of position or the possibility of encountering enfilading rifle fire.

They could be stopped by a determined stand of accurate riflemen if the odds were not too great. Often, the odds were too great and it resulted in the death of every soldier who faced them. When the pulajans once got to close quarters with their great knives, massacre was the result.

The men who have survived their charges write that never can they forget that scream of "Tad-Tad" and that patter of bare feet in the jungle that announced the beginning of a pulajan charge.

And so, an originally simple hill people came under the influence of "Popes'" and exploiters to develop into unsympathetic and bloodthirsty bandits.

There is the incident of the town of Taurian. This village came under pulajans attack and twenty-six peaceable natives were slaughtered by their own countrymen. There is another incident of the barrio of Cantaguio to remind us of the bloody raids. Here the pulajans came in force at daylight on July 10, 1904. They killed the Lieutenant of Police and several others and proceeded to the tribunal (town hall), where they seized the local teniente, or municipal president, an appointee of the United States government.

He was conducted to the plaza by a cordon of red-shirted men and the American flag was fashioned into a turban for his head. This was saturated with kerosene and lighted. Surrounded by his fellow townsmen, the teniente was burned as an example to his fellows of the dangers of accepting office under the Americans.

As the torch flamed, one Julian Caducay, the leader of the pulajans, commented to onlookers upon the dangers of serving that flag. "Call upon the flag you have adopted," he said to the stricken teniente, "to protect you now."

The band then cut off the lips of the teniente, burned the village, and carried off fifty of the inhabitants. These latter were principally girls who were to be the concubines of the bandits.

For this atrocity, Caducay was hunted down and captured to be hanged.

It was a wave that swept the Philippine Islands. . . .

A frantic, kaleidoscopic tide that drew together pulajans and Santa Iglesia and Cazadore and Mohammedan Moro alike--to spew them out on the crest of the bloody froth that lapped the combat years. It was a hemorrhage of clawing, homicidal tribesmen who had little in common save that desperate urge that spelled resistance to man-made law.

It was a jungle--alive now, with fangs of steel--pouring its pagans and its Christians and its Mohammedans against the lonesome patrols. The "Tad-Tad" of the pulajan and the "La ilahu-il-la'l-lahu" of the Moro were blurred and almost silenced in that thunder of sound that signaled the conquest of the jungle . . . that dreadful chop of blade on living flesh; that blast of the Krags, and that whistle of spears in flight.

In that jungle are the enduring footprints of the men who brought law to the Philippines. The large footprints of men of great stature who served in the American jungle patrol. Some were regular army; some were Scouts; the rest were officers of Constabulary. In their daily duty in that frightful bush they were fulfilling a prophecy that had been expressed in the magazine Truth in an issue of 1899:

"We wish you much joy in your Islands,
Which you have so easily won.
But the troublesome part of the business,
Has only, we fear, just begun.
You will find how extremely ungrateful,
Your new fellow subjects can be,
Compelling you even to shoot them,
Before they consent to be free."

But the men of the jungle patrols were greater than the colonial urge that brought them into existence. They showed, by everyday valor and by a splendid fortitude, that they were to be set apart from ordinary men. They were magnificently careless men--many of them bearing the names of able fighting families of America. Lieutenant C. E. Boone, of the14th Ilocanos, must have understood that jungle, for he was a grandnephew of the immortal Daniel who had blazed the way Westward in America.

We have a view of Daniel's grandnephew in Samar, hiking the trail with Cromwell Stacey. The two officers enter a region where a strange bright red fruit resembling an apple and a tomato hangs from the branches beside the trail. Stacey speaks, "Boone, I wonder if those things are poisonous?"

"I wonder," Boone answers.

A few hours later Boone speaks again to Stacey. "About those red things," he says. "They are not good to eat--and they are not poison. I ate two to find out."

And Boone, in a measure, was speaking for all of the members of the jungle patrol. It was their manner of doing things; the only manner they knew. To investigate--to find out--to break through the secrets of the jungle. Quite often they died before they reached that last full limit of their endurance. The force they commanded was not adequate to the qualities of leadership these men possessed. They proved that, in later years, in other wars.

Today, officers in white uniforms attend teas at post receptions where these muddy riflemen of three decade; ago fought for their lives.

The men who conquered pulajan and Moro are not contributory to a book on the jungle campaigns. They are the book.

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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.