John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

He scribbles sullen yellow glare into his notebook.

“This land is a veritable cornucopia,” announces the Lieutenant, gazing moonily out at the fruit trees. It is gloomy inside the passenger car, the windows taped over with cardboard to discourage target practice by the locals, each mile of the railway bought with American lives and still vulnerable to sabotage, but Manigault has peeled one of these blinders away so they can admire the countryside. The two privates he has impressed to accompany them sit glumly in the seat behind, terribly dull souls who seem as resentful of each other as they are toward their officer.

Manigault is a bounder, of course, but except for the redoubtable and ever loquacious Funston, remains the most inexhaustible fount of material the Correspondent has discovered in the Philippines. And though the Lieutenant’s outbursts and observations retain a tinge of hysteria, he was pronounced fully recovered by the worthy médicos at San Juan de Dios and put on the street.

“Once we have opened it up for white men of boldness and industry—”

“But that pestilence you mentioned—” the Correspondent interjects in his not-for-the-record voice.

“The Anglo-Saxon brings many blessings on his march to glory,” winks Manigault. “Paramount of these is the concept of hygiene.”

“But the very soil seems to breed these scourges.”

The orchard gives way to a miasma of murky standing water and rotting plant life, the roots of the stunted trees writhing up from the ground as if in a desperate attempt to escape it before being wrenched under again.

“The soil responds to its master. Before the War, my people were in tobacco,” proclaims the Lieutenant for the hundredth time, and the Correspondent can only picture these ante-bellum Manigaults lying in a warehouse, dried and rolled in enormous leaves of white burley. “They could expectorate on an anthill and raise a cash crop from the result.”

The Lieutenant waits for him to finish writing, the mark of a born newspaper source.

“Unless my presence is urgently required back in Wilmington,” he says, staring unimpressed at the festering swamp without, “I shall embellish my new properties with that tradition.”

The Correspondent attempts not to snort. “Have you seen any of it?”

“As of yet, only in description. But this,” and here he waggles a much-folded survey map in his hand, “though only recently liberated, should prove the most developed of my holdings.”

Cheltingham has been cabling that the subscribers are not so much bored with the conflict as confused, “Why are we there?” rapidly deteriorating into “I don’t care to read about it.” It was no problem after the treacherous attack in February, the Tagalos begging for chastisement, but as the fury of battle has dissipated into the grinding trudge of skirmish and evasion, a chess game where the opponent has only pawns and hides them under the table, the purpose of the adventure falls further into question. The Indians had at least their Fetterman massacre, their Little Big Horn, ambushes of a scale and barbarity to rouse the public’s sporting blood, but this—

Not that he is wishing slaughter on American patriots.

He arrived in Havana rather too previous for the fireworks, a terrible case of the sprue forcing him to return to New York and sit out the siege of Santiago in an isolation ward on Long Island. American shooting wars, and the opportunities for rapid advancement they afford men of print, are in short supply. The Otis angle has been fruitful, the Correspondent using the Tarheel Lieutenant’s pungent observations to hint, nay, to declare that swifter progress (and greater pyrotechnics) should be had if the general were replaced by a younger, bolder commander. And perhaps this plea to the American spirit of adventure and commerce, plus the suggestion that the next Klondike is festooned with palm trees, will reawaken their interest.

A paradise , he writes, waiting for Anglo-Saxon angels to reap its bounty .

The train slows, stops, and they disembark at what the freshly painted sign announces as San Fernando, taken two weeks ago by Hall’s flying column. The sun makes its sudden and cruel assault on the Correspondent’s epidermis and spirit, seeming to drill through the woven palm of his Panama to blister his cranium. They walk through the artillery-blasted stone buildings, the morose privates dragging behind them, to the stick-and-mud village beyond, the dwellings comparing unfavorably with his boyhood treehouse, the requisite coterie of louse-ridden canines harrying their steps (the poorer the man, the more dogs he is bound to own) as Manigault smartly salutes the garrison sentries. Filthy children abound, a few clothed only in Nature’s costume, and he witnesses one old woman entering the rubble-strewn, roofless shell of what was once a small church and pausing, even in the absence of holy water (or the basin that once held it) to sign her wrinkled forehead.

“Ninety percent of war is character,” says the Lieutenant, apropos of nothing. “Character and will. The googoo shoots badly because he is untrained, yes, but he remains so because training would be wasted on him. Your mongrel races do not possess the mental stamina, the powers of self-abnegation to apply themselves to any endeavor requiring concentrated effort and understanding. When faced with an enemy greater not only in stature but also in force of will and character, he senses the futility of direct resistance and either flees in panic or resorts to a more skulking, treacherous type of aggression.”

“So you do not esteem the insurrecto as an opponent?”

“Our chief opponents here are ignorance, superstition, and savagery. Where the lower races have polluted each other to the degree we have encountered here, their effect is legion. But we shall prevail.”

“ ‘ Their silent, sullen peoples shall thank your God and you. ’ ”

Manigault gives him a wry smile. “As your Mr. Roosevelt has observed, indifferent verse, but noble sentiment.”

The Correspondent smiles, never having thought of the bucktoothed Rough Rider as his before, and noting again that to a son of the South all yankees are as one.

It is early afternoon when they leave San Fernando, walking eastward toward solitary Mount Arayat, Manigault holding his survey map at arms’ length and turning it this way and that as he strides down a dried-mud thoroughfare much pitted by buffalo hooves, occasionally checking the unrelievedly flat horizon for some reference point while one of the privates, embarrassed, lets the woven basket holding their supper slap against his leg every other step. They cross a tiny stream, a trio of young women with the surly aspect of the Malay flogging wet clothing on the rocks while their offspring, barely old enough to walk, gambol in the listlessly flowing water, then rediscover the sorry excuse for a road. They pass vast grayish squares of harvested rice interrupted by desultory stands of banana trees or indigo, then one irrigated field in which a lone water buffalo, one of the ubiquitous carabao glistening like polished steel from its recent wallow, treads snuffling for edibles with an equally solitary white egret following after, feasting on the crawly things brought to the surface in the great beast’s footprints. That is me trailing the Tarheel Lieutenant, thinks the Correspondent, with the crawfish and cutworms replaced by quotables. The soggy patch gives way to desiccated plain, some sort of ground crop with a scraggle of green leaves planted on both sides of them. The few rustics they pass, out chopping at weeds in the vicious sun, studiously avoid taking notice of their procession. Thus it was for the conquering Roman , the Correspondent writes as he walks, perspiration burning his eyes, in all venues the focus of a dull hatred cloaked with indifference .