70 MANILA AND THE PHILIPPINES 



But we will leave the old haunted town. It is an unwhole- 

 some place, full of evil spirits and horrible memories. We will 

 pass the Pasig river, with its resting blockaded ships, and enter 

 the modern city of Binondo, full of life and traffic and of the 

 great business houses of the white man. 



The streets are crowded with Spanish voluntaries, who are 

 very conspicuous in their swell uniforms, filling all the cafes 

 and beer-houses. The Spanish volunteers seemed to me to 

 have quite a different opinion about their military duties from 

 that held by the Americans. The former refused with indigna- 

 tion to do dutjr in the trenches outside the town. They de- 

 clared to the captain -general that they were not willing to do 

 such poor, plain, private-soldiers' work, and that they preferred 

 only to make the "guard routine " in the interior of the city, 

 and with old Castilian pride the) 7 have done that tiresome, but 

 rather safe work. I found the public buildings in Binondo 

 occupied by strong detachments of well-dressed, well-nourished, 

 and well-armed young men, who helped themselves through 

 the hardships of the war by playing cards and smoking innu- 

 merable cigarettes. We will leave them to their innocent doings 

 inside the town and walk to the circle of the widely extended 

 suburbs of Ermita and Malate. 



The more Ave advance, the more the character of the streets 

 changes. No more the crowd of people playing at soldiering; 

 no more the symptoms of untroubled safety. The streets be- 

 come absolutely empty ; all the shutters of the houses are her- 

 metically sealed and the whistling of passing Mauser bullets 

 can be heard ; sometimes they strike the walls of the brick coun- 

 try houses of the wealthy Manila people with a short, dry noise, 

 or perforate the miserable bamboo huts of the natives. The only 

 living beings you can see are small bodies of Spanish regulars, 

 marching carelessly in the middle of the enfiladed road to the 

 ill-famed trenches. They look haggard and worn out, but they 

 are brave men, and do not care for whistling bullets. Silent, dull, 

 and hopeless as are these poor unfortunate privates and their 

 subaltern officers of the front, they do their duty scrupulously. 

 For three months they have lived in the trenches; they sleep 

 there, they eat there, they fight there, and they are buried there. 



The Spanish forces are widely extended around the suburbs 

 of the town in a circle of sixteen miles ; no carefully regulated 

 relief service is in operation, and all military preparations give 

 the impression of improvisations. In the trenches it is still 



