The Crucible: The Autobiography of Colonel Yay

By Yay Panlilio

The Crucible: An Autobiography by “Colonel Yay,”, first published in 1950, is the dramatic firsthand memoir of Filipina-American Yay Panlilio's (1913-1978) time in the Philippines with the resistance group known as “Marking's Guerrillas.” The book includes descriptions of encounters with the Japanese army, espionage, sabotage, constant moving to avoid capture, torture and execution, communication with Allied forces, the struggle to obtain adequate food and medical supplies, and also the romance between Yay Panlilio and former boxer Marcos Augustin, the determined leader of the guerrilla force (and Yay's future husband). In 1945, Ms. Panlilio returned to the U.S. with her children. Overall, an insightful and moving account of the day-to-day struggles of a brave band of Filipino fighters against a brutal, uncompromising opponent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barajima Books
• Release date: Jan 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839741852

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© Barajima Books 2020, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE CRUCIBLE

An Autobiography by "Colonel Yay"

YAY PANLILIO

The Crucible was originally published in 1950 by the Macmillan Company, Inc., New York.

Cover: Yay Panlilio with her husband Marcos V. Agustin (Marcos Marking), leader of the Marking Guerrillas.

* * *

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

CREED 6

FOREWORD 7

CHAPTER 1 9

CHAPTER 2 16

CHAPTER 3 28

CHAPTER 4 37

CHAPTER 5 51

CHAPTER 6 56

CHAPTER 7 63

CHAPTER 8 68

CHAPTER 9 73

CHAPTER 10 79

CHAPTER 11 96

CHAPTER 12 112

CHAPTER 13 117

CHAPTER 14 128

CHAPTER 15 143

CHAPTER 16 149

CHAPTER 17 157

CHAPTER 18 166

CHAPTER 19 172

CHAPTER 20 181

CHAPTER 21 196

CHAPTER 22 201

CHAPTER 23 206

CHAPTER 24 215

CHAPTER 25 223

CHAPTER 26 229

CHAPTER 27 233

CHAPTER 28 241

CHAPTER 29 247

CHAPTER 30 252

CHAPTER 31 259

CHAPTER 32 268

CHAPTER 33 275

CHAPTER 34 283

CHAPTER 35 287

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 292

DEDICATION

TO

MAJOR-GENERAL LEONARD F. WING,

Commanding,

BRIGADIER GENERAL ALEXANDER N. STARK,

Assistant Division Commander, and

BRIGADIER GENERAL HAROLD R. BARKER,

Division Artillery Commander,

The 43rd "Winged Victory Division, U.S. Army In appreciation of permission from the one and encouragement from the others for the independent operations granted to the 1st Yay Regiment, supported by the 2nd Yay Regiment, Marking’s Guerrillas," Luzon, which, in the race to take the objective, first reached IPO DAM.

May 19, 1945

CREED

April 9, 1942

Fall of Bataan

...IF THE LEAST WE DO IS FERTILIZE THE SOIL WHERE WE FALL, THEN WE GROW A RICHER GRAIN FOR TOMORROW’S STRONGER NATION...

WE, MARKING’S GUERRILLAS, BELIEVE it is the right of every Filipino to walk in dignity, unslapped, unsearched, untied; to speak freely of honor and injustice alike; to assemble freely; to mold our destiny as a people.

WE BELIEVE that we owe allegiance to America, and that the only flags to fly in this sweet air are the Stars and Stripes and the Philippine flag until such time as the Philippine flag flies alone. We want no independence by treachery. Our independence will come to us in the benevolent manner consistent with the way America treated us for more than two-score years; or we will get it in due time, on the field of battle if we still want it that badly, without the help of an aggressor who transgressed us and calls us brother and now whips us to arms against those who would help us and punish him.

WE BELIEVE that it is the right of every Filipino to raise his or her weapon against the enemy, be that weapon a rifle, a bolo, poison, or a sweet I-don’t-know-a-thing smile. And we believe that it is the right of every Filipino to hide, help, and arm every American who comes within reach of Filipino hands, and to feed and comfort Americans within the concentration camps.

WE BELIEVE that the greatest and the humblest, the richest and the poorest, the wise and the childlike, the oldest and the youngest, the best and the worst, the men and the women, with or without military training—that all these are brother Filipinos and that they have the right to fight the enemy.

WE BELIEVE that the nature and function of the guerrilla is threefold: (1) It harasses the enemy, occupying as many enemy troops as possible in their own occupied territory, thus keeping them out of their own front lines (2) It is a secret self-government, where there is justice and aid for all of the people, by the people, for the people. (3) It is an opportunity for a small minority of bums, loafers, ex-convicts, and Welfareville boys to risk their lives on the toughest assignments and thus prove their loyalty, their valor, and their intelligence, and by association with the majority to gain a new standard for living and acting.

WE BELIEVE THAT GOD IS WITH US ALL THE WHILE WE DO RIGHT, AND THAT VICTORY SHALL BE OURS IN THE END.

FOREWORD

THIS story was lived by one of the most gallant women of our time, a woman of whom two nations should be proud.

Colonel Yay did not see the Philippines until she was eighteen. Born in Denver of an Irish father and a Filipina mother, she grew up in the freedom of the United States, and she took with her into the hills of Luzon not only the American ideals of justice and pride but the Filipino traits of courage and unselfish devotion. In the crucible of war, in herself as well as her adopted country these qualities were blended into greatness.

She is what the Islands call a mestiza, a mixture. Thus, she is small, too thin, with olive skin and black hair and eyes. These are her Filipino heritage. And the Irish in her comes out in delicate bone structure, long-fingered hands, a pointed chin, a casual yet fluid manner of using her body, an intensity of mind.

I first saw her in 1945 in one of the crummiest hotel rooms I have ever entered. Fresh from the blood-drenched provinces she had defended, she had brought her three children by army transport to their grandmother in California. The Red Cross had arranged for available shelter, and I found her on Los Angeles’ Skid Row in a corner room furnished with two enormous double beds of brass, an ancient dressing table, and a rug brown with the droppings of humanity. There was a telephone hanging from the woodwork by the door, and a cubicle which boasted a three-foot tin tub.

Yay, hearing I was in the writing racket, had asked me to come down. The newspaper business was and still is one of her greatest loves. Before the war she was the finest woman reporter in the Philippines, and she had begged for a chance to talk the language.

When I saw where she was living I was shocked. Then she made the statement which, more than any other, indicated what the preceding three years had been for her.

But it has walls, Kate, she said. It has walls!

At that moment, I hoped she would write this book, if for no other reason than to let the people of America balance their part in the winning of the war against hers. But she had a larger reason for writing it: She wanted to tell the citizens of the country in which she was born about her boys. In that, I thoroughly agreed, for they—and the man who led them—made an army out of legend.

Yay has underplayed herself in every page of what you are about to read. Such is Yay. For the story, as she saw it, was the men in the outfit and what they endured. She only allowed herself to enter when it was necessary for her to fight with them for principle, for the American way which is so very dear to her.

Yet someone should tell you what Yay herself endured. Someone should point out that although, less than a year before the occupation, she had broken her leg in an automobile accident and it had not healed properly, she marched over mountains with the rest of them. And that although, shortly before the bombs started falling, she had spent three weeks in a hospital with her heart packed in ice, suffering from a cardiac condition from which the doctors thought she would never recover, she worked eighteen hours a day in the hills, lived on less than nothing, fought her own war against the Japs. And that she too had malaria and dysentery for months, lay in muddy huts when she had the awful chills and fever, marched in the few hours a day when she was free of them, rarely had the solace of drugs of any kind.

This takes courage. Yay has it.

And she has pride, as you will discover, humanity which was fed on tragedy, and the faith in God and man which passes understanding.

Yet she is humble. Her importance in Marking’s outfit has to be inferred. She makes herself a shrew, if anything, a gnat singing about them all. But Marking himself has told me that at the end there was not a man among his followers who would not have given his life for her. Many of them did, in fact. Gladly.

Hers is the only story I have heard in years of reporting which bears endless repetition, endless examination. To me that is the test, both of the woman and of her history. This is that history, three terrible, valorous years.

KATE HOLLIDAY

CHAPTER 1

WAR came thundering over the Philippines, and seven months after the bombing of Oahu I, Yay Panlilio, reporter and United States Army agent, had a price on my head and lay alone in a remote foothills farm hut, freezing and burning with my first attack of malaria. To that hut where I lay alone, badly needing help from somewhere, God brought the guerrillas.

I had tried, since the Japs had landed on the Islands, to fight them in my own way, on my own. It had been impossible. Now, like thousands of others before and after me, I took the only course open: I became a guerrilla.

The torch fell in Bataan, igniting the Philippines from Aparri to Sulu. The light flickered out in Corregidor, flamed again unseen in loyal hearts everywhere, in cities and towns, in rice paddy, jungle, and forest. ‘To you from falling hands..." And thus it became ours, forever to hold high. We did what even America in her greatness could not do. We kept her flag, and our own, hoisted in occupied territory. The enemy ripped it down again and again, and again and again we ran it up on bamboo poles to float proudly on the winds, to glorify the mobile upland camps of freemen who hit and ran and were attacked and retreated, over and over again.

The first sixty days of those seven months, I had risked occupied Manila. I had to risk it. Captain Ralph Keeler, assistant chief of Intelligence at Fort Santiago, told me to. Major Each-Hair-in-Its-Place Diller, aide to General Douglas MacArthur, refused to order me to Bataan with the army, refused even to allow me to catch a ride with the troops.

I thought I had a right to be on Bataan, for, long before we saw the war coming inevitably, Keeler had sworn me in as a United States agent, Badge No. 67, following orders from Colonel J. K. Evans. I was to continue to cover Manila as a reporter, picking up everything interesting to S-2 as I went along.

When the Japs struck, instantly I became primarily an agent. Reporting was secondary. Through the Baguio bombing, the Cavite bombing, and the dog-fighting over Manila, I kept my eyes open. I shuttled from the Fort Santiago Army Intelligence headquarters at one end of the Walled City to Victoria No. 1 at the other end. There MacArthur was busy ordering his already battle-worn forces up from the far south, through the defenseless city, and down into Bataan.

Over at Victoria No. 1 I had to go along to Bataan, too, I said. I could drive a truck. I could pound a typewriter. In a pinch, I knew which end of a rifle was the shooting end.

I would plead with Diller.

I have to go! I said.

You can’t go, he answered.

Back I went to the Fort. Trucks roared in and out of the tunneled walls. Like a two-way crossbow, I pulled my front in as a truck shoved me one way, yanked in my rear as I was shoved the other. Trucks were as good as bullets those days; you could get killed just as fast.

Inside, S-2 was confused. No telephone in its cradle did anything but ring. No swinging door did anything but hurl this way and that, holding hard to its hinges, split seconds between swings. The only spot out of the traffic was a corner, and from there I made timid signals to my friend Keeler, as he strode to and fro in an awful sweat with a sheaf of papers in both hands.

My signal, a teacher-may-I-leave-the-room affair, caught Keeler’s eye. Stick around, he said. One hour. Two hours. My signal caught him again. Stick around, he said.

Finally I came out of the corner to stop him in the middle of the floor by blocking each direction he plunged. So he said, Wait for orders.

I went back to MacArthur’s headquarters to Diller. Diller said: No! No, no-no-no! What do you think this is, a picnic? I showed him my badge. By the middle of December, I had found it again in the bottom drawer of my desk under newspaper mats, old negatives, and what not. He waved me off. Go home, he said. But he was still too polite, too unruffled, to say what he meant. He meant, Get the hell out of here before I toss you through a window!

So I went back to the Fort. Back and forth. And once in a while to the Herald, to sleep on my desk, to cover a world flying apart, to drink coffee out of a tin can.

And then toward Christmas, as I went salmon-leaping up the stream of army trucks, Glass came by, and he wasn’t in plain clothes any more. I looked at his cap—overseas. I looked at his coat—khaki. So long, kid, said this agent, who had been kind to me and taught me a little of sleuthing. I said nothing. I think I kept looking at him. Glass said, Take care of yourself.

Words came to my tongue: Where to?

Glass poked his head out of the car window. Off to the wars, kid.

We were talking swiftly, in urgent sentences. I said, Let me in. He shook his head. Nope, kid, I can’t.

Glass, I can drive. I can type. I can shoot. Really I can. Just show me how to get the bullets in. And, hopefully: "You never handled a rifle in your life."

He said, cheerfully, the way we used to talk making the nightclub rounds, They tell me the wooden end goes against your shoulder.

Let me in, Glass. And I tried to get the door open.

He pushed me away, slapping my hands big-brother fashion, and turned his head to the driver, saying, O.K., buddy, roll! To me he called back, Save the country if you can, kid.

At radio station KZRH, where I had been doing programs for fun, I couldn’t save the country; but I tried at least to steady both myself and it by broadcasting preparation for war programs. And at the Herald office, squeezed in with the Bulletin after incendiary bombs burned us out of the Walled City, I wrote into my column advice for the women: Let your children look back and remember how their mother faced the war.

From Keeler in Intelligence: Stick around. From Diller close to MacArthur: Go home. From Glass: Save the country if you can. And again from Keeler: Wait for orders. We’ll send you orders. That’s all I had to go on.

The Japs occupied Manila on January 2, 1942. All the world knows that story. I saw my friends behind the Santo Tomás fence, helpless individuals herded in with the thousands. I clung to the fence, looking, and I was unable to reach out or speak words of comfort because they were ordered back. I hung there for a while, my eyes pulling at the figures, then walked a few steps to sit on the curb and retch into the dust between my feet.

I needed to think. It was two blocks home. I stood up to go home. I walked roundabout, halfway across the city, seeing the Japs taking over like a newsreel, thinking all the way and still thinking when I found myself in front of my own house. It was the first real thinking I had ever done: If orders were coming through, best to keep reminding them that I was alive. No use merely waiting, better be ready to fill the bill when it came. As an agent, get in close. As a fool, get the children out of the way first.

I had separated from my children’s father, Eduardo Panlilio, long before the war started. He was in the mountains of Palawan Island at his job of mining engineer. So the safety of the kids was up to me. I took them to Herbert and Janet Walker, elderly Americans exempted for the time being from internment. They would hide my nine-year-old daughter Rae, my six-and three-year-old sons Junior and Kerty.

In the first week of the occupation, I met one Victor Takizawa, who for fifteen years had been of Davao. In 1939, when I had been turning out a newspaper supplement on the Davao plantations we had been congenial. He had shown me around, even had had a huge tree felled for my special benefit. I had taken pictures, written articles, collected advertising money in advance. One of the pictures had shown the Jap flag alone on its pole flying over a Jap schoolhouse in the heart of Davao, still technically part of the Philippines; and when Jesus M. Integnan, city editor of the Herald, saw it, he patted me on the head and passed the picture along to the proper authorities and up started a rumpus between the American High Commissioner’s Office and the Japanese Consulate. Two years ago—1939; and here was Takizawa, of Davao, a conqueror.

Faint heart never won any war. I climbed out of the calesa to answer Taki’s greeting, and I walked swiftly, with dignity, to keep my knees from buckling. We met once again as friends.

There was in the group a newspaperman of the Philippines Free Press staff, denying that he had anything to do with its last issues, the finest they had ever printed. He held a Jap, a former clerk in the Japanese Consulate, tightly by the hand, and wheedled for a pass. The former clerk, no longer obsequious, taunted: Why do you need one? You are a civilian. You are safe. The newspaperman kept on wheedling, pleading. The clerk maliciously swung him around by the hand and wrote with his forefinger across the newspaperman’s back: We’ll give you a pass. We’ll write ‘Stool pigeon.’

That was the cue on how far to go and when to stop.

So, with Taki, I discussed the need for gardens. The people must eat, I said. The people were my greatest concern. Taki showed concern over my concern. He took my telephone number, and two days later he called. Luck! Shining luck, for he had been assigned to reopen KZRH and I was familiar with the station. Would I help him? I couldn’t help him fast enough.

On the air with news reports, Jap news reports. Would Evans, would Keeler, would Diller with MacArthur’s forces, hear my voice, know it was I, listen, listen sharp, realize where to find me to deliver my orders, my orders or anybody’s orders? Would the Voice of Freedom from somewhere in the Philippines answer and think twice and be careful—sort of remember where I was?

While I waited, I tight-roped and triple-talked in and out of the Japanese-censored scripts, trying to accomplish three things: advise the truculent, unarmed Manilans to look before they leaped; tip off the Voice of Freedom what to say instead of what it was saying; inform the Filipino-American forces by the most delicate innuendo what was going on behind enemy lines, innuendo so obscure sometimes that only mental telepathy could decode it. Between broadcasts I chittered and chattered with the Japs, covering my tracks in advance by looking and sounding even more of a fool than I was.

Taki was around a lot. He wasn’t running the station any more, but he was still around.

He drifted in one day, eased a thigh over a desk corner, talked idly. He squirmed, but I couldn’t tell whether happily or otherwise until he pulled out of his pocket a badge covered with Japanese characters and a flower design. Then I was sure he was happy.

This is the miritary interrigence badge of the Japanese Imperiar Forces, he said.

I liked Taki. Congratulations, I smiled, for many reasons glad to know. Some day the knowledge might save my skin. Looks like a reward.

You rike one? asked Taki.

In the old days I could have said: Sure, pal. I’ll tie one on each end of a string and play them both. But now I said, Those are for their very own whom they can really trust, like you. Taki nodded proudly. Need any more rumors? I added.

Through me, loyal elements, certain guerrilla units which were only beginning to form, had been giving the Japanese military police the run-around. Antonio M. Bautista, lawyer and founder of the Civil Liberties Union, had had me tell Taki that I had heard of something suspicious going on in South Manila, with the result that he and his confreres had haunted it while Tony and his own confreres had run guns through North Manila.

Quickly, Taki answered my question. Yes, what have you heard?

That it isn’t South Manila, Taki. It’s North Manila. I don’t know what’s going on, but there’s a stir, sort of.

Taki may have been joking when he said, You better be careful—you know who I am now, because he hied himself away, happy and proud, to check up on North Manila. And Tony Batista sent something south, something on two legs with a price on its head.

That night, straining to hear the jammed-out Voice of Freedom talking to Manila, I thought I heard my cue: "There are those who speak...Listen to them within the bounds of honor."

Corregidor had recognized my voice.

Damn that woman! the great MacArthur had burst out, turning on his aide, Major Carlos Romulo, who as Manila newspaper owner before the invasion had been my boss. Isn’t that your Yay? The boss hung his head, and I, talking my way to a saber execution, would have kicked him by television if I’d known it.

General Willoughby was bright. That woman, he said, is trying to give us information. And he lined up the stenographers to take it down. They couldn’t get a tenth of what I tried to say: only the bay between us and yet...I wasn’t that good. Sometimes with the Japs at my elbow I was plain yellow—that was when I reached High C singing their praises. But—God bless Willoughby—HQ did get some of it.

The Japs were catching on, bringing in English-speaking Intelligence men of their own who could understand my triple talk. Run, or stick it? They could pick me up at any time, but it was my contacts they wanted, a whole network of them. Friends of other days now could be divided into three classes: those who had fallen away and could no longer be depended on; those who held aloof and would keep for the day when all could be explained; and those who fell in step, knowing the score, ready to pay the price—but not stupidly. A word of warning to these spread swiftly, silently, and by common consent I walked alone. America was no farther away than the Philippines, and where before my days had been numbered now it was the hours.

The Japs held off. I held on. And then, somehow, I knew when and how to go, and why. Not to die, but to fight and survive to fight again.

It all came to a head one afternoon early in March. The Japs were combing the city for Romulo. Thinking I knew where he was, they tried to trick me with a letter for him. They thought I would lead them to him, or take the letter and be followed. I was eager to help them, but blank: Romulo, when he had last been seen, was with General MacArthur. Did they know General MacArthur? Both might be found in Bataan. Did they have a map, and would they care to send me there? No. No, they wouldn’t send me there. It is very dangerous, they said. They left. Because of a conference at the Jap High Command, the radio station was almost empty—only a few sentries and a handful of small-fry collaborators there to earn a living. A telephone call could order the sentries to arrest me, but probably the radio officials were occupied with boot-licking their superiors, or might doubt a little longer before taking action. If I talked carefully, easily, like any blurb...

And so, for all of Romulo’s former staff members, I said goodbye. I broadcast to Dr. Carlos P. Romulo, pronouncing his name clearly and in full: Wherever you are, put up your feet and listen. In essence, I told him to keep going; and, in straight words: We to whom you were a father—we will keep faith.

We did, too. Not one of Romulo’s writing staff sold out to the enemy. Integnan, his city editor, died by torture to keep that faith.

I snapped off the mike, faded in the music, waited the remaining minutes of my program to turn the booth over to the regular announcer, then tried not to walk too fast out of the station, into the street, around the corner. The Japs had recently kept check by tuning in on what went over their air. Within fifteen minutes of my leaving the station, the order was out for my arrest.

It took four days of side-stepping to clear the city. Ding Moskaira, whom no one knew I knew, with whom ten years before I had scraped up an acquaintance in the aisles of the markets, she with her basket, I with mine, gave me refuge. Late at night, an inch before curfew, I knocked at her door. She opened the width of her hand, then wide to pull me inside, and she asked, Have you eaten yet? That was all she ever asked.

When her husband Roger came in, he led me up the back stairs, pointed to the window ledge outside below the sill, the wall top lower down, and a door open several patios away. If anything happens, climb out that way. Straight through that house. I’ll meet you on the other side of the block—somehow. That was all he ever said.

And the disguise that passed friend after friend, sentry after sentry, was simply girl’s clothes—worn for the first time in years. A masculine escort, lipstick, powder, a dress. No customary slacks, no boyish bob visible under a frivolous kerchief. I simpered, clinging to my escort’s arm, and he said: That’s it, damn it. Overdo it, you idiot!...Don’t turn your face when we pass a sentry. And don’t talk. Think about the weather. And, through teeth gritted to keep them from clicking, I said, Funny, how cold the tropics are now.

And so in one slow day we passed into the province of Rizal, and through the town of Tanay, and into the foothills, and to the tops of the mountains. From there we watched Bataan, a rough dark line against the horizon, a No-Man’s-Land where, in the minutes we stood there, Americans and Filipinos alike were fighting and dying. The entire sky was a gun-metal mauve, and through it as through a curtain with a hole cut in it was the round, rayless, blood-red sun. In all the gamut of Philippine sunsets, from brazen to pastel, there had not been one like that.

A small, cold wind swept up the slope. It was like a bad omen.

Then, as we watched, the curtain broke apart and the clouds reformed, a cluster of mauve islands in a sea of red. Bathed in blood, I said. Let’s get out of here. I’m seeing maps in the sky. When the Japs found I had gone, a price was set on my head and I was to be shot on sight. My children were to be taken hostage.

Through weeks of waiting for America to come back, through weeks of learning to live as a hunted creature, my heart was in Bataan. Where were the reinforcements? Slowly the Japs were seeping out of Manila into the towns: excess soldiery, not needed any more to hold Bataan, not needed even to crush it. And then I found myself in the hut of Igi, the farmer, and began to think.

While I was thinking, shaking with new malaria, alone in a place I hoped the Japs weren’t patrolling, while I was wondering whether to join the guerrillas in the north or the guerrillas in the south, the guerrillas joined me. They joined me by rolling up on my doorstep and sweeping me along with the tide.

CHAPTER 2

THEY rolled up in the middle of the night, ragged, soaked with the night’s drizzle, on weary retreat from a three-point attack by the Japs on their Tatala-Binañgonan Camp. They stacked their rifles wherever they could lean them, wrung out the remnants of their shirts and warmed their bare backs at the fire which Igi the farmer had covered with ashes and they had built up again into a fine, crackling blaze. It was July of 1942.

I had heard about the guerrillas and had thought about joining them, but realized honestly that I was kidding myself. It was hardly my line. A broken leg that had set awry gave me a bad knee, and a tired heart muscle made me huff and puff on the climbs. Also, I was shortsighted: would I see the Japs first, or they me? And I was a woman—not a juicy morsel, but there are times when any old horse looks like fresh meat.

But as I looked at the gaunt faces in the firelight the maternal instinct in me was awakened. My heart tightened, and I loved them so much I got gooseflesh. So I climbed down from the bamboo-slat shelf where I slept, one more sardine with Igi’s wife and kids.

Boys, I said, better get some sleep. Take the rice loft up above, and two of you squeeze into my place. The rest of you will have to make out as best you can. At least, the ground is dry. I indicated the floor.

Nobody moved.

Then a face familiar to me said in the dialect to anybody who was listening: It’s a helluva life. We fight. We don’t eat. We don’t sleep. We got no blankets. And now we take orders from a woman. In a flash, love turned to hatred, and I leaped off the last rung of the little ladder. You do as you’re told. This is my house, by God! I got here first. Up into the loft! Line up beside those kids—and don’t wake them up, or they’ll squall until morning. And shut your traps!

Also, I identified the familiar face. Two months after the fall of Corregidor, he had almost ridden me down on a trail, galloping madly by on what once had been a race horse. Spluttering, he had said, You can’t see the Major!

Who’s the Major? I demanded, wiping mud off my chin. He said, proudly: Marking. Major Marcos V. Agustin.

Well, I don’t want to see him.

You can’t see him anyway.

In the firelight, looking gaunt Ming Javellana in the eye, with the taste of mud again in my mouth, I said, As for you, look out!

They bedded down, mostly because they were worn out. I propped my back against a post and slept hunched, knees against chest, head pillowed on knees. The loft was full of guerrillas, the ground covered with them. Periodically until morning I woke up, ears cocked, on guard for them and for me, for the Japs follow up an attack. Through the mud, the Filipino fighters had left their tracks. Poor, hunted devils. Brave. Sassy as hell, but sweet. I, who wanted to help, on that night found something to help. My fever had cooled. Was the quinine licking the malaria? No matter—tomorrow we might both be dead, the malaria and me.

At dawn I discovered more of them in the larger farmhouse Igi the farmer used as an outpost up front to guard me in the hut farther back. The Jap garrison knew that outpost, and having patrolled there before, would know the trail in, especially following tracks, and the lay of the land when they got there.

The men were in no condition for more retreating. One was lying in his wet clothes on the farmhouse table, a boy not more than sixteen, groaning with appendix pains. He wouldn’t unbutton himself, nor let me. I had no patience and, poising an arm to give him a back-slap, managed to unbutton him with the other and slip in a cold canteen over the pain. Tears welled up in his eyes, and he said, Ma’am, I don’t want to die that way.

You won’t, I said. Just do as you’re told.

Upstairs another, Robert Velge, stripped to the skin was lying on the bare floor—his only garment a pair of torn pants hung on the sill to dry. He was delirious in dry fever. Five days on the run, no time to stop. He needed cathartic pills.

There were so many. They packed both the farmhouse and the hut, and overflowed outside under the trees. They lay everywhere. They walked everywhere. They cooked in a huge cauldron they lugged along with them, and stood in line for rations of boiled rice in coconut shells or cupped leaves.

You’ve got to get out, I said. This is the last place you should stay. I didn’t know then that the people everywhere, fearful of being caught in the crossfire, forever urged them on. By what I said, I was merely another cowardly, selfish example. So they didn’t move.

I harangued. They referred me to their officers. Cunanan referred me to Rodriguez; Rodriguez referred me back to Cunanan; Cunanan referred me to Cabalhin; Cabalhin wasn’t there yet. I stayed around, insisting they move.

Cabalhin arrived with more worn soldiers who had been covering the rear, to give the weakest and least experienced a start and a chance to rest. He eyed me with suspicion, and I eyed him back, curiously, for by this time, as far as I was concerned, it was up to them if they wanted to get wiped out. He had perfect up-slanting cats’-eyes with the upper lids almost straight across the eye, hiding part of the pupils. High rosy cheekbones flanked the button of a nose, and an elfin grin curved up from a boy’s round, half-formed chin. The eyebrows were sharply defined, and above a good brow was a shock of stiff black hair that, short or long, jutted in all directions like coconut husk. For the rest, he had fine, broad shoulders, a Colonial Dame waist, short, bandy legs. He might have been five foot three, twenty years old, a hundred fifteen pounds. Some of the guerrillas were twice his size or twice his age; but when his eye fell upon them they were all respectful attention.

He, too, was respectful—hostilely respectful. What do you wish, please?

Nothing to lose. I repeated from memory, "Get your men out behind my hut instead of all over the landscape in front of it."

Why?

The Japs know this place.

How far is the other place?

Just around that spur, maybe half a mile.

I cannot act without orders from the Major.

I sighed. All right, where is the Major?

Quick, narrow-eyed suspicion gleamed behind his half-dropped lashes.

I gave up. "Look, I don’t care where your Major is, nor who he is. If you want