Note 9 — Chapter XI · Otis and the War

The first battle of the war began about 8:30 o’clock on the night of February 4th, and lasted all through that night and until about 5 o’clock in the afternoon of the next day. Our casualties numbered about 250 killed and wounded. The insurgent loss was estimated at 3000. “Those of the insurgents will never be known,” says General Otis.9 “We buried 700 of them.”10 There was fighting pretty much all around Manila, for the insurgents had the city almost hemmed in. An arc of a circle, broken in places possibly, but several miles long, drawn about the city, would probably suggest the general idea of the enemy’s lines. They had been allowed to dig trenches without interference while the debate in the Senate on the treaty was in progress, pursuant to the temporary “peace-at-any-price” programme. The arc was broken into smithereens by 5 P.M. of February 5th. When the morning of February 6th came Col. James F. Smith, commanding the First Californias, was non est inventus, and so was a large part of his regiment. “No one seemed to know definitely his location,” says the Otis Report.11 As a matter of fact he had taken two battalions of his regiment and waded clean through the enemy’s lines, and had to be sent for to come back to form again with the line of battle needed to protect the city. So the Californias probably carried off the pick of the laurels of the first day’s fighting. General Anderson, commanding the First Division of the Eighth Corps, threw them some very handsome well earned bouquets in his report, stating also that their colonel had shown “the very best qualities of a volunteer officer”—why he limited it to “volunteer” does not appear, but is inferable from the well-known disposition of all regulars to consider all volunteers “rookies”12—and recommended that he be made a brigadier general, which shortly afterward was done.13