Note 29 — Chapter XI · Otis and the War

The reason the writer lays so much stress on Mr. Bass’s letters to Harper’s Weekly on the early fighting in the Philippines, is because his remarks come direct from the battlefield, and are, as it were, res gestæ. They were made dum fervet opus, to use a law Latin phrase which in plain English means “while the iron is hot.” They reflect more or less accurately the feelings of the men whose deeds he was recording. He, and O. K. Davis, now Washington correspondent of the New York Times, and John T. McCutcheon, of Chicago, the now famous cartoonist (who was with Dewey in the battle of Manila Bay), and Robert Collins, now London correspondent of the Associated Press, and “Dick” Little of the Chicago Tribune,—a little man about six feet three,—and lots of other good men and true, were all through that fighting, and we will later come to an issue of personal veracity between them and General Otis which culminated in the retirement from office of Secretary of War Alger, and ought to have resulted in the recall of General Otis, but did not, because to have acknowledged what a blunderer General Otis had been and to have relieved him from command, as he should have been relieved, would have been to “swap horses crossing a stream,” as Mr. Lincoln used to put it in declining to change generals during a given campaign. The object here is to bring out the truth of history as to how the men who bore the brunt of the early fighting felt about it. Testimony as to what the officers and men of the army said would be of no value, because a complaining soldier’s complaints are too often only a proof of “cold feet.”29