Note 19 — Chapter XVI · “I CAME FROM MARTYRDOM UNTO THIS PEACE”

Of these some had endured such torturings that death must have come as a relief. Neither age nor worth to be spared, was the ancestral precept for all such butcheries. Moisés Salvador was more than seventy years old. He had been tortured until he could no longer stand and must be carried out and laid prone on the ground when his time came to be shot. Francisco Roxas the thumb-screw, or whatever other deviltries, had made insane. He knew nothing of what was going on about him but imagined himself to be in church. When he knelt before the firing-squad he spread his handkerchief upon the ground as he would upon the church floor and began to say his ordinary prayers.19