“I CAME FROM MARTYRDOM UNTO THIS PEACE”
It was November 3, 1896, when Rizal, heavily guarded, passed again
through the dark gateway of Fort Santiago, whence he had issued four
years before to go to Dapitan. Now his enemies had him wholly in their
power; he was dragged to earth at last. Yet for a time they were
puzzled how to proceed with him. Dull as they were and remote from the
highways of European thought, they were not unaware that the eyes of a
scornful world were upon them. Therefore they could not, as in the
cases of so many “unvalued men,” shoot him at sunrise on a dunghill.
Some pretense of legality must be followed; there must be regard to
decency.
But of anything civilized men could call evidence against him or of
reason for anything such men could call a trial there was no trace nor
suggestion. Say that the Katipunan was all that hysteria described it;
not a scrap of paper connected Rizal with it. He was not a member; he
had expressly disapproved of its aims; he had been an exile in Dapitan
while it was being formed. How then? And what then? In all such
dilemmas it had been the practice of the Government of the Philippines
to resort to those medieval precedents that best befitted the theory
upon which its authority was based. Where required testimony was not to
be stumbled upon it was usually to be produced with the thumb-screw and
the lash; to torture somebody into perjury was the sovereign specific.
Upon these promptings the authorities seized Paciano, Rizal’s brother,
and exercised upon him their most recondite arts. To his left hand was
fitted the terrible screw; at his right were pen and ink and a
statement that his brother had part in the Katipunan conspiracy. Then
the screw was applied until the victim fainted with the pain. But he
would not sign; no, not for all the ingenious torments of their
devising. There was iron in the Rizal blood; father and mother had
shown it. When the mother had started to trudge around Laguna de Bay,
when the father had refused to submit to the tyranny of the friar’s
agent, when José had dared to write “Noli Me Tangere,” they had
vindicated their tribal inheritance. Paciano was all of the same stern
race. Day and night the horror continued; he was trussed up until he
fainted again, and then was revived with stimulants for new sufferings,
and still he would not sign. Then his mind began to wander; he was
plainly unable to sign anything, and the torturers released him. [210]
Meantime José, though undeceived as to his probable fate, fought for
his life with the resolute courage of his kin. He knew there was no
evidence against him, that before no court with the least respect for
justice could he be convicted. But he determined to make that
conviction as difficult as possible and as shameful in the eyes of the
world. From his prison-house he issued this address:
My countrymen:
On my return from Spain I learned that my name had been in use,
among some who were in arms, as a war-cry. The news came as a
painful surprise, but, believing the incident to be closed, I kept
silence over what seemed to be irremediable. I now notice
indications that the disturbances are continuing, and lest any
persons, in good faith or bad, should avail themselves of the use
of my name, to stop such an abuse and to undeceive the unwary I
hasten to address you these lines and make known the truth.
From the very beginning, when I first had notice of what was being
planned, I opposed it, fought it, and demonstrated its absolute
impossibility. This is the fact, and witnesses to my words are
still living. I was convinced that the scheme was utterly absurd,
and, what was worse, would bring great suffering.
I did even more. When later, against my advice, the movement
materialized, of my own accord I offered not alone my good offices,
but my very life, and even my name, to be used in whatever way
might seem best, toward stifling the rebellion; for, convinced of
the ills which it would bring, I considered myself fortunate if, at
any sacrifice, I could prevent such useless misfortunes. This is
equally of record. My countrymen, I have given proofs that I am one
most anxious for liberties for our country, and I am still desirous
of them. But I place as a prior condition the education of the
people, that by means of instruction and industry our country may
have an individuality of its own and make itself worthy of these
liberties. I have recommended in my writings the study of the civic
virtues, without which there is no redemption. I have written also
(and I repeat my words) that reforms, to be beneficial, must come
from above, that those which come from below are irregularly gained
and uncertain.
Holding these ideas, I cannot do less than condemn, and I do
condemn this uprising—as absurd, savage, and plotted behind my
back—which dishonors us Filipinos and discredits those that could
plead our cause. I abhor its criminal methods and disclaim all part
in it, pitying from the bottom of my heart the unwary that have
been deceived into taking part in it.
Return then to your homes, and may God pardon those that have
wrought in bad faith! [211]
José Rizal.
Fort Santiago, December 15, 1896.
Still remained for his enemies the necessity of a semblance of charges
upon which might be based the semblance of a trial. As a move of
obvious desperation they now fell back upon the fantasy that La Liga
Filipina was an illegal body and upon the precarious assertion that
even if he had no connection with the Katipunan it had been formed as a
result of his teachings. Upon these grounds and only these his life was
to be sought; the first wholly untrue, the other tenuous and fraught
with grave danger to the existence of any system of justice. As for La
Liga Filipina, that was as seditious as an average board of trade, and
as secret; it had no purposes but economic improvement and Filipino
union. But the other charge was a different matter. If it could be held
that Rizal’s teachings were such that they instigated an uprising he
had always opposed, then any but a paralyzed dumb man could be held
responsible for anything that happened anywhere. Suppose, for instance,
a British newspaper to criticize severely the British prime minister,
and the next day a man attempt the assassination of that minister. Who
is to say, if this doctrine be sound, that the newspaper did not
instigate the murderous attempt? It is apparent that if such a view
were ever deemed valid an end would come to all free discussion or the
pretense of a free press; no journal would dare to have an opinion
about anything but the weather.
The inhibition would never stop with the press; the most ordinary and
the most useful activities of organized society would be put into
jeopardy. Suppose, for instance, Rizal had opposed and denounced
vivisection, and a weak-minded man anywhere, maddened by the loss of
his pet dog, should assault the physician that had cut it to pieces.
Who could say that Rizal under this doctrine was not the guilty
assailant? Even supposing the man that did the deed never to have read
Rizal nor heard of him, Rizal’s influence might have been transmitted
through many persons and still be his. It is evident that at once we
plunge into limitless possibilities for oppression and wrong. Suppose
an American reformer to denounce some official grafter and a fanatic to
shoot that grafter. The reformer might be hanged, and the assassin go
free.
Of all places in the civilized circuit the Philippine Islands were then
the most perilous in which to introduce such a theory. In the
Philippines an evil oligarchy maintained itself by terrorizing the
population. Before its need and greed, justice was at best farcical. To
admit that any man that criticized its methods might be held
responsible for the acts of any revolutionist, murderer, or lunatic
whatsoever was to place in the hands of the oligarchy the last and
worst of weapons. It would need nothing else to render unassailable and
unlimited its already despotic power. The courts would be a hangman’s
noose.
Yet on such preposterous grounds and none other the terrible travesty
of justice was now urged along. It is likely that since the days of
Caiaphas has been no such desperate hunting for testimony against
innocence. “This man spake blasphemy,” cried the high priests, and,
when they could find no confirmation of the charge, twisted to a
desired meaning the most casual utterance, the cross being made ready
in advance. The proceedings were as illegal as unjust. Supposing the
offenses charged to have been committed, they were under the civil law
of the Islands. The civil law and the civil courts were brushed aside
lest even in the Philippines they might fail of legalized murder, or
halt it; and the proceedings were held by court martial.
Before this tribunal, organized to slay, Rizal was brought bound, his
elbows drawn back with cords so as almost to touch. Thus he must sit
throughout each session, though the notion that he might try to escape
or to assault any one was obviously fantastic, for he was heavily
guarded and the room was filled with soldiery. To a gratuitous malice
all this must be ascribed, the malice of immature or perverted minds.
The torments he endured from aching muscles and constricted arteries as
thus he sat grew almost intolerable while the long sessions dragged on,
but it is not recorded that the victim made complaint. He was not
allowed an attorney, but a list of army officers was spread before him
from among whom he might select counsel—so called. He found in the list
a name that had a friendly sound in his ear. It was de Andrade, and
proved to be borne by a brother of the young army officer that had been
assigned to watch him and had ended by becoming his warm admirer and
charmed companion on so many walks in 1887. But the choice of a counsel
was mere formality. Luis de Andrade did all he could to win justice for
the prisoner, but before such a court he might as well have used
question with a wolf. [212]
There was no taking of testimony in any sense that civilized nations
have of that term. A few terrified Filipinos were put upon the stand,
and answers were extracted from their lips to carefully prepared
questions; but cross-examination was not allowed, and the value of
their admissions was nothing. The judge-advocate denounced Rizal as a
traitor and an enemy to Spain. Extracts were read from his writings
that it was pretended had encouraged the existing revolt. The Christmas
holidays intervened while the ghastly processes of slaughter were still
incomplete. On December 29 the court found him guilty and sentenced him
to be shot within twenty-four hours.
To this and nothing else he had looked forward from the beginning of
the hearing. Some nights before the verdict, knowing well what it would
be, he had written in his cell by the light of his little alcohol lamp
his farewell to his country, his family, and his friends. It is that
poem now become the national classic of the Philippines, the beautiful
and tender elegy that he called “My Last Farewell.” On the last night
he folded the manuscript and hid it in the bowl of the lamp.
Of this marvelous production, almost unequaled in literature for its
pathetic sincerity and noble feeling, there exist in English two
versions. [213] That which seems the more adequately to express the
thought of the original we offer here, and his must be a strangely
indurated heart that can read it without emotion:
Land I adore, farewell! thou land of the southern sun’s choosing.
Pearl of the Orient seas! our forfeited Garden of Eden,
Joyous, I yield up for thee my sad life, and were it far brighter,
Young, or rose-strewn, for thee and thy happiness still would I
give it.
Far afield, in the din and rush of maddening battle,
Others have laid down their lives, nor wavered, nor paused, in the
giving.
What matters way or place—the cypress, the lily, the laurel,
Gibbet or open field, the sword or inglorious torture—
When ’tis the hearth and the country that call for the life’s
immolation?
Dawn’s faint lights bar the east; she smiles through the cowl of
the darkness,
Just as I die....
Vision I followed from afar, desire that spurred on and consumed me!
Greeting! my parting soul cries, and greeting again! O my country!
Beautiful is it to fall, that the vision may rise to fulfilment
Giving my life for thy life, and breathing thine air in the
death-throe;
Sweet to eternally sleep in thy lap, O land of enchantment!
If in the deep rich grass that covers my rest in thy bosom,
Some day thou seest upspring a lowly tremulous blossom,
Lay there thy lips—’tis my soul!...
And if at eventide a soul for my tranquil sleep prayeth,
Pray thou, O my fatherland! for my peaceful reposing;
Pray for those who go down to death through unspeakable torments;
Pray for those who remain to suffer torture in prison;
Pray for the bitter grief of our mothers, our wives, our orphans;
Oh, pray, too, for thyself, on the way to thy final redemption!
When our still dwelling-place wraps night’s dusky mantle about her,
Leaving the dead alone with the dead, to watch till the morning,
Break not our rest, and seek not to lay death’s mystery open.
If now and then thou shouldst hear the string of a lute or a zithern,
Mine is the hand, dear country, and mine is the voice that is
singing.
When my tomb, that all have forgot, no cross nor stone marketh,
There let the laborer guide his plow, there cleave the earth open.
So shall my ashes at last be one with thy hills and thy valleys.
Little ’t will matter, then, my country, that thou shouldst forget me!
I shall be air in thy streets, and I shall be space in thy meadows;
I shall be vibrant speech in thine ears, shall be fragrance and color,
Light and shout, and loved song, for ever repeating my message.
Idolized fatherland, thou crown and deep of my sorrows,
Lovely Philippine Isles, once again adieu! I am leaving
All with thee—my friends, my love. Where I go are no tyrants;
There one dies not for the cause of his faith; there God is the ruler.
Farewell, father and mother and brother, dear friends of the fireside!
Thankful ye should be for me that I rest at the end of the long day.
Farewell, sweet, from the stranger’s land—my joy and my comrade!
Farewell, dear ones, farewell! To die is to rest from our labors!
Before his murderers, before the jeers and savage exultations of the
well dressed mob clamoring for his death, throughout the hearing, at
the moment of the unjust verdict, he had maintained the same attitude
of perfect serenity described as wonderful by all that observed it.
Other condemned men have simulated this self-possession; this man had
it in truth and not in seeming. Calmly he heard his condemnation,
calmly he reëntered the prison where for his last night on earth
quarters had been made for him in the chapel. A newspaper reporter came
to interview him. He was like a prosperous and well bred host
entertaining a cultured friend; [214] no eyes, however searching, could
discover a joint in that perfect armor of the soul sustained and
possessed, without a tremor and without a gloomy thought. To the
reporter and to others that had watched him this bearing seemed not
bravado but something mystical and inexplicable, but it seemed so only
because the source of it was beyond their understanding. He was calm
because he had long before in effect given his life to this cause and
the shooting of the next day would be only the last incident in a
sacrifice already made. Of this there is every indication. What men
call the joy of living had since his youth meant to him the joy of
serving Filipinas. He seems to have had since the day of his exile to
Dapitan a feeling that in other ways his service [215] was at an end,
but there remained the service of his death. All the hard tests of life
had left him unshaken and uncorrupted, a man truly without fear and
without reproach. With the same faultless and unpretentious courage he
walked forward to meet the end.
As was to have been expected in the conditions attending his fate, the
power that had dragged him down with so much of trickery and deceit
attempted to soil with other deceit the name he should leave to his
countrymen. To the newspaper reporter he said that “Noli Me Tangere”
had been much misunderstood because the authorities had selected from
it only passages that seemed to indicate sacrilegious or seditious
purpose, whereas when read in their proper places with the context they
had no such appearance. This statement was so distorted as to appear as
an expression of regret that he had written the book. When he said that
the Republicans in Spain had mistaken their strength and their
opportunities, this was distorted into a petulant charge that the
Spanish Republicans had been the cause of all his troubles. When he
spoke with characteristic modesty of his own work as feeble and of
small avail, the remark was twisted into a dubiety of his basic faith.
Attempts were made to wrest from him something that could be called a
retraction of his political opinions; even the last solemn offices of
the church were utilized toward an end so base. All his life he had
remained a true Catholic, [216] despite his sharp condemnation of the
friars. He now desired to partake of the holy sacrament, and priests
were sent to him. What took place when they gathered around him was so
perverted that no man may feel sure he has the truth of the story.
According to one account the priests refused him the sacrament until
they should satisfy themselves of his orthodoxy, and a long examination
followed. They demanded a signed statement affirming his belief in
revealed religion. He readily consented to give it; he could have given
it truthfully at any time. Of this affirmation two irreconcilable
versions were subsequently reported, a fact that dealing with a thing
so simple must serve to discredit both. As to one, no other evidence is
needed than its style and content to show that Rizal never wrote it. As
to the other reputed statement, opinions differ; reasonably, one might
say, since there is extant no original copy, and no one now pretends to
have seen such a copy. The style in the second statement is Rizal’s or
an imitation of his; the expressions in it are in line with his general
convictions; [217] and if throughout this phase of the story we met
with less of manifest treachery and lying the probable authenticity of
some such declaration might well be admitted.
On the basis of evidence so untrustworthy the tale was fabricated that
he had retracted his political views. It was brazen impudence that put
out this fable and simple credulity that believed it. Much that
happened in the last scenes of his tragedy is and always will be
uncertain, but the one thing about which is no doubt is that he went to
his death unshaken in his loyalty to the great causes to which he had
dedicated his life and labors, to the rights, emancipation, and
progress of his country.
If from the tangled accounts now available to us we wish to build a
surmise, it is likely that Rizal affirmed his religious faith,
renounced masonry, [218] was reconciled to the church, received the
sacrament, and then had [219] performed the ecclesiastical marriage
rites between him and his wife that he had so desired in vain at
Dapitan. Even as to this there is no record, but the correlative facts
are strong. To his mother and sisters he now said the last farewell;
said it with the calm and gentle resignation that from the first had
marked his conduct. Even in that crux of his sufferings his command
upon himself and all his faculties seems never to have wavered. He knew
well that all his effects would be searched and any papers he might
leave would be seized and destroyed; yet he desired to give to his
countrymen the song of parting he had written for them. At the
interview with his mother and sisters they were kept separated from him
by a space of some feet under the pretended fear that poison might be
passed to him and so might he cheat revenge of blood-drops for which it
thirsted. To transmit the poem, therefore, was difficult, but the
resourceful mind of Rizal did not fail him now. The little alcohol lamp
by which he had written his song and read and studied in his cell had
been the gift of a friend in Europe. In the Islands it was something of
a curiosity. This he managed to bequeath to his sister Trinidad and
when he told her about it he added quickly in English, “There is
something inside.” [220]
Even in these last hours efforts were made by his friends to rescue him
from the jaws that had opened to rend him. Relatives and friends
besieged the governor-general; he would not even admit them to his
presence. In Spain fervent appeals were made to the National
Government. All scientific and sympathetic Europe was horror-stricken
at the impending murder of one of the most learned men of the age.
There is a story that the Spanish prime minister wished to yield to
these demands. It was the queen regent that he found implacable.
Something in one of Rizal’s books had mortally offended her. She, too,
was determined to have his blood.
All the hours of that night Rizal spent in prayer, in reading, and in
cheerful conversation with his guards and the priests. He did not sleep
and had no need of sleep. But his wakefulness was not of his nerves.
None of the watchers could detect a troubled look in his eyes or a
quaver in the smooth, even tones of his voice. [221] Other men so
counting out the last moments of their lives have been mercifully
supplied with drugs and drink. The stimulus that sustained Rizal must
have been from within. So have testified the witnesses.
It was a beautiful morning, men still remember, calm, cool, and bright,
“the bridal of the earth and sky,” typical of the sweet December
weather in the Philippines; the air so clear the mountains on both
sides stood out marvelously brown and rugged; so clear one could even
make out far Corregidor on guard at the entrance of the bay.
As day broke the crowds began to gather in the Luneta. Spaniards of the
ruling caste predominated, come to see the death of their enemy and
gloat over him; but also there were Filipinos with drawn brows and
quivering lips, disquieting to look upon. [222] In many Filipino houses
that last night there had been no sleep. Men and women prayed all night
for the man about to be slaughtered for their sake.
At seven o’clock the troopers came and tightly bound his arms behind
his back. He wore a neat black suit with a sack-coat and a black hat.
Outside, the trumpets sounded and the drums beat. The troopers placed
him in the center of a strong guard. Then they led him forth from the
prison door.
With the drum always beating at the head of the band, thus he was
marched almost a mile through scenes that had been familiar to him in
his boyhood. Thirty-seven years and twenty-eight days before, another
martyr had gone forth to his death with the same clear-souled,
untroubled calm. “This is a beautiful country,” said John Brown,
Osawatomie Brown, as with the sheriff he drove to the execution-place;
“I never noticed it before.” With the same sense of drawing in for the
last time the breath of God’s bounty to men, Rizal looked about him and
spoke of the loveliness of the scene. “I used to walk here with my
sweetheart,” said he, thinking of Leonora. Above the roofs he saw the
Ateneo, where he had spent so many happy days. Since his time the
buildings had been altered. “When were those two towers added?” he
asked and observed the effect with a critical eye. All the way he went
with head erect, unflushed cheek, unruffled mien, as one that goes
forth to meet fair weather in the morning.
By his side marched the Jesuit priests, his comforters and supporters,
for he always remembered tenderly his days at the Ateneo.
“We are going to Calvary,” he said to them. “My sufferings are little.
The Savior suffered much. He was nailed to the cross. In an instant the
bullets will end all my pain.” [223]
A crowd lined the street, for the most part silent, but among the
Spaniards were some exclamations of joy. One foreigner, a Scotchman,
watching the scene, was moved to cry aloud a brief good-by. A little
company of Rizal’s former students at Dapitan stood together and wept.
He looked out upon the bay and the ships.
“How beautiful is the morning, Father! How clear is the view of
Corregidor and the Cavite Mountains! I walked here with my sweetheart,
Leonora, on mornings like this.”
“The morning to be is still more beautiful, my son,” answered the
priest.
“Why is that, Father?” asked Rizal, not quite understanding his
confessor’s words.
The officer in charge of the squad stepped between them, and the
father’s reply was not heard.
Thus they moved to the place of execution, the dreadful Bagumbayan
Field, the spot where so many others had been slain for defying
tyranny, where Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora had given up their
lives. To their memory he had dedicated his protest against the beast
that had torn them. Now in his own turn he was come to be torn.
A great troop of soldiers had formed a square to hold the people back.
Artillery was drawn up as if a rescue were feared, and at one
side—strange and incongruous spectacle!—a band to sound the national
anthem of triumph over this one man. To the governing class the
occasion was all holiday. Hundreds of that class stood there, men and
women, and uttered cries of animal pleasure when they saw their enemy
come bound and helpless to be killed before their eyes.
Neither they nor the engines of death they had evoked seemed to pierce
the serenity that wrapped him around. As they reached the field, he
stopped before the captain in command and said quietly:
“Will you shoot me in the front, please?”
“It cannot be,” said the captain. “I have orders to shoot you in the
back.”
“But I was never traitor to my own country nor to Spain.”
“My duty is to comply with the orders I have received.”
“Very well, then; shoot me as you please.” [224]
He asked that the soldiers be instructed to aim not at his head but his
heart, and that he should not be compelled to kneel but might receive
his death standing. These requests the captain granted.
Into the square he marched, between two batteries of artillery, a
company of cavalry in front, another behind. With him still went the
priests, Fathers Estanislao March and José Villaclara, and behind them
the man that had been his counsel in the mock trial, Luis de Andrade.
Rizal stepped to the place where he was to die and looked out over the
blue sea, bright in the sunlight. And then for the first time the iron
composure seemed shaken. It may have been some thought of his lost
youth, or the terror of the scene that reached out at him like
something coldly palpable. A shiver seemed to go over him; the mortal
man that he had so long suppressed in him reasserted itself; and one
great sigh seemed to burst from his heart.
“O Father, how terrible it is to die! How one suffers! Father, I
forgive every one from the bottom of my heart; I have no resentment
against any one: believe me, your reverence!”
The next instant the spasm had passed. The will with which he had ruled
himself so long came back to its accustomed empire. He was himself
again and stood erect, with no twitching of his lips and no fear in his
eyes.
The executioners marched upon the field.
Rizal shook hands firmly with the priests and with his counsel. Father
March held to him the cross for him to kiss.
He now turned his face to the east and stood with his back to the
firing-squad. Eight native soldiers had been told off to slay their
fellow-countryman. Behind them were eight Spanish soldiers with leveled
rifles. They were to shoot the executioners if these failed to obey
orders.
Rizal stood with his eyes open and turned toward the sky. In his face,
it is said, was neither ecstasy nor fear, but only the calm of a
perfect resignation. Often he had said: “What is death to me? I have
sown the seed; others are left to reap.” [225] The testing of that word
had come. It found him ready and undismayed.
At that instant a military doctor, amazed by such a show of fortitude,
ran out from the line of officers.
“Colleague,” he cried, “may I feel your pulse?”
Rizal said nothing but thrust his right hand as far as he could from
the bands that held it.
The pulse was hardly a beat above normal.
“You are well, colleague,” said the doctor, “very well!” and stepped
back to his place.
Rizal made no response and resumed his former attitude. He now twisted
his right hand and indicated the spot in his back at which the soldiers
should aim.
The captain gave the signal. The eight soldiers fired together.
The body of Rizal was seen to waver and fall. With a last effort of his
indomitable will, even in falling he turned so that he should lie with
face upward. [226]
In the thirty-sixth year of his age and the twenty-fourth year of his
service—poet, patriot, and martyr.
Cheers and laughter arose from the crowd as his blood was seen to be
pouring upon the field. Women waved their handkerchiefs and clapped
their hands; men shouted with delight. This was the end of him that had
unveiled to the world the realities of their social order; that had
ridiculed all their structure of rank and caste. He had died like a dog
before them.
The band played the national anthem. “Viva España!” shouted the crowd.
A photographer made pictures of the scene. It was a great day for
Spain. Her supremacy in the Philippines was approved and established
for ever. For whomsoever thereafter might venture to question its
righteousness, the same fate. Let him also die like a dog to the
applause and laughter of the existing order, rock-rooted and eternal.
“Viva España!” How poor are they that will not ponder history! From the
hanging of John Brown to the Emancipation Proclamation was three years
and twenty-nine days. From the murder of José Rizal to the surrender of
Manila was one year, eight months, and seventeen days.
The body was cast into an undesignated grave, and great care was taken
to obliterate all marks by which it might be identified; for this hated
enemy there should be nothing but loathing and contumely, alive or
dead. The perpetrators of this last outrage believed they had managed
with skill and success. Little they knew the people with whom they
dealt. Into the unmarked grave were covertly introduced objects that
would allow of a future identification, [227] and the dust that malice
and bigotry sought to dishonor was destined to a final burial with the
proud mourning of a nation and the respectful sympathy of the world.
Not even yet was satiated the hot thirst for blood that seemed to rage
in this abnormal community. The jails had been stuffed with other
members of the Liga Filipina, men that like Rizal had committed the
crime of desiring their country’s good. On January 11, 1897, two weeks
after the sacrifice of Rizal, fourteen of his companions were led forth
to Bagumbayan Field and shot, as he had been shot. Two of these were
priests of the church; among the laymen were members of ancient
Filipino families, and men of conspicuously blameless walk and notable
attainments. Father Inocencio Herrera and Father Prieto Gerónimo led
the procession of the condemned whose names were now to be added to the
long roll of those that had made that one field a shrine of liberty
hardly to be equaled in men’s acquaintance. Others whose blood was shed
with theirs that day on that sacred spot were Domingo Franco, Moisés
Salvador, Numeriano Adriano, Antonio Salazar, José Dizon, Luis Enciso
Villareal, Faustino Villareal, Ramón A. Padilla, Manuel Avella, Roman
Basa, Cristobal Medina, and Francisco Roxas. It was a flag dripping
with blood that Spain raised to the world that morning.
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. [228]
“Viva España!” There never was a grimmer irony of fate. Even as the
crowds raised that cry above the blood of Rizal, in all the Far East
there was no more Spain. The band that played triumphant the national
anthem was in reality sounding a funeral dirge. The shots that struck
down Rizal to the cheers of “broadcloth ruffians” shattered the Spanish
empire. Until that December 30, 1896, there remained just basis for the
ancient boast about the flag whereon the sun never set; as Rizal
tottered and fell it passed among the curios of history. On the day the
murderous court martial pronounced Rizal’s death the Filipinos began to
slip from the city and join the forces of Bonifacio. Among them that
evening went Paciano, men said with pinched lips and clenched jaws, to
fight with conspicuous valor while the Spanish flag flew in his
country. [229] Silently they went and by thousands. The insurgent lines
swept up as close as Cavite, so strong had the uprising grown. There,
in the face of all the vigilance, all the spying, all the rules and
regulations, they stood in their trenches with arms in their hands.
Guns came from the thickets, the roofs, the carabao stalls. Soldiers
that enlisted without rifles fought with bolos until in the first
encounter they could wrest guns from the Spaniards. From the waterfront
of Manila one could see their flag flying. Inadequately armed, badly
fed, ragged and untrained, they went into battle and overwhelmed the
Spanish regulars, because they had been fired with a vision of freedom
and a holy wrath against the System that had struck down their
champion. Back went the Spanish regulars to the gates of Manila, as one
hundred years before the household troops of every king in Europe had
bent before the citizen soldiery of France, fighting for the republic.
In a short time there was left no last doubt of the seriousness of the
revolt; with reason this time the Spanish colony cowered. The
thirty-fourth since the beginning of Spanish dominion in the
Philippines, it threatened at last to sweep that vicious anomaly into
the sea. A man had arisen capable of verifying the most sanguine of
Bonifacio’s prophecies, a college-bred farmer, without military
training but with a strange gift of military prescience, able with an
equipment of native genius to outwit, outmanœuver, and outlast the best
of the Spanish commanders. Against the skill and restless energy of
Emilio Aguinaldo they seemed to make no permanent progress, and one
reading the records of those days is irresistibly reminded of Francis
Marion and the Carolinas. If the regulars drove him hence to-day, he
would attack them there to-morrow. A union of Filipino hearts such as
Rizal, living, had hardly dared to dream of had been cemented by his
death. For the first time the possibility of ridding all the Islands of
all Spanish power laid hold upon determined and reasoning men, and
there began a life and death struggle between light and darkness, the
nineteenth century and the sixteenth.