The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  I could not have you, and after I could not have you my fate became only to have my army, so now I will truly return, not only to the Philippines but to the very embryo of all that made me not only great but half fulfilled. I will bring my army to Leyte, to Tacloban, to you, rescue you and elevate you in the eyes of your people as a symbol of the impossible love that reason and fate forced us to throw away.

  Yes, I thought. I did not know if it was true, but with MacArthur it was so grand and preposterous as to be eminently possible. And this to me explained his darkest moods. On Leyte he was surrounded by the dreams that he had dealt away like a young Faust in exchange for a glorious career, while at the same time he was separated from the wife and toddler son that had eventually replaced them.

  Ponce and I waited on the road for another hour. Then again as if by silent command we walked together back to the house and slowly approached the veranda. MacArthur and Consuelo were not there. Hesitantly, I peeked inside the house but saw nothing in the darkness. Then I heard Ponce, whispering behind me.

  “There!” he said.

  I turned and saw him pointing across the wide lawn to the beach. Following his finger, I finally saw a tall silhouette standing underneath the coconut trees, next to the lapping waves. But I could not see her.

  “Where is she?”

  Ponce grinned, as if vindicated. “They are together!”

  Looking more closely, I saw that he was right. They were embracing. As we watched, MacArthur suddenly turned, looking toward us, and then took Consuelo’s hand and walked further down the beach.

  Watching them walk away I felt soiled and voyeuristic. I was ashamed of myself for watching, and despite his power and greatness I felt sorry for the General. Because I now believed Ponce’s story.

  “I’m going to bed,” I said. And I left Ponce alone on the veranda.

  The next morning after breakfast, MacArthur called me into his room. He was pacing, clutching a stack of papers, cables from Washington and reports from the field. When I entered he fixed me with a look that almost dared me to disagree.

  “She was telling me about the death of her father,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I answered.

  “I was very close to their family.”

  “That’s what Ponce told me,” I said, wanting to be done with it.

  “Yes, Ponce,” said MacArthur, scrutinizing my face, his eyes telling me what his words had no need to say. “A very brave soldier, famous among the guerrillas. They’re a very important family, both here and in Samar. And they’re welcome here at any time, Jay. Take care of it.”

  And so I did, several times a week.

  CHAPTER 3

  On December 15 our soldiers invaded the island of Mindoro, giving us air bases only two hundred miles southwest of Manila. The day after Christmas MacArthur announced that the Leyte operation was over, except for what he termed some “minor mopping up.” In his announcement he proclaimed that “General Yamashita has sustained perhaps the greatest defeat in the military annals of the Japanese.” Both of these observations were at once odd and premature, for he knew it would take several more months of rugged, exhausting fighting to finish off the thirty thousand Japanese still dug in at Leyte. And he had yet actually to face Yamashita at all.

  On January 9, 1945, we landed at Lingayen Gulf, just down from the very spot where the Japanese had invaded three years before. But now both sides were playing on a much larger scale. We had approached Luzon with nearly a thousand ships, and 280,000 soldiers—more than had landed at Sicily, and more than would fight in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa combined. Yamashita waited with 262,000 men, more than twice the number that would defend the home island of Okinawa and more than ten times the forces on Iwo Jima, by far the largest army the Americans would face in any of the Pacific campaigns.

  But Luzon was as large as Ireland, a vast strategic canvas laced with mountains and jungles. Rather than allowing his forces to be bottled up in the cul-de-sac of the Bataan Peninsula, Yamashita withdrew most of his army into the Zambales Mountains west of Clark Field and far away to the north in the mountains near Baguio. A smaller, principally naval force stayed behind in Manila.

  From our landing place at Lingayen Gulf, Yamashita was to the north and Manila was to the south. General Walter Krueger, the field commander, was carefully deploying his forces in both directions. But MacArthur wanted Manila. Daily, sometimes hourly, he was pushing Krueger to advance. MacArthur, never particularly cautious but usually clever, was now impelled by his emotions, ready to burst with frustration. He sullenly marked his sixty-fifth birthday on January 26, without having budged Krueger and without entering Manila.

  “Get to Manila! Get to Manila!”

  But the Prussian-born Krueger would not budge. Now wearing four stars, he had first served in the Philippines as a private under MacArthur’s father. Krueger knew the terrain of Luzon better than anyone, and he also knew MacArthur’s mercurial moods. He realized all too well that he would be blamed if the attack went wrong.

  On January 29 General Robert Eichelberger, another of the leaders some had facetiously come to call “MacArthur’s Germans,” landed south of Manila, making an immediate, daring dash toward the city. That same day Krueger finally ordered the just-arrived First Cavalry Division to race southward, creating a double envelopment of the capital. On their way in, Krueger’s forces liberated prisoner of war camps at Cabanatuan, Muntinglupa, and Santo Tomas. And on February 3 our soldiers finally entered Manila.

  MacArthur had thought the city would be left undefended. Instead the imperial navy garrison left behind by Yamashita, bent on fighting to the last man, resisted our soldiers in one of the most suicidally destructive battles of the entire war. The Japanese mined the streets. They made bunkers out of houses. They took naval weapons and turned them into point-blank artillery pieces. And for a month they fought the advancing Americans until the last of them had died.

  Worse, in the midst of the battle the Japanese went on a sick and murderous rampage. The port facilities and the entire business district were deliberately destroyed, as were most of the factories, utilities, and housing areas. By the time the last Japanese had been rooted out of the last room in the last rubble of what used to be downtown Manila, one hundred thousand Filipinos had been killed. Hospitals had been set afire with patients deliberately strapped to their beds. Men had been routinely mutilated. Women and even young girls had been raped. Small children and babies had been slaughtered and desecrated.

  There would be no victory parade, no joyous celebration, no garlands of sampaguita thrown around the necks of marching soldiers by thankful, smiling, slender-waisted Filipinas. Unlike Leyte, MacArthur’s return to Manila could not have been more devastating. Personally, he had lost most of the treasures in his prewar home at the Manila Hotel. Strategically, the heart of the country’s government and economy was in ruins. And as a military leader he had to take moral responsibility for putting into motion an assault that led to a level of suffering greater than any other American ground attack on any city in the entire war.

  And it was not just any city being attacked by any American. It was the city in which he had spent long years of his life, the city whose people revered him above all other places on earth. In many ways, MacArthur had just attacked and seen the destruction of his own hometown.

  It is almost embarrassing to repeat this, but as I have said, my own war was different. For it was in the midst of all this carnage, on a road filled with death, that I fell in love. Her name was Divina Clara Ramirez. I met her in early February during the First Cavalry Division’s dash toward Manila.

  Unlike in Leyte, where he rarely left the mansion in Tacloban, after the landing at Lingayen Gulf, MacArthur was constantly agitated, always in motion. He inspected infantry units even as they fought. He went up in a B-17 bomber to observe an airborne drop. At one point he personally rallied a regiment under attack by Japanese tanks when the American forward positions began to lose thei
r nerve. He wanted to be everywhere at once. We were forever on the roads, with him or behind him, like the tail of a dancing kite.

  MacArthur had quit for the day, and I was taking a jeep back to a temporary camp near San Miguel. The road was moonlike, cratered and broken by bombs, washed into gullies by a recent incessant rain. Traffic was unending, dominated by rumbling, surging tanks and military trucks. On both sides of the road our aircraft were making repeated bombing runs. Overhead, the skies danced with dogfights between Japanese and American planes. All around me was a terrible destruction that on the one hand was ubiquitous and on the other had assumed an odd normality: nipa shacks and markets aflame, churches and schools knocked to pieces, cars and trucks ripped open and burning, and everywhere the bombs and artillery that seemed never to end. And far to the front as I drove, like a false dawn on the grey horizon, I could see the pulsing of more bombs and the orange tongues of reaching flames as Manila began to quake and burn.

  She was beside the road, sitting inside a brightly colored caratela. The small pony that had been pulling the little two-wheeled cart had been startled by a passing tank and had slipped into a mud hole, breaking its leg. The pony was now lying on its side, snorting and struggling, hopelessly trying to regain its footing. Its eyes were bulging with fear. It was still harnessed to the caratela. The caratela swayed dangerously as the pony twisted and whinnied. As I neared her in my jeep I watched a young Filipino walk up to the pony, shaking his head apologetically as if the animal could understand what was about to happen, and then shoot it between the eyes.

  I pulled off the road behind the caratela and walked up to her. She was still sitting in the cart, her knees together, clutching a wooden box protectively against her. The box was as wide as her shoulders, and as high as her chest. It was intricately and beautifully carved from narva, the Philippines’ most precious wood. She was crying, more from anger than despair, all the while shouting commandingly in Tagalog to the young man, who now was holding his hands helplessly up into the air and shaking his head as if denying responsibility.

  I could tell not only that she was beautiful but that she had taken great pains to hide her beauty. She wore no makeup or earrings. Beneath her plain brown cotton dress it appeared that she had bound her breasts to minimize their fullness. Her hair was pulled back and down, tied severely in a bun at the base of her neck. And she did not look particularly happy to see an American officer leaning inside her cart.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Are you blind?” she answered, angling her head toward the dead pony, her eyebrows arched rebukingly.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “If you were Christ, I would ask you to resurrect my horse,” she said. She stared for a moment at the young man, who by now I could tell was her servant, and then down at the wooden box. Then she crossed herself quickly, as if apologizing to God for her sacrilege, and looked back up to me. “I’m sorry, I should not have said that. But it was our last horse. Maybe you can take me to Pampanga.”

  “I’m not going to Pampanga,” I said. “I’m going to San Miguel.”

  “After Pampanga I’m going to San Miguel,” she said. “I live in San Miguel. But first I have to go to Pampanga.”

  I checked my watch. She picked up on it intuitively, raising her chin and looking away from me. “Never mind.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s OK. I have time.”

  “I will not be put in a position of begging,” she said firmly, staring straight ahead at her dead pony and clutching the box to her. Her eyes now averted, I scrutinized her features for the first time. I decided that she was the most naturally beautiful woman I had ever seen. And more than that, she emanated a certain fearlessness that illuminated the contrast between her delicate profile and the strength of her determined eyes.

  “You should go with me,” I said. “You can get hurt out here.”

  “Out here, in there, it’s all the same.” She glanced at me as if to preempt my next question. “We only stay in San Miguel because if we leave someone will steal our house.”

  “Why do you need to go to—”

  “Pampanga,” she reminded me, finishing my sentence. “There is food there. I’m to trade this box for a caván of rice.”

  “How much is a caván?”

  “Two bushels.”

  “Two bushels of rice for that? It’s one of the most beautiful boxes I’ve ever seen. It must be an antique.”

  “Yes, it’s been a family treasure for more than a hundred years. But you can’t eat it. And we are feeding seven people.”

  I found myself smiling in admiration. She was so strong, so sure of herself in the midst of all this chaos, that I wanted to stay near her. That was all. If I left I would never see her again, and that thought made me sad. “Come on,” I said. “Get in my jeep. I’ll take you to Pampanga and then to San Miguel.”

  “All right,” she said, as if granting my petition. “But afterward I will pay you. And give your name and your military number to my boy.”

  “My what?”

  “You’re a soldier. You must have a military number.”

  “Why would you talk to me like that? I’m offering to risk my life to take you to Pampanga.”

  She leaned toward me in the cab, fixing me with a polite but powerful stare. “I’m very sorry if I am offending you, but these are not normal times. I don’t know you! If I don’t come back, my boy can help my parents find me. Or you. Doesn’t that seem fair?”

  A half mile up the road a Japanese aircraft suddenly swooped low and lobbed a bomb into a truck. The huge explosion sent the vehicle sideways, where it did a double roll and landed upside down in a nearby field. A half-dozen bodies had flown from the truck bed into the air. The truck was a flaming shell. I crouched for a moment behind the caratela, then came up shaking my head. She had not budged from her place on the seat.

  “What do you think I’m going to do?” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  “If anything did happen, my family would kill you.”

  I was enormously attracted to her, and her stubbornness only increased her magnetism. But it seemed to me that she had crossed over to impudence.

  “You’ve insulted me,” I said, beginning to walk back to my jeep. “Get somebody else to take you.”

  “Wait!” she called. I stopped and turned to face her again. She gave me a small, scrutinizing smile. “Why are you afraid to give my boy your name?”

  “I’m not,” I said. “But all I did was offer to help you, and now you’re threatening to have me killed!”

  “Give him your name,” she said, as if the issue were now decided. “And I promise you won’t be killed.”

  “You’re a very strong woman,” I said, smiling my surrender.

  “Give him your name,” she answered. Only now it sounded like a lilting invitation.

  I wrote my name and service number on a piece of paper and gave it to the boy. As I walked back to the jeep she instructed him to unstrap the dead pony and pull the caratela back to San Miguel himself. He carried her box and loaded it behind my front seat. And when she joined me in the jeep she gave me her first true smile.

  “I like it that you were going to leave,” she said as I steered the churning jeep through mud gullies back onto the road. “It shows me that you have pride. Gallantry without pride is nothing more than servitude, don’t you think? I mean, I have been thinking about this. All men of true honor have a point beyond which they will not bend.”

  “Was that my test?” I teased, gaining the road.

  “Oh, no.” She smiled. “True tests are never obvious.”

  That was the way she talked, and that was the way she thought. We had not traveled a mile before I was certain that she was better educated and more intelligent than I and probably more firmly principled. It was as if she had thought everything through. Nothing seemed to surprise or intimidate her. She was only twenty-two, but somehow she had acquired the gift, or perhaps
the curse, of wisdom.

  In Pampanga the war seemed far away. She directed me down narrow side roads until we found a large warehouse. Fierce little dogs barked at us as we drove up, and along the edges of the warehouse building I watched two huge rats scurrying inside. The warehouse was guarded by a dozen armed Filipinos who appeared to be guerrilla soldiers.

  A well-fed older man met us as I braked the jeep. He was wearing a fair amount of his wartime profiteering, four gold rings, a fine wristwatch, and a thick gold chain around his neck. He eyed Divina Clara’s narva box and they spoke rapidly in Tagalog, bargaining. I could see her becoming angry, and finally the old man waved at her and began walking away. She shouted at him, an obvious insult, and he waved at her again, not even turning his head.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “He’ll only give me half a caván. I traveled all the way from San Miguel and now my horse is dead. He is a despicable liar.”

  I walked toward him, calling to him. “Sir!”

  He turned to face me, looking back at her for one quick moment with an exultant grin, and greeted me in English. “She called me a liar. I heard her say that. So let her find rice from someone who tells the truth.”

  “Let me talk to you,” I said. He hesitated, so I took him by the shoulder and moved with him toward the warehouse. As soon as I touched him a half-dozen rifles were raised to the ready position by nearby bodyguards, but I ignored them.

  “Over here,” I said. “I’d like to make you an offer.”

  “You will not talk to him!” called Divina Clara from near the jeep.

  “Stay there!” I commanded, and she did. For the second time that afternoon I saw a look of respect flash across her face.

  The old man and I walked to the doorway of the warehouse. Tons of rice were stashed in a series of bins inside. I took out my wallet and showed him my military identification card.

  I spoke quietly. “My name is Jay Marsh. I work directly for General MacArthur.” Seeing the look of disbelief in his eyes, I gestured toward the jeep. “How do you think I have my own jeep? You should check this through your people. Jay Marsh. Remember my name. I will be seeing General MacArthur tonight, and I will be with him all day tomorrow. I want to be able to tell him that you are helping his effort to bring assistance to the people of San Miguel. I would like to tell him that you gave this woman a caván of rice as a way to thank him for liberating Luzon.”