I’ll let the title of the fol­low­ing pas­sage from The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Mark Twain sum­ma­rize it:

Mr Clemens com­ments on the killing of six hun­dred Moros–Men, women, and children–In a crater bowl near Jolo in the Philippines–Our troops com­manded by Gen­eral Wood–Contrasts this “bat­tle with var­i­ous other details our mil­i­tary history…

We will stop talk­ing about my school­mates of sixty years ago, for the present, and return to them later. They strongly inter­est me, and I am not going to leave them alone per­ma­nently. Strong as that inter­est is, it is for the moment pushed out of the way by an inci­dent of to-day, which is still stronger. This inci­dent burst upon the world last Fri­day in an offi­cial cable­gram from the com­man­der of our forces in the Philip­pines to our Gov­ern­ment at Wash­ing­ton. The sub­stance of it was as follows:

A tribe of Moros, dark skinned sav­ages, had for­ti­fied them­selves in the bowl of an extinct crater not many miles from Jolo; and as they were hos­tiles, and bit­ter against us because we have been try­ing for eight years to take their lib­er­ties away from them, their pres­ence in that posi­tion was a men­ace. Our com­man­der, Gen­eral Leonard Wood, ordered a recon­nais­sance. It was found that the Moros num­bered six hun­dred, count­ing women and chil­dren; that their crater bowl was in the sum­mit of a peak or moun­tain twenty-two hun­dred feet above sea level, and very dif­fi­cult of access for Chris­t­ian troops and artillery. Then Gen­eral Wood ordered a sur­prise, and went along him­self to see the order car­ried out. Our troops climbed the heights by devi­ous and dif­fi­cult trails, and even took some artillery with them. The kind of artillery is not spec­i­fied, but in one place it was hoisted up a sharp accliv­ity by tackle a dis­tance of some three hun­dred feet. Arrived at the rim of the crater, the bat­tle began. Our sol­diers num­bered five hun­dred and forty. They were assisted by aux­il­iaries con­sist­ing of a detach­ment of native con­stab­u­lary in our pay–their num­bers not given–and by a naval detach­ment, whose num­bers are not stated. But appar­ently the con­tend­ing par­ties were about equal as to number–six hun­dred men on our side, on the edge of the bowl; six hun­dred men, women and chil­dren in the bot­tom of the bowl. Depth of the bowl, fifty feet.

Gen­eral Wood’s order was “Kill or cap­ture the six hundred.”

The bat­tle began–it is offi­cially called by that name [battle]–our forces fir­ing down into the crater with their artillery and their deadly small arms of pre­ci­sion; the sav­ages furi­ously return­ing the fire, prob­a­bly with brickbats–though this is merely a sur­mise of mine, as the weapons used by the sav­ages are not nom­i­nated in the cable­gram. Hereto­fore the Moros have used knives and clubs mainly also inef­fec­tual trade-muskets when they had any.

The offi­cial report stated that the bat­tle was fought with prodi­gious energy on both sides dur­ing a day and a half, and that it ended with a com­plete vic­tory for the Amer­i­can arms. The com­plete­ness of the vic­tory is estab­lished by this fact: that of the six hun­dred Moros not one was left alive. The bril­liancy of the vic­tory is estab­lished by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hun­dred heroes only fif­teen lost their lives.

Gen­eral Wood was present and look­ing on. His order had been “Kill or cap­ture those sav­ages.” Appar­ently our lit­tle army con­sid­ered that the “or” left them autho­riza­tion to kill or cap­ture accord­ing to taste, and that their taste had remained what it has been for eight years, in our army out there–the taste of Chris­t­ian butchers.

The offi­cial report quite prop­erly extolled and mag­ni­fied the “hero­ism” and “gal­lantry” of our troops; lamented the loss of the fif­teen who per­ished, and elab­o­rated the wounds of thirty-two of our men who suf­fered injury, and even minutely and faith­fully described the nature of the wounds, in the inter­est of future his­to­ri­ans of the United States. It men­tioned that a pri­vate had one of his elbows scraped by a mis­sile, and the private’s name was men­tioned. Another pri­vate had the end of his nose scraped by a mis­sile. His name was also mentioned–by cable, at one dol­lar and fifty cents a word.

Next day’s news con­firmed the pre­vi­ous day’s report and named our fif­teen killed and thirty-two wounded again, and once more described the wounds and gilded them with the right adjectives.

Let us now con­sider two or three details of our mil­i­tary his­tory. In one of the great bat­tles of the Civil War 10 per cent of the forces engaged on the two sides were killed and wounded. At Water­loo, where four hun­dred thou­sand men were present on the two sides, fifty thou­sand fell, killed and wounded, in five hours, leav­ing three hun­dred and fifty thou­sand sound and all right for fur­ther adven­tures. Eight years ago, when the pathetic com­edy called the Cuban war was played, we sum­moned two hun­dred and fifty thou­sand men. We fought a num­ber of showy bat­tles, and when the war was over we had lost two hun­dred and sixty-eight men out of our two hun­dred and fifty thou­sand, in killed and wounded in the field, and just four­teen times as many by the gal­lantry of the army doc­tors in the hos­pi­tals and camps. We did not exter­mi­nate the Spaniards–far from it. In each engage­ment we left an aver­age of 2 per cent of the enemy killed or crip­pled on the field.

Con­trast these things with the great sta­tis­tics which have arrived from that Moro crater! There, with six hun­dred engaged on each side, we lost fif­teen men killed out­right, and we had thirty-two wounded–counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy num­bered six hundred–including women and children–and we abol­ished them utterly, leav­ing not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incom­pa­ra­bly the great­est vic­tory that was ever achieved by the Chris­t­ian sol­diers of the United States.

pgs 403–404

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Tags: autobiography, Autobiography of Mark Twain, General Wood, Mark Twain, Moros, philippines, political commentary, samuel clemens, slaughter