Great activity was at once begun on board the vessel, when it was learned that the army and navy were to co-operate in suppressing hostilities among the ferocious tribes of this jungle island, whose leader, the squinty-almond-eyed insurgent General Lukban, had defiantly sneered at foreign authority. Provisions and ammunition were stored in the hold, numerous three-inch rifles, Colt automatics, and one-pounders secured on deck, while four Kentucky mules to be used in dragging the guns occupied stalls amidships. After the munitions of war had been carefully stored and the minor details of the expedition completed, Major (now Colonel) L. W. T. Waller, with his battalion of three hundred marines, boarded the cruiser. This gallant battalion had recently returned from China, where their valiant bravery before the gates of Pekin had been attested by the troops of all nations. What a scene this was on board a man-of-war!――seven hundred sailors in the fashion of the sea, and three hundred marines in the garb of the field, all ready, as mad Anthony Wayne said, to storm hell if necessary. One of the most magnificent military scenes and inspired feeling I have ever experienced was on that balmy October morning in the year 1901, as I reported to Admiral Rodgers, six bells and underway. The band had struck up, “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching,” as the entire sortie joined in the singing: “Damn, damn, damn the Filipinos, Pock-marked, almond-eyed ladrones, And beneath the starry flag We’ll civilize them with the ‘Krag,’ Then we’ll journey to our old beloved homes.” This was a gala day for all on board; burnished bayonets glittered in the noonday’s sun, while the khaki uniforms of the soldiers of the sea contrasted with the immaculate white of the sailors. The officers of the battalion to a man were soldiers, like those of the St. Louis battalion, thorough in the art of war; men who had proved themselves in active service; unlike a few under whom I served, who broke into the army in ’98 and earlier, whose non-commissioned officers were required to draw their topographical outlines, and who, were it necessary to depend on their merits in civil life, would suffer incompetency in a country grocery. The voyage down the coast was one grand round of pleasure; apparently it was “an excursion” for the men who had fought their way through Tien Tsin on to Pekin, and with Riley’s battery, the Ninth and the Fourteenth Infantry, had battered, rammed, fired, and scaled the walls of the Forbidden City. On the gun-deck of the man-of-war talented musicians of the battalion kept an incessant flow of music in action, a piano accompanying the popular songs of the sea and field, as rendered in their true originality by some whose bones were doomed to bleach on the gruesome battle-fields of Samar.