What a lot of maudlin sentiment the home papers and builders of political issues lavished upon those Filipino fiends who, it was alleged, were given more water than was good for them! The soldier at the front knew the mockery of it all. He had felt the bolo of the treacherous “amigo” at his back, the while he parleyed, friendly-wise, with the aforesaid amigo’s snaky comrade in front. He had seen the pitiful remnant of what were once white human forms, the forms of his own comrades and friends, still living, perhaps, fresh from the torturings inflicted by their savage captors. He had seen the dismembered bodies of children and old men who had been slain in cold blood because they or their friends had been friendly to the Americans, and he had heard the wailing of women who had suffered shameful outrage, aye, a living death, at the hands of our “little brown brother.” What wonder that the boy in khaki grew tired of making prisoners of fiends from hell, who deserved nothing better than a short shrift and a merry trip back to their father, the devil, and drove his bayonet a little deeper or emptied his magazine a bit faster than would permit him to see or heed a signal of surrender? Of all the regiments who were sent to those far away islands, none bore itself more gallantly, none was more pertinaciously put to the fore than the --th Montana. A history of the thin, khaki-clad firing line in the Philippines that did not give more than a modest share of honor to that gallant regiment would be but a false and biased chronicle. Johnny, the boy of the slums, may not have been so patriotically inspired as some of his comrades, but he was a fighter by instinct, and a soldier by profession. He knew his duty, fear was a thing apart from him, and he attended strictly to “business” as he understood it, namely, to obeying orders, shooting true, and keeping tab of the Filipinos he potted. There be those who say that his game bags were not only large, but of select contents. He had a keen eye for brown officers, and, as he said, there were so many Filipino generals and such folk, that there were enough for everybody, even after he had taken his multitudinous pick. It was not long before the mighty ones at staff headquarters became quite familiar with Johnny’s ways. Our soldier soon found himself in demand, a demand which, from details of special and hazardous duty, occasional at first, but finally very frequent, won for him a sergeant’s stripes, and regrets at headquarters that it was not possible to immediately decorate his shoulders with strap and bar. Never did better man wear non-com’s stripes.