"The thing is on," said General Hughes, Provost Marshal of Manila, to General Otis, at Malacanan palace, on the night of February 4, 1899, about half past eight o'clock, as soon as the firing started. [188] He was talking about something which every American in Manila except General Otis had for months frankly recognized as inevitable--the war. On the day of the outbreak of February 4th, General Otis had under his command 838 officers and 20,032 enlisted men, say in round numbers a total of 21,000. Of these some 15,500 were State volunteers mostly from the Western States, and the rest were regulars. All the volunteers and 1650 of the regulars were, or were about to become, entitled to their discharge, and their right was perfected by the exchange of ratifications of the treaty of peace with Spain on April 11, 1899. The total force which he was thus entitled to command for any considerable period consisted of less than 4000. Of the 21,000 men on hand as aforesaid, on February 4th, deducting those at Cavite and Iloilo, the sick and wounded, those serving in civil departments, and in the staff organizations, the effective fighting force was 14,000, and of these 3000 constituted the Provost Guard in the great and hostile city of Manila. [189] Thus there were only 11,000 men, including those entitled to discharge, available to engage the insurgent army, "which," says Secretary of War Root, "was two or three times that number, well armed and equipped, and included many of the native troops formerly comprised in the Spanish army." Such was the predicament into which General Otis's supremely zealous efforts to help the Administration get the treaty through the Senate by withholding from the American people the knowledge of facts which might have put them on notice that they were paying $20,000,000 for a $200,000,000 insurrection, had brought us. This is not a tale of woe. It is a tale of the disgust--good-humored, because stoical--which finally found expression at the time in the army song that heads this chapter, disgust at unnecessary sacrifice of American life which could so easily have been prevented had General Otis only revealed the real situation in time to have had plenty of troops on hand. It is a requiem over those brave men of the Eighth Army Corps from Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and the Western States that bore the brunt of the early fighting, whose lives were needlessly sacrificed in 1899 as the result of an unpreparedness for war due to anxiety not to embarrass Mr. McKinley in his efforts to get the treaty through the Senate, an unpreparedness which remained long unremedied thereafter in order to conceal from the people of the United States the unanimity of the desire of the Filipinos for Independence.