[212] That night the general was good enough to extend the usual courtesy of a cot to sleep on, in the headquarters building. Toward dusk I went to dine with a certain lieutenant, also of the regular army. [213] As we approached the lieutenant's quarters a sergeant came up with a prisoner, and asked instructions as to what to do with him. The lieutenant said: "Take him out and find out what he knows. Do you understand, Sergeant?" The sergeant saluted, answered in the affirmative, and moved away with his prisoner. We went in to the lieutenant's quarters, and while at dinner heard groans outside. I said "What is that, Jones?" [214] Jones said: "That's the water-cure he's giving that hombre. [215] Want to see it?" I replied that I certainly did not. Returning that night to the general's headquarters, after breakfast the next morning I met my friend Jones coming out of the general's office. I said: "What's the matter, what are you doing here," he having mentioned the evening before an expedition planned for the morrow. He said: "Well, I've just had a talk with the general to see if I could get my resignation from the army accepted?" "Why?" said I. "Well," was the reply, "that ----" (designating the prisoner of the night before by a double barrelled epithet) "died on me last night." Just how the matter was hushed up I have never known, but Jones was never punished. More than one general officer of the United States Army in the Philippines during our war with the Filipinos at least winked at the water-cure as a means of getting information, and quite a number of subalterns made a custom of applying it for that purpose. It was practically the only way you could get them to betray their countrymen. Did I report the incident to General MacArthur? Certainly not. It was the business of the general commanding the district. The water-cure, though very painful, was seldom fatal, and when not fatal was almost never permanently damaging, and it was about the only way to shake the loyalty of the average Filipino and make him give information as to hidden insurgent guns, guerrilla bands, etc. It was a part of Benevolent Assimilation. Let us now return to the early battlefields about Manila which we left, initially, to analyze the extreme bitterness of the feeling between the combatants that very early began to develop. We left war correspondent John F. Bass among the dead and dying on one of these fields, supposedly musing on the White Man's Burden, or Land-Grabbing, or Trust-for-Civilization theory, or whatever it was that moved the fifty-seven senators whose votes had ratified the treaty by a majority of just one more than the constitutionally necessary two-thirds.