To combat such a population, it is necessary to make the state of war as insupportable as possible; and there is no more efficacious way of accomplishing this than by keeping the minds of the people in such a state of anxiety and apprehension that living under such conditions will soon become unbearable. Little should be said. The less said the better. Let acts, not words, convey intentions. [397] Under date of December 26, 1901, General Bell reports: I am now assembling in the neighborhood of 2500 men, who will be used in columns of fifty each. I expect to accompany the command. * * * I take so large a command for the purpose of thoroughly searching each ravine, valley, and mountain peak for insurgents and for food, expecting to destroy everything I find outside of town. All able-bodied men will be killed or captured. Such was the central idea animating the Bell Brigade that overran Batangas in 1902. The American soldier in officially sanctioned wrath is a thing so ugly and dangerous that it would take a Kipling to describe him. I have seen him in that mood, but to describe it is beyond me. Side by side with innumerable ambuscades incident to the nature of the field service as it then was, in which little affairs the soldier above mentioned had lost many a "bunkie," there had gone on for some time, under the McKinley-Taft peace-at-any-price policy, whose keynote was that no American should have a job a Filipino could fill, much appointing to municipal and other offices of Filipinos, many of whom had at once set to work to make their new offices useful to the cause of their country by systematic aid to the ambuscade business. With this and the Balangiga massacre ever in mind, the men of General Bell's brigade began their work in Batangas in a mood which quite made for fidelity in performance of orders to "make living unbearable" for the Filipino "by acts, not words." Also, the American soldier can sing, sometimes very badly, but often rather irrepressibly, until stopped by his officer. Also, whether justly or unjustly is beside the question, he considers a politician who pets the enemy in the midst of a war a hypocrite. So General Bell's 2500 men began that Batangas campaign on New Year's Day, 1902, giving preference, out of their repertoire, to a campaign song whose ominous chorus ran: "He may be a brother of William H. Taft But he ain't no friend of mine," and between songs they would say purringly to one another, "Remember Balangiga." And their commanding officer was the very incarnation of this feeling. So listen to the stride of his seven-league boots and the ring of his iron heel: