I expect to first clean out the wide Looboo Peninsula. I shall then move command to the vicinity of Lake Taal, and sweep the country westward to the ocean and south of Cavite, returning through Lipa. I shall scour and clean up the Lipa mountains. Swinging northward, the country in the vicinity of [here follows a long list of towns] will be scoured, ending at [a named mountain], which will then be thoroughly searched and devastated. Swinging back to the right, the same treatment will be given all the country of which [two named mountains] are the main peaks. And so on ad libitum. General Bell's course in Batangas was commended in the annual report of his immediate superior, a very humane, as well as gallant, soldier, General Wheaton, as "a model in suppressing insurrections under like circumstances." [398] The Batangas programme was approved by General Chaffee, the commanding general. In 1902 the United States Senate rang with indiscriminate denunciation of the Batangas severities and the Samar "kill and burn" orders. I tried in 1903, without success, to satisfy my distinguished and beloved fellow-townsman, Senator Bacon, that at the time it was adopted it had become a military necessity, which it had. The fact was that the McKinley-Taft policy of conciliation, intended to gild the rivets of alien domination and cure the desire for independence by coddling, had loaned aid and comfort to the enemy, by creating, among a people used theretofore solely to force as a governmental agency for making sovereignty respected, the pathetic notion that we were afraid of them, and might be weakening in respect to our declared programme of denying them independence. The Bell opinion of the Commission's confidence in Filipino gladness at its advent among them is sufficiently apparent in his orders to his troops. On May 23, 1902, Senator Bacon read in the Senate a letter from an officer of the army, a West Point graduate and a personal friend of the Senator's, whose name he withheld, but for whose veracity he vouched, which letter alluded to "a reconcentrado, pen with a dead line outside, beyond which everything living is shot"; spoke of "this corpse-carcass stench wafted in" (to where the letter-writer sat writing) as making it "slightly unpleasant here," and made your flesh crawl thus: At nightfall clouds of vampire bats softly swirl out on their orgies over the dead.