Jungle of Snakes by James R. Arnold Page B

undergirding his strategy in a circular order to all his station commanders: “The insurrection in this brigade
     continues because the greater part of the people, especially the wealthy ones, pretend to desire, but in reality do not want
     peace.” Bell continued that as soon as the people wanted peace, peace would come quickly. Based on his experience in northern
     Luzon, Bell concluded that clearly the correct policy was to “make the people want peace, and want it badly.” 14
    On December 8, 1901, Bell gave his most controversial order. Some years back Bell had interrupted his military career to study
     law and pass the Illinois bar. Now his legal eye examined General Order 100 and focused on the mandate requiring an occupying
     force to protect the people from undue hardship. This duty to protect the people became his justification to concentrate them
     into secure camps. He ordered post commanders to establish protected zones for the safety of all Filipinos who desired peace.
     The peace-loving people had twenty days to move their families, food, and possessions into the protected zones. Thereafter,
     all territory outside of the zones would be treated as enemy territory. Here all property could be confiscated or destroyed
     and all males subject to arrest. If they tried to evade they would be shot. Bell informed his subordinates that General Order
     100 “authorizes the starving of unarmed hostile belligerents as well as armed ones, provided it leads to a speedier subjection
     of the enemy.” 15
    Bell was correct that General Order 100 allowed the “withholding of all sustenance or means of life from the enemy.” Indeed,
     this was well within accepted military practice. From earliest recorded times, starvation was the method by which a besieging
     force compelled the surrender of a castle or fortress town. senior American officers were well aware that the starving of
     the people of Vicksburg had led to its surrender to the Union army commanded by U. S. Grant. Likewise, the practice of forcibly
     separating civilians from insurgents was not a novel solution. In South Africa the British were using concentration camps
     in their battle against the Boers. During the American Civil War, something of this sort had been done on a smaller scale
     and had been a key ingredient in ending Confederate guerrilla operations in northern Arkansas. But the policy had most recently
     been employed by the Spanish in Cuba and this was not a happy comparison in American minds.
    Spanish general Valeriano Weyler and his Cuban reconcentrado policy had drawn widespread condemnation in the American press. During the buildup to the war with Spain, he was routinely
     described as “Butcher Weyler.” Press accounts of the Cuban victims of Butcher Weyler’s concentration camps had been instrumental
     in turning American public opinion against Spain. With this in mind, heretofore the U.S. Army had concealed its concentration
     camps by calling them “colonies” and “zones of protection.” Chaffee tried to maintain this fiction, going so far as to ask
     the adjutant general of the army to hand-deliver news of Bell’s plan to the secretary of war and then destroy it. Chaffee
     explained that he did not “care to place on file in the Department any paper of the kind, which would be evidence of what
     may be considered in the United States as harsh measures.” 16
    In the event, a concentration policy of the scale employed in Batangas could not be concealed. The Philadelphia Ledger compared Bell with Butcher Weyler and asked, “Who would have supposed . . . that the same policy would be, only four years
     later, adopted and pursued as the policy of the United States in the Philippines?” The Baltimore American expressed astonishment “that a general of our army in the far-off Philippines has actually aped Weyler.” It continued, “We
     have actually come to a thing we went to war to banish.”
    The imperialist press