Baler: The Last Soldiers of a Finished War

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The war was over, the treaty was signed, and the empire they were fighting for had already sold the islands out from under them. Fifty men inside a stone church went on holding a country that no longer existed for eleven more months, calling every newspaper that told them the truth a forgery. What does it take to make a soldier believe his war has ended?

The 57 men behind the walls of the church feared the newspapers the enemy threw at them more than they feared the enemy's bullets. Because those newspapers said only one thing: the country you are dying for lost this war months ago, and this ground no longer belongs to Spain. The lieutenant decided the pages were a trap, tore them up, and went on fighting — for 337 days.

On the eastern shore of the island of Luzon, at the edge of a bay that opens onto the wide waters of the Pacific, there is a small town called Baler. Today you can drive there, and surfers know its beaches. But at the end of the 19th century, Baler was one of the loneliest corners of the Philippines. The Sierra Madre mountains cut the town off from the rest of the island: forested, carved by rain, a barrier that took weeks to cross even on the back of a mule. The only reasonable way to travel from Manila to Baler was by sea, and even that was not possible in every season. Between November and February the swells rolling in from the Pacific beat the bay so hard that no steamer could come alongside. For part of every year, in other words, Baler was a dot that existed on the empire's map but could not actually be reached.

Spain had governed the Philippines for more than 300 years. In the towns at the far edge of that government, the state meant a handful of officials, a friary church, and an understrength detachment of soldiers. Baler was no different. In the middle of the town stood a church of stone, thick-walled, with few windows: the church of San Luis de Tolosa. In a tropical climate a stone building is a luxury; the Baler church sat among the surrounding houses of wood and thatch like a boulder. No one had designed it as a fortress, but it stood like one.

The town was not calm. The Philippine revolution that began in 1896 had spread across the whole island, and Baler had taken its share. In the autumn of 1897 revolutionaries stormed the Spanish detachment in the town and the garrison suffered heavy losses. Madrid wanted the lost position back. So in February of 1898, on the 12th, a steamer dropped anchor in the bay and a new detachment came ashore.

These were the men the whole world would eventually talk about, though nobody knew it that day. At their head was Captain Enrique de las Morenas y Fossi, appointed civil and military governor of the district, which made him both commander and administrator. He had two lieutenants with him: Juan Alonso Zayas and Saturnino Martín Cerezo. A military physician came along, Rogelio Vigil de Quiñones. And a chaplain, Cándido Gómez Carreño. Counting the enlisted men, they were 57 in all. Most were young, most were peasants, most had been conscripted out of the poor Spanish countryside and had never seen an ocean in their lives.

The first months passed in a strange quiet. The soldiers traded with the townspeople, children ran across the square, the church bell rang. Captain Las Morenas saw to the town's affairs, kept his ledgers, wrote his reports. Martín Cerezo looked at the church's walls, its door, its bell tower, and kept to himself the thought that went through his mind: if it came to it, this place could be held. It was the reflex of a soldier. That reflex would be the reason 57 men stayed alive a few months later.

Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers away, the wheel of history had begun to turn. In February an American battleship blew up in Havana harbor; in April the United States and Spain went to war. On the morning of May 1, 1898, the Spanish squadron faced the American navy in Manila Bay and was destroyed within a few hours. Spain's 300-year presence in the Pacific was shaken to its foundations in the course of a single morning.

Baler heard about it weeks later, in broken fragments of rumor. The news reaching the town now came from one direction only: over the mountains, out of the mouths of the insurgents. No official notice, no order, no mail arrived from Manila, because Manila itself was under siege. The detachment was left at the end of the empire with no one to tell it what had happened to it.

When June came the mood of the town changed. Trade fell off, greetings grew short, the streets began emptying early. At night the soldiers listened to the sounds coming out of the forest. Captain Las Morenas ordered the supplies carried into the church: rice, dried meat, beans, salt, kerosene, ammunition. The townspeople packed up their houses and withdrew in ones and twos; a town abandoned by its own people is the quietest possible warning of what is coming. In the last days of June, Baler was all but empty.

The only solid thing left was the stone church. Fifty-seven men, with no idea that an empire on the other side of the world had already been beaten, walked inside it.

On the morning of June 30, 1898, Martín Cerezo went out toward the river with a small patrol. He wanted to see why the town had emptied. The reason showed itself soon enough: fire opened from among the trees, the patrol was ambushed, a corporal was wounded, and the men pulled back fighting. That withdrawal was no longer the beginning of a garrison's duty; it was the beginning of a siege. The detachment closed the church door behind them and barred it.

The next day, July 1, came the first call to surrender. The Filipino commanders sent a written letter: Spanish rule in the Philippines was finished, resistance was pointless, and those who gave themselves up would be treated honorably. One of the names at the head of the siege was a son of the town itself, Teodorico Novicio Luna; a few weeks later Calixto Villacorta took over the command. The force under their orders varied between 800 and 1000 men at different stages of the siege. Inside there were 57, and their number would fall with every passing day.

Captain Las Morenas refused the call. The reasoning behind the refusal was a piece of military logic that looks like stubbornness from the outside and is something entirely different from the inside. A Spanish officer could surrender a besieged position only on a written and verifiable order coming down from his own superiors. The sentence "the war is over," spoken by the enemy, was by definition a ruse of war; every army's manual on sieges carries examples of it. The tragedy of Baler was born precisely there: these men did not act wrongly, they acted correctly — only, acting correctly kept them fighting for nothing for 11 months.

The church quickly became a fortified work. Loopholes were cut into the walls, the door and windows were blocked with sandbags and sacks of rubble, the bell tower became an observation post. The houses around the church gave cover to the attackers, so the detachment set them on fire in night sorties. To stay alive, they burned their own town with their own hands. When the fires had burned out there was an empty, level, open space around the church: a space a sentry could see across and a rifle could reach.

Then the siege settled into its own monotonous rhythm. Firing before dawn, a sniper's duel through the day, silence toward evening. The besiegers could not batter the wall with artillery; the light guns they had could only open wounds in the stone. When they tried a direct assault they took heavy losses crossing the open ground. Over the 337 days of the siege, Filipino losses in dead and wounded are reckoned at around 700, which is the clearest measure of how difficult a target the church was.

The relationship between the two sides was not made of bullets alone. From time to time the firing stopped, men met under a white flag, tobacco and small gifts changed hands, they asked after each other's health. Then everyone went back to his position and started shooting again. This strange courtesy, common enough in sieges, lasted at Baler from beginning to end, and it also decided how the end would come.

In August the world outside picked up speed. On August 13 Manila surrendered to American forces. Spain no longer even had a capital to defend in the Philippines. The Spanish authorities in Manila did not forget Baler; on the contrary, they sent emissaries again and again. Ranking officers, signed letters, even two Spanish friars held prisoner by the Filipinos were sent to the church. The friars were let inside and stayed there until the end of the siege, but they could not make the news they carried stick.

Because for the men inside, every emissary was an emissary who had passed through the enemy's hands. Every letter was a piece of paper that had come from behind the enemy's lines. Signatures could be imitated, seals could be manufactured, a captured officer could be made to write whatever sentence you wanted. Martín Cerezo considered each of these possibilities and rejected them all. In the memoir he would write years later he describes the one fixed idea in his mind during those days: proof had to be proof that had not passed through the enemy's hands.

There was no such proof. And inside the church, an enemy far more patient than any bullet had already gone to work.

The real killer of the siege was not the rifle. The provisions had been weighed out from the start: rice, dried beans, salted meat, a little tinned food. As the months passed the rations were cut, then halved, then became unrecognizable. But the real problem was not quantity, it was variety. For months the men in the church ate almost nothing but polished rice. Today we know what that means: when the bran is stripped from rice, vitamin B1 goes with it, and without that vitamin the human body surrenders to the disease called beriberi.

Beriberi comes slowly. First numbness in the legs, then weakness. A man can no longer lift his rifle. Starting at the ankles the body swells, the edema climbs upward, the breath tightens. In the end the heart tires and stops. Inside the church, healthy 20-year-old men became unable to walk within weeks. Laid out along the base of the walls, their swollen legs stretched out in front of them, without the strength left to speak, they died one after another.

The physician Rogelio Vigil de Quiñones did not know the cause of the disease; nobody knew it exactly at that date, because the concept of a vitamin had not yet been established. He had no medicine left either. But with a good doctor's instinct he noticed something: there was a link between the illness and what they were eating. He insisted on fresh food. So a small vegetable patch was planted around the church, and raids were mounted in the dark to slip into the nearby gardens and gather squash, greens, whatever could be found. Going out under fire for a handful of leaves looks insane from the outside. From the inside it was survival itself, and those raids really did slow the dying.

It was not enough. The chaplain, Cándido Gómez Carreño, was taken by the disease. On October 18, 1898, Lieutenant Juan Alonso Zayas died; beriberi had taken him too. Within a month, on November 22, the commander of the detachment, Captain Enrique de las Morenas, died of the same illness. He had come as the governor of a town; he died inside a church, beside his own men, without medicine.

That November is the darkest month of Baler. A detachment that loses two of its officers at once would, under ordinary circumstances, fall apart. The bodies were buried in the churchyard, in pits dug under fire. Even burying the dead was an operation; short truces were arranged and the earth was thrown over in haste. The number of those who died during the siege reached 19: 15 from disease, 2 from wounds, and 2 by the decision of their own comrades.

Command had now passed to the only officer left, Saturnino Martín Cerezo. He was in his early thirties, a provincial man, hard, and sparing with words. What came into his hands was not a unit but a wreck: sick men who could not walk, dwindling supplies, two dead officers, and an enemy outside shouting endlessly that the war was over. What Martín Cerezo did with it was a choice that raises the hair on the back of your neck. Instead of loosening his grip, he tightened it. He reorganized the watches, kept up the daily roll call, gave a duty to every man still able to stand, and tried to run discipline exactly as it had run on the first day of the siege.

There was a reason for this. In places like that, what hastens death is usually not disease but dissolution; a man with nothing left to do goes faster. Routine functioned as a kind of medicine inside that church. Morning roll call, night watch, watering the vegetable patch, cleaning out a loophole. But that same discipline, that same hardness, would leave a permanent argument hanging around Martín Cerezo's name: a hero, or a stubborn man who kept his soldiers lying down in front of death for months without need?

That question is not entirely closed even today. What is certain is that the men inside the church did not know what they were holding out for. While they were dying at the foot of those walls, Spain had sat down at a table and was selling its colony.

On December 10, 1898, a treaty was signed in Paris. Spain gave up its sovereignty over Cuba, handed over Puerto Rico and Guam, and left the Philippines to the United States in return for 20 million dollars. The sovereignty being defended by the church at Baler came to a legal end that day on a sheet of paper. The men inside knew nothing about it, and if they had, they would not have believed it.

Because disbelief had become a habit in that church. For some time the besiegers had been trying a new method: paper instead of bullets. Coming forward under a white flag, they left Spanish-language newspapers in front of the church. Newspapers reporting that Manila had fallen, that the fleet had been sunk, that a treaty had been signed. Martín Cerezo read them and judged them to be forgeries.

Seen from today that decision looks unbelievable. But it is worth following his logic. A newspaper is the easiest thing in the world to counterfeit. If there is a printing press behind the enemy's lines, you can set and print whatever news you like. What is more, some of the papers that arrived really did carry news that was suspiciously well-aimed: pages that seemed chosen precisely to convince the man inside. Martín Cerezo went through each issue like an intelligence officer, studying the advertisements, the dates, the typesetting, and in every one of them he found the possibility of a fabrication. He threw the newspapers aside, and kept most of them from his men in case they damaged morale.

Meanwhile the world outside changed once more. On February 4, 1899, fighting broke out in Manila between Filipino and American forces, and the Philippine-American War began. The people besieging the church were now inside a brand-new war, and they wanted this strange knot at Baler untied as quickly as possible.

In April an unexpected shadow appeared from the sea. On April 11, 1899, the American warship Yorktown anchored in Baler bay. The Americans had heard the story of the Spaniards still holding out in the church and were thinking of taking them off. A boat was lowered from the ship; a small party under Lieutenant James Gillmore moved toward the mouth of the river. Filipino troops waiting behind the trees on the shore opened fire. Several of the Americans were killed, Gillmore and his men were taken prisoner; they spent months in captivity and were rescued only in December. The American ship waited in the bay for a while, then weighed anchor and left.

The men in the church heard those shots. Rescue from the sea had been torn apart a few kilometers from their door, and they never even fully understood what it was.

By the time May came, the air inside the church had turned poisonous. Among men who had spent months between the same walls, seeing the same faces, burying their dead, living half-starved, despair had begun to be spoken aloud. On May 8 a soldier, a private named Alcaide, slipped out in the dark and went over to the Filipino side. The escape was the most dangerous moment of the siege, because if one man had run, it meant others were thinking about it.

Martín Cerezo took this as a sign of dissolution and convened a court-martial. Two soldiers found to have helped the deserter, Antonio Menache Sánchez and Vicente González Toca, were shot on June 1, 1899. One day before the last day of the siege, they died by their own comrades' bullets. This is the most disputed, darkest page of the Baler story, and the fact hardest to fit inside a narrative of heroism.

And yet the lock had already begun to turn. On May 28, 1899, Lieutenant Colonel Cristóbal Aguilar y Castañeda, sent from Manila, approached the church under a white flag and tried to talk as everyone else had, and went back without result. But he left a bundle of newspapers behind him.

Martín Cerezo opened these papers with suspicion too. He turned the pages. Then, not among the war reports but in the pages of daily life, he came across a small, ordinary, trivial item about an officer he knew. It was a private detail of the kind only he could have known. No enemy could have invented it; inventing it would have required knowing that man's life, and besides, it would never have occurred to anyone to put a detail like that inside a trap.

Holding the paper in his hand, he understood. The newspaper was real. And if this newspaper was real, the others were real too. Spain was gone. For nearly a year they had been guarding the flag of an empire that no longer existed.

On the morning of June 2, 1899, a flag was waved from the walls of the Baler church. For the first time in months, the men inside were waiting without raising their rifles.

Martín Cerezo did not surrender; he negotiated. He set out his terms in writing: firing would stop, the weapons would be handed over to Filipino officers in good order, he and his men would not be counted as prisoners of war, no one would be harmed, and safe passage would be provided to a port from which they could return to Spain. The Filipino officers running the command in the last stage of the siege accepted the terms.

Then the bugle sounded. The flag that had stood on its pole since the first day of the siege was brought down and folded. The rubble sacks and sandbags in front of the door were cleared away; the door that had been shut for 337 days was opened, and those who came out into the daylight were counted: 33 men. Fifty-seven had gone into the church. Nineteen had died, 5 had deserted. Those left were bearded, sallow-faced, some too weak to walk, their uniforms in rags.

What waited for them outside was not the humiliating scene of a defeat ceremony. The Filipino soldiers who had been firing at those walls for months formed up, presented arms, and saluted the wretched column in front of them. The townspeople brought food. The 33 set out from Baler under the protection of the men who had besieged them, and reached Manila safe and sound.

The document that turned the story into a legend came four weeks later. On June 30, 1899, Emilio Aguinaldo, president of the Philippine Republic, issued a decree. The decree praised the resistance shown by the Spanish force defending the Baler church, describing it as an epic worthy of the descendants of the legendary heroes El Cid and Pelayo. And it laid down this ruling: the individuals making up that force were not to be considered prisoners but rather friends, and were to be given the papers necessary to return to their own country.

It is worth remembering that this was written by a man whose people had fought against 300 years of colonial rule, and that he wrote it for the soldiers of his own enemy. Aguinaldo was at that moment in a life-or-death war with the American army; releasing the 33 men at Baler brought him no military advantage whatsoever. The decree was not a calculation but a gesture, and history tends to forget calculations and remember gestures.

The survivors reached Barcelona on September 1, 1899. There was a crowd on the quay. It was a strange moment for Spain: a country beaten on every front in 1898, having lost the last pieces of its empire, found a single story to hold on to and held on to it. Martín Cerezo was promoted to major and given one of the heaviest of the military decorations; the enlisted men received medals and pensions. In 1904 Martín Cerezo published his memoir of the siege, and many of the details we know about Baler today first came out of those pages. The name given to them in Spanish stuck as well: los últimos de Filipinas, the Last Ones of the Philippines.

And it is exactly here that the story began its second life. A film shot in 1945 carried the siege onto the screen as a national epic and turned the men in the church into a whole generation's definition of heroism. A new film made in 2016 told the same events from the opposite direction: as the story of young men spent inside a war that was already over, of a loyalty that had lost its meaning, of ordinary people paying the bill for colonial adventures. The two films describe the same 337 days; the difference between them is the change that took place in 70 years in the way Spain looks at its own past.

The last of those who came out of the siege alive, Emilio Fabregat, died in 1960. By the time he died, the Philippines was an independent republic, Spain's colonial age had been closed into the history books, and the church at Baler was still standing.

Today Baler is the capital of Aurora province. The church has been restored, a monument to the siege stands in the square, and the place where the Spanish soldiers were buried is marked. In 2003 the Congress of the Philippines passed a law declaring June 30 Philippine-Spanish Friendship Day; the date chosen is precisely the date of Aguinaldo's "not prisoners but friends" decree. Every year on that day the flags of the two countries are raised side by side in Baler, and the descendants of two armies that once fired on each other stand in front of the same church.

What makes Baler worth remembering is not only the endurance of 33 men. The real issue is the news itself. Inside that church a war went on for 11 months after it had ended, because word of the ending could not reach the place in a form that could be accepted. Today it takes seconds for an event to be heard, but a human being accepting a piece of news is still an entirely separate matter. The newspapers in Martín Cerezo's hands were true, and for months he did not believe them; what convinced him in the end was not some overwhelming proof but a detail too small for anyone to have invented. The human mind is most often taken by the greatest truth through the smallest detail.

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