Show OUR ARMY AT MANILA one of the unpleasant yet common results of any war is the tendency of most people to magnify the importance of their own special heroes and to belittle the efforts of all participants in actual engagements the quarrel of partisans of two gallant naval commanders rs as to which deserved most if not all the credit for the destruction of cerveris veras fleet is still fresh in every ones memory a single regiment no matter which of half a dozen that might be named did all the hard fight ng ig at san juan hill if the regiments regiment li special admirers are to be believed and now the story Is told again and again that our army in the philippines really did nothing in particular at mania manla that the army might as well have been elsewhere for the city was really at the mercy of the navy that the army consequently marched through swamps and into trenches killed some spanish soldiers and suffered some killing in return for no possible purpose durpos except to display itself and to grato gratify its feeling of pea lousy regarding the ex plots of the navy the truth lathat is that without the army we should never have taken manila ability to destroy does not imply ability to take and hold admiral dewey could have reduced manila to ashegh and rubbish and its people to starvation or flight but even then he could not have spared enough men to take and maintain possession pos of the ruins it la Is unnecessary to say that no Amez american ican naval commander would of his own accord destroy a great city and put its inhabitants in extreme misery except for strate gc reasons such as did not exist at manila until manila was held however we lacked much of the moral and political effect of deleys deweys brilliant victory colliers weekly |