"Are the guns ready?" Major General Arthur MacArthur asked.
"They armed, sir" The officer replies.
"Commence the attack." Arthur answers.
~~
The morning air over the Bagbag River was thick with a damp, suffocating mist that clung to the tall elephant grass and weighed heavily on the leaves of the nipa palms. It was a deceptive quiet, broken only by the low, rhythmic croaking of frogs and the distant, muffled sounds of a massive army rousing itself to life two kilometres out.
I crouch with my back pressed against the damp earth wall. With me, Anya sat beside in silence, while her thumb gently resting against her sidearms. Down the zig-zagging traverse line, my core squad were scattered among the soldados, while the other Kabo teams are in their position.
Not a single soul spoke. Even a single match was not litt.
Then, the sound of the cannons seems to have shattered the earth.
THOOM! THOOM! THOOM!
About two kilometres to the west, the field guns spit its synchronized volley of high-explosive iron. seconds later, the air above the riverbank tore open with a sound like ripping canvas, followed by the stomach-churning, rolling thunder of the shells crossing the sky.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The ground violently lurded beneath our boots as the preliminary barrage detonated. Geysers of mud, shattered nipa palms, and scorched earth burst into the morning sky. Shrapnel whistled viciously through the air, shearing through the tall grass and raining clods of dirt down onto our hidden bamboo canopy.
A few of the regular soldados in the trench instinctively cringed, their eyes wide with raw, primal terror, hands clapping over their ears. I moved along the line in a low crouch, placing a firm, steadying hand on a young recruit's trembling shoulder. I didn't say a word; I just caught his eyes and gave him a slow, measured nod.
The shells kept coming. THOOM! BOOM! THOOM! BOOM!
It was a relentless, mechanical rhythm designed by the general's artillery commanders to turn human bones to powder and break a defender's spirit before a single infantryman stepped onto the field. For forty-five suffocating minutes, the barrage pounded the riverbank, churning the landscape into a hellish crater-scape.
It's just that every single piece of high-explosive iron hit empty air.
Fifty meters to our left, the dummy trenches we had spent the previous night constructing—painstakingly dressed with loose brush, rotted logs, and torn canvas rags—were being systematically pulverized into oblivion. The American spotters across the river, observing through their field glasses, saw the freshly turned earth erupting in clouds of black smoke and assumed their fire was wiping out the last remnants of Luna's center line.
Down in our actual, three-meter-deep, timber-braced traverse ditches, my men sat virtually untouched. The thick earth berms pushed the blast waves up and over our heads, leaving us enveloped in a thick blanket of drifting cordite smoke and falling dirt, but entirely unharmed.
Gradually, the thunder of the field guns slowed, sputtering down to a final, echoing thud before falling completely silent.
A heavy, ringing quiet settled over the Bagbag River. The drifting smoke hung low over the churned mud, smelling bitterly of sulfur and scorched timber.
Beside me, Anya slowly eased herself up toward the hidden observation slit in the trenches, her eyes narrowing into cold slits. I pulled myself up beside her, raising my brass spyglass just enough to clear the grass line.
Across the murky water, movement broke the tree line.
Dark blue uniforms surged forward out of the brush. It wasn't a cautious, spread-out scouting element—it was a full-scale, disciplined infantry push. The americans were moving forward in tight, confident columns, their rifles held at the ready, bayonets gleaming dully under the pale morning sun.
Seems the enemy had advanced a few metres to the front as the field guns are spewing its attacks. They reached the shattered, dismantled span of the Bagbag railway bridge and the shallow, muddy ford beneath it. With the practiced efficiency of a modern army, American officers barked orders, their clear English voices carrying across the still water.
"Move up! Double time! Keep the line tight!"
The first wave of blue coats splashed into the river, pushing through the knee-deep water and scrambling up the muddy banks on our side. As the lead company crested the lip of the embankment, they came upon the smoking, blackened ruins of our dummy trenches.
I watched through the spyglass as an American officer—a captain with his saber drawn—stepped over a shattered log inside the fake earthworks. He looked around at the scorched dirt, the torn canvas, and the absolute absence of a single Filipino corpse.
A wide, arrogant grin spread across his face.
A chuckle rippled through the advancing American ranks. To them, the conclusion was obvious: the preliminary artillery barrage had terrified the "insurgents" so thoroughly that they had abandoned their positions and fled into the jungle, leaving behind nothing but broken shelters. The Filipinos were in total disarray. The center line was wide open.
"They ran!" a sergeant shouted, laughing as he waved his arm forward. "The Gugu's cut and run! Forward! Secure the bridgehead!"
The overconfidence was infectious. The American formation broke its cautious skirmish line. Sensing a quick, bloodless victory that would have them having lunch in Calumpit, the blue coats accelerated their pace. Hundreds of soldiers bunched up into tight, surging columns, pouring over the riverbank and marching briskly down the narrow dirt approach road toward our sector.
They were moving fast, boots churning the soft mud, completely unaware that they were stepping directly into the jaws of a trap.
Deep in the darkness of the main trench, not a single Filipino moved.
My men,, supported by Todri's platoon,sat with their knuckles white against the wooden stocks of their Mausers and Remingtons. The urge to panic, to stand up and shoot early, was a physical weight in the air. But my relentless drills, backed by the firm hands of my squad and Todri's men physically pressing down on the regulars' shoulders, kept the line dead still.
"Hold..." I whispered, my voice barely a thread of sound carried on the humid breeze. "Hold..."
Anya stood beside me, her eyes tracking the lead American column. They crossed the five-hundred-meter mark. Then four hundred. Three hundred.
They were so close now that I could hear the wet slap of their canteens against their hips, the heavy breathing of the soldiers, and the arrogant banter of men who believed the battle was already won. They were bunched together, a dense mass of blue uniforms squeezed into the narrow corridor between the river and the dense bamboo thicket.
Two hundred meters.
One hundred and fifty.
They reached the exact clearing where two massive, ancient bronze lantakas—heavy, muzzle-loading native cannons stuffed to the brim with black powder, iron scraps, lead balls, and rusted nails—lay hidden beneath camouflaged brush, aimed flat along the road at point-blank range.
Beside the hidden cannons, Mateo and Miguel stood with burning slow-matches held in their calloused hands. They looked at me, their faces grim, waiting for the single word that would unleash hell.
I drew my captured Orbea .44 revolver, stepped up onto the firing step, and raised the heavy iron barrel toward the sky.
"FUEGO!" I roared.
Mateo and Miguel slammed the glowing matches down onto the touchholes of the lantakas.
BOOOOM-CRACK!
The twin bronze cannons detonated simultaneously with a deafening, earth-shaking roar that sounded like the mountain itself had split open. A blinding sheet of orange flame and thick, white smoke erupted from the brush, spewing a cone of jagged iron scrap, lead, and nails directly into the front ranks of the bunched-up American column.
The effect was catastrophic.
At a range of barely a hundred meters, the improvised canister shot tore through the lead American company like a scythe through dry grass. The front line of blue uniforms simply vanished, disintegrated in a red spray of iron and bone. Men were lifted off their feet and thrown backward into their comrades, the tight column instantly collapsing into a writhing, screaming mass of crimson.
Before the echoes of the cannon fire could even fade, I brought my arm down.
"SQUAD! OPEN FIRE!"
Along the entire three-hundred-meter length of our deep, hidden trench, the men threw off their bamboo camouflage screens and rose from the earth like ghosts rising from the grave.
PAM! PAM! PAM! PAM-PAM-PAM!
A wall of synchronized, controlled rifle fire erupted from the parapet. My original squad, equipped with their Mauser rifles, cycled their bolts with mechanical, terrifying speed, pouring a relentless stream of 7.0mm lead into the stunned American ranks. Alongside them, the regulars, executing the "one shot, one breath" rhythm that Sanchez and Julian had beaten into them, fired in disciplined, overlapping volleys.
The narrow approach road became a literal meat grinder.
The Americans, trapped between the river embankment and the dense brush, had nowhere to run. The overconfident charge turned into an absolute slaughter in a matter of seconds. Officers were picked off instantly by Anya and the veteran Kabos, their shouts of command choked off before they could order a formation shift.
"Ambush! It's an ambush!" American soldiers screamed, stumbling over the dead and wounded as they desperately tried to unslung their Krag rifles. "They're in the ground! THEY'RE IN THE GROUND!"
Panic, absolute and unadulterated, swept through the blue-coated ranks. The tight columns that had been marching so confidently moments ago has now shattered into chaos. Men dropped their rifles, turned, and tried to sprint back toward the riverbank, shoving past their own reinforcements who were still trying to push forward.
"DON'T LET THEM RETREAT!" I bellowed over the deafening roar of gunfire, stepping fully onto the parapet. "VP-SECTION! ENCIRCLE THEM!"
From the left flank, Kabo Vicente and his fireteam, who had been lying in wait inside a secondary concealed ditch, rose out of the high grass. They opened a merciless crossfire along the retreat path, cutting off the bottleneck to the shallow ford. From the right flank, Kabo Macario led his veterans out of the brush with fixed bayonets, sealing the pocket.
The Americans were completely surrounded, pinned against the muddy banks of the Bagbag River.
What followed was no longer a military engagement; it was a clinical, merciless trap closing shut. Each volley of fire is supported with minimal gaps, so whenever a group of Americans tried to charge the trench, it created a zone of death that no human could cross.
The blue uniforms fell in piles along the river road. The murky water of the Bagbag, which had been clear only an hour before, turned a dark, sickly red as the bodies of the invaders tumbled down the muddy banks into the current.
In less than twenty minutes of violent, concentrated chaos, the primary American assault force that had stepped across the river to celebrate a bloodless victory was utterly decimated—shattered by the depth of a trench they never saw coming.