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All Spaniards are robbers and they'd kill us for a peso. Yes, and the pacificos are no better. I tell you we need to get out of this place." "I intend to arrange it at once, but the sight of those jewels has frightened me. If we are searched if we are even suspected " "Oh, Rosa wouldn't have any more use for her pretty trinkets. She'd be in heaven before you could scratch your nose."
So long as the cities were overcrowded with pacificos and their streets were putrid with disease, so long did the Spanish garrisons sicken and die, as flies perish upon poisoned carrion. Out on the cool, clean hills and the windy savannas where the Insurrectos dwelt there was health.
The letter press accompanying these photographs explained that this guerrilla leader, Benito Cerreros, had found six unarmed pacificos working in a field near Sagua, and had murdered them and then brought their bodies in a cart to that town, and had paid the local photographer to take a picture of them and of himself and his body guard.
The huts of the pacificos, with from four to six people in each, were jammed together in rows a quarter of a mile long, within ten feet of the cavalry barracks, where sixty men and horses had lived for a month. Next to the stables were the barracks. No one was vaccinated, no one was clean, and all of them were living on half rations.
I saw the survivors of the Johnstown flood when the horror of that disaster was still plainly written in their eyes, but destitute as they were of home and food and clothing, they were in better plight than those fever-stricken, starving pacificos, who have sinned in no way, who have given no aid to the rebels, and whose only crime is that they lived in the country instead of in the town.
Indeed, it was upon the hapless pacificos that the horrors of war chiefly descended. They were ruined, but that was the least. Their property, the honor of their women, and their lives were held to be the legitimate spoil of any Spanish soldier, and the tacit legalization of loot, rapine, and murder was taken full advantage of.
"You got a touch o' sun, like as not, riding in that heat this morning. Now there's no call to get worked up, or talk about blood-sheddin'. Blood-sheddin' ain't in our line, yours nor mine, nor husband's neither. Fur as doin' goes, we're all pacificos here, Miss Margaritty, and you mustn't forget that.
It's hard to be a man and lose the activity of your limbs. But there! there's compensations, I always say. If Noonsey was as he was ten years ago, he'd be off with the rest, and then where'd I be?" "Then" Rita's eyes flashed, and she bent nearer her hostess, and spoke low. "Then you are not at heart pacificos, Marm Prudence.
I have no statistics to prove these figures, but, judging from the hospital reports and from what the consuls tell of the many murders of pacificos, I judge that that proportion would be rather under than above the truth.
One was a picture of the bodies of six Cuban pacificos lying on their backs, with their arms and legs bound and their bodies showing mutilation by machetes, and their faces pounded and hacked out of resemblance to anything human. The other picture was of a group of Spanish guerrillas surrounding their leader, a little man with a heavy mustache.
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