All That Love Can Give

This is from Richard Fernandez, the "Wretchard" of the famed "Belmont Club, here. A Harvard-trained Filipino, he speaks eloquently of the his childhood memories of the fabled Filipino heroes who fought back against the Japanese occupation of the Phillipines during WWII:

I thought they would never die; that through some mysterious process sheer bravery would save them from old age and death.

As I child I sat listening to my parent's family friends tell of the ones who didn't make it. Of the guerrilla Captain from Calumpit. A Japanese ratissage had hauled up all the men in town on the bridge. They were lined up on the bridge where a hooded informer led a Japanese officer to the only man he knew for certain to be in the guerillas -- the Captain.

A Nipponese officer asked him to identify his men. He refused. The Japanese officer flicked off his ear with a sword. The Captain stood straighter. And the inquisition went on until he fell to his knees, every part of him that could be sliced off, gone. And then the Japanese officer shot him through the head.

I asked our family friend if the Captain had revealed the names of his men. "No," he said, "and he could have shifted the whole questioning to his second in command -- his Lieutenant. But he didn't."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"Because I was the Lieutenant. I stood next to him in that line. And he never said a word."

I knew then that I would never be as brave as that unnamed Captain whose identity is lost to posterity, save through the memory of a child, as he writes decades later.

And as they began to pass, I realized that the tears at the funerals were in part for ourselves. We were weeping for ourselves. While they lived we felt safe in their fading shadows. And the tears were for a day when we knew we would be alone, orphaned in our patch of history.

Then no longer could the Captain on the bridge come to strengthen us in our dreams. They say that no man comes into his inheritance until he possesses it himself.

We have been given all that love can give. The rest is up to us.