The American Legacy Historian Arnaldo Dumindin quotes an incident in the death camps: 17 Female prisoners, Batangas, ca. 1899. Note the young girl and the elderly woman. (c) Public domain ing into account the provisions needed to feed them. He assigned garrison troops to guard and punish the populace for the slightest infraction. This freed a large portion of his troops for employment in field operations. His troops methodically devastated the countryside section by section until no hut or structure stood, all fields had been burned, wells poisoned, and every nook and cranny scouted. The result: 100,000 in the concentration camps perished. General Malvar, to stop further harm on the people penned in hamlets, surrendered. Reverend W. H. Walker received a letter from his son and showed it to the Boston Journal, which reported about it on May 5, 1902. The letter described how 1,300 prisoners were executed over a few weeks. A Filipino priest heard their confessions for several days and then he was hanged in front of them. Twenty prisoners at a time were made to dig their mass graves and then were shot. The young Walker wrote, “To keep them prisoners would necessitate the placing of the soldiers on short rations, if not starving them. There was nothing to do but kill them.” In his defense, Bell declared that Filipinos had broken General Order No. 100 (The Lieber Code) “by wearing civilian clothes with no special markings and returning home between battles” and “divesting themselves of the character and appearance of soldiers...concealing their arms...posing as peaceful citizens.... rudely constructed infernal machines propelling poisoned arrows or darts…destruction of telegraph wires and bridges.” Summing up, he said, “it is an inevitable consequence of war that the innocent must generally suffer with the guilty” and 65