In the far north the Japanese took Marcelo Adduru, the guerrilla governor of Cagayan, who had kept a free provincial government alive in the hills. Another of the north's free governors was gone — Ablan vanished, and now Adduru in enemy hands. The mountains still hid the fighters, but the men who had held civil authority in them were falling one by one.

From the Davao Penal Colony, ten American prisoners and two Filipino convicts made the only large escape of Allied prisoners in the whole Pacific war. Among them were Dyess, McCoy, Shofner, and Grashio, men who had survived Bataan and the Death March. They vanished into the swamp with guerrilla help, carrying in their memory the truth of what had been done to the prisoners — a truth the world had not yet heard.

After months of hide-and-seek by the shores of Laguna de Bay, Marcos Agustin and Yay Panlilio led the Marking guerrillas north and east into the Sierra Madre, the great mountain wall of eastern Luzon. From its ridges and rivers they could strike toward Manila and vanish again. The band that had been hunted on a narrow peninsula now had a range to hide an army.

From Australia MacArthur sent Villamor a worried word: the guerrilla commands were feuding, leader against leader, over rank and ground. Villamor had his own complaint — he protested to headquarters against Peralta's high-handed order to arrest the paroled soldiers. The resistance had grown large enough to quarrel with itself, and the quarrels could cost as much as the enemy.

As the rice failed, the people turned to the land in a new way. Camote and cassava went into the yards, kangkong into the ditches, and vegetables onto every empty lot in Manila. The city that had bought its food now grew it, in tin cans and vacant corners. Hunger made farmers of clerks.

After the March sweeps the Hukbalahap rebuilt itself. It set up a General Headquarters under Luis Taruc and Casto Alejandrino and redrew its regional commands across the rice plain. But a rift opened between Taruc and the party leaders, and the peasant army began to spend as much strength quarreling — with its own and with the USAFFE bands over the plain — as it spent against the enemy.

The Kempeitai chief Ikeda had sent Marking a demand to surrender. Marking refused, and the answer came under a full moon: a heavy patrol fell on his base at Mount Kanumay. He and forty-nine of his men broke out and ran four days through the Sierra Madre before they reached safety. To refuse the enemy was to be hunted; to be hunted and live was its own victory.

Jorge Vargas and Chief Justice Jose Yulo, the highest Filipinos in the enemy's service, sailed south to inspect Negros and Panay and judge how the pacification was going. They came to see loyal, quiet provinces. Behind the official welcome, the islands they toured were laced with the very resistance they had come to declare beaten.

From Villamor's landing a chain of hidden radios spread along the coasts of the Visayas. The coastwatchers counted the ships that passed in the straits — the troop transports, the tankers, the escorts — and passed the tally out to Australia. The islands had become MacArthur's eyes on the sea lanes, silent and patient behind the enemy's back.

Through the spring the dawn round-ups went on. A barrio ringed at first light, the people herded to the plaza, the hooded informer walking the line, and the pointed-at carried off to Fort Santiago. The independence promised in the newspapers did not reach the cells. Fear kept its own calendar.

On the fifth the KZRH radio told the city that Premier Tojo had come again to Manila. The capital was swept and hung with flags for the highest man of the empire. He had come to make the great promise in person, and to see for himself the loyalty his administrators swore the islands felt.

At a vast day of gratitude on the Luneta, Tojo promised the islands their independence — swiftly, he said, on the condition that the people give active military cooperation to the empire. The crowd was turned out to give thanks. The price of the promise, spoken plainly, was Filipino help in Japan's war.

On the first anniversary of Corregidor's fall, Vargas went on the air and called on all the USAFFE men still in the hills to come down, surrender, and lay their arms aside. Some, worn out, did. Most heard the voice of a countryman speaking the enemy's words, and stayed where they were.

The people had their own newspaper, and it travelled by mouth. News of the war passed barrio to barrio faster than the enemy could stop it, wrapped in jokes, in whispered rumours, in the old kundiman sung with a double meaning. Under the occupation the Filipino learned to say one thing and mean another, and to keep hope alive in a tune.

Villamor asked headquarters to name him, plainly and permanently, commander of the Seventh Military District — Negros and Siquijor. He had built the intelligence net and steadied the island; now he wanted the authority to match the work. The request tangled in the same rivalries MacArthur had warned him of.

Behind the bright talk of nationhood, the country starved by degrees. The sugar economy had collapsed and thrown thousands out of work; famine crept through the provinces; families lived on root crops and less. The promise of a flag arrived at tables with nothing on them. Independence, the people said, you cannot eat.

Recognized now by MacArthur, Fertig spread the government of his Tenth District across the free interior of Mindanao — courts, schools, printed money, even a small guerrilla air and sea service. Where the enemy held only the coast towns, a whole country ran itself in the hills. Mindanao showed what a free Philippines under arms could look like.

On Negros, Villamor set up a free civil government and put at its head the popular pre-war governor, Alfredo Montelibano. It fed the people, judged their disputes, and printed emergency money — a whole province running itself behind the enemy's lines. As on Mindanao under Fertig, a free Philippines governed in the hills while the occupier held the coast.

Senator Jose Ozamiz slipped secretly onto Mindanao with the Campos brothers to knit his Manila-facing intelligence into Fertig's district and Parsons's network. The threads of the underground were being tied together across the islands — Manila to Negros to Mindanao — into one web reporting to Australia.

To fight the guerrillas the occupation armed more Filipinos against Filipinos. The constabulary was enlarged, and the pro-Japanese groups — the Ganap and their like — were drawn into a Fifth Column of watchers and militiamen. The enemy meant to make the country police itself. It divided the country instead.

On Leyte, Colonel Kangleon worked through the spring to draw the island's feuding bands under one command. It was slow and dangerous work — some leaders would not bend, and the enemy pressed between — but piece by piece the Leyte resistance became one force. The island that would greet MacArthur's return was being made ready, a year ahead.

Having crossed the swamps and mountains from the central plain, the Wha-Chi — the Chinese Squadron 48 — reached Paete on the shore of Laguna de Bay, guided the last stretch by the Marking and Hunter guerrillas. There they helped raise four new squadrons for the Huk. The war against the occupier was fought by Filipino and Chinese hands together.

In a house on Third Street in Manila, Antonio Bautista of the Free Philippines gathered a quiet company to dinner — Colonel Manzano, the jurist Jose B. L. Reyes, Liling Roces, Lorenzo Tanada — and over the table they matched their intelligence work and their plans. Under the very nose of the Kempeitai, the city's underground governed a war of its own.

On the seventh tee at Wack Wack, in the early morning, a man named Feliciano Lizardo shot Jose Laurel and left him gravely wounded. Laurel lived. A citywide Kempeitai crackdown followed, and suspects were seized and killed. The gun had reached even into the ranks of the enemy's chosen Filipinos.

Near Lubuagan in Kalinga the Japanese, having tortured a native runner into talking, at last caught Colonels Moses and Noble, the two who had raised the standard of USAFIP-NL. With their capture, command of the whole North Luzon resistance passed to Russell Volckmann, who would hold it, unbroken, to the end of the war.

In the hills east of the capital, Major Ed Ramsey knit the guerrillas of Rizal, Bulacan, and the Nueva Ecija border into the East Central Luzon Guerrilla Area — an underground army whose agents reached into Manila itself. He built for the long game: intelligence now, uprising later, when the Americans came.

Near Labangan on the Zamboanga coast, Major Jordan Hamner came ashore with radios, medicine, and weapons for Fertig's Tenth District. Piece by piece, submarine by submarine, the Aid was reaching the islands — the tools of a real army placed in guerrilla hands.

Back in Tokyo, Tojo told the Diet the Philippines would be independent within the year. The word ran through the islands and filled a thousand speeches. To the men writing the new state it was a mandate; to the men in the hills it was a flag the enemy meant to fly over an occupied country.

The KALIBAPI convened and chose twenty of its own for a Preparatory Commission for Philippine Independence, with Jose Laurel — barely risen from his hospital bed — at its head. Their charge was to write a constitution, in the spirit of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. A nation was to be drafted to order, under the eye of the occupier.

Felipa Culala — Dayang-Dayang, the peasant leader who had beaten the Japanese at Candaba in the first spring of the war — was tried by her own Huk comrades for banditry and abuse of power, and shot. The revolution had begun to judge, and to kill, its own. It is a hard part of the story, and it is told here plainly.

From Panay, Peralta reached beyond his island. He sent Captain Hontiveros with a combat team to Masbate and Colonel Jurado with another to Mindoro, carrying the organization of the resistance into new ground. The Free Panay forces were becoming a regional power, their writ crossing the seas between the islands.

The June rains came, and the barrios planted what they could. But the young men were in the hills or the graves, the carabao had been taken, and the seed rice was short. The land was willing; the hands and the beasts to work it were not. The rice year opened under a shadow that no rain could lift.

On Palawan a rancher named Alfred Cobb shot and killed Major Guillermo Maramba, the constabulary inspector, in a bitter dispute over who would command the armed men. Far from Manila, in the smallest places, the war bred its own quarrels, and Filipino killed Filipino over rank and rifles. It is set down here as it happened.