At Malacanang, with the Japanese commander Tanaka looking on, Jorge Vargas urged that the constabulary be remade into a weapon against the guerrillas, and put Benigno Aquino forward to lead the hunt. The men who ran the occupied state were sharpening its blade for the fight with their own countrymen in the hills. The republic to come would be born with a sword already drawn.

Before a great crowd Jose Laurel took his oath as President of a new Philippine Republic, Chief Justice Yulo holding the book. The enemy called it independence. The forms were all Filipino — a president, a cabinet, an assembly — but the power stayed Japanese. A nation was proclaimed inside a cage, and its first duty would be to serve the empire that had built the cage.

For the first time since the occupation began, the Philippine flag — the sun and stars of the revolution — was raised, by the old men Aguinaldo and Ricarte, and the anthem was played. Some in the crowd wept at the sight of it, whatever they thought of the men on the platform. The flag was true even where the freedom was not.

On the day the enemy crowned its republic, a stranger moved through the ceremony crowd — a dried-fish and chicken trader by his clothes, Major Emigdio Cruz by his true name, Quezon's own physician come secretly from Australia. He had walked and sailed the length of the occupied islands to reach this city. Now, hidden in the throng that cheered a borrowed freedom, he began his real work.

In the mountains the news of the new republic came as it came to everyone, by radio and rumour. The guerrillas heard it and did not lower their guns. A freedom handed down by the invader, they said, was no freedom at all; the true republic was the Commonwealth that fought on from Australia and from the hills. Two Philippines now claimed the same islands.

Four days into his republic, Laurel called a special session of the National Assembly to face the thing no ceremony could hide: the country was starving. Rice was gone from the markets, the money bought nothing, and hunger was killing in the provinces. Independence had come to a nation that could not feed itself.

Foreign Minister Recto and the Japanese ambassador signed a Pact of Alliance between the republic and the empire. Its meaning stood plain in its words: the Philippines would give Japan every facility for its military actions. The independent nation had bound itself, on paper, to the side that occupied it — though it stopped short, for now, of declaring war.

A week after the enemy crowned its republic, MacArthur in Australia recognized Kangleon as commander of all the guerrillas on Leyte — the 92nd Division. Now two authorities claimed the islands: one in Manila under the rising sun, one in the hills under the promise of return. On Leyte, the people knew which one they would answer when the ships came.

In the city Cruz reached the men he had come to see. Manuel Roxas, the highest Commonwealth man left in the islands, would not cross to the enemy and would not betray him — and through him Cruz learned that Alunan, Yulo, and Avancena too held secretly to Quezon. He gave Cruz papers to carry back. The doctor hid them in a bamboo trunk under cigars and clogs and turned for home.

Independence changed nothing at the granary. The occupation went on seizing the harvest for its soldiers, and the republic's ministers could only ration the little that was left. A Filipino government now signed the orders, but the empty pot in the barrio was the same, and the hand that emptied it was still the empire's.

The great cargo submarine Narwhal came with ninety-two tons for the guerrillas — rifles, radios, medicine — and Chick Parsons aboard. She landed tons on Mindoro, then slipped into Nasipit, where a guerrilla band in pressed uniforms played Anchors Aweigh at the dock. Thirty-two evacuees sailed away in her; Parsons stayed. The Aid was no longer a trickle in small boats. It came now by the shipload.

Under a general amnesty proclaimed to grace the new independence, Major Manuel Enriquez walked out of Fort Santiago. He did not lay down his work. Within days he was back at the underground, running his men from the very city that had jailed him. The enemy's mercy had returned a soldier to the resistance.

On a dark night north of Manila the submarine Cero met Bernard Anderson's guerrillas and put ashore twenty tons of the war — radios, demolition men, a weather team, operators. The Aid was reaching Luzon now too, close to the capital itself. The underground that watched the enemy was being given the tools to strike him.

Through the autumn the occupation pressed its anti-guerrilla sweeps harder across the islands, and leaned more heavily on Filipino auxiliaries and the constabulary to do the hunting. The policy hardened toward terror. The enemy meant to break the resistance before the Americans could return to it.

On Panay the campaign of terror reached its worst. In Capiz whole districts emptied, the government ceased to function, and the burning and killing drove even friends of the guerrillas to despair. The enemy meant to break the island's will by breaking its people. It came terribly close.

The terror spilled off Panay and across the water. Along the east coast and out to Tablas, Sibuyan, and the Romblon islands the enemy swept through, burning homes and wrecking what the people had. Small islands that had thought themselves too far to matter learned that the occupation's reach had no edge.

By November Villamor's net of eyes was built and running, but the enemy was closing on him and the man was spent. He was taken off by submarine to Australia, and his work passed to others. The intelligence chain he had begun on a dark Negros beach would outlast him and feed the return.

On the rice plain the low war between the Huk and the American-led bands ran on through the autumn. Each claimed the towns and the harvest; each called the other usurper; and the enemy held the roads between them. The republic in Manila and the promise from Australia both seemed far from the fields where Filipino watched Filipino down a rifle.

On Mindoro the American agent Phillips gathered the island's leaders and pressed Ramon Ruffy to take command of a Fourth Military District of his own, free of Peralta's hand across the water. At Mamburao they made it so, with Beloncio as his second. Another island had drawn its guerrillas under one head — though the tangle of who commanded whom would not soon be undone.

From Negros the signal went out to Australia: the doctor was back and safe, his errand done. Cruz had brought word that Roxas, Alunan, Yulo, and Avancena — men who sat near the enemy's new republic — held in secret to Quezon and to America. The question Quezon had sent him to answer was answered. The heart of the country had not turned.

The submarine Gar, missing her mark at Darigayos in the dark, surfaced instead off Santiago Cove in Ilocos Sur and put ashore an intelligence and demolition team under Captains Farrell and Vaughn. The coast of the north was becoming a doorway — men and matters slipping in from the sea to feed the guerrilla war on the land.

From house arrest in Manila, General Vicente Lim sent a quiet invitation to Ed Ramsey: come, and let us talk of drawing all the guerrillas of Luzon under one command. Even watched and confined, the old soldier was working to knit the resistance whole. The dream of one army for Luzon would not die for want of men to carry it.

At Piddig in Ilocos Norte, Volckmann's men formally raised the 15th Infantry Regiment of USAFIP-NL, with Captain O'Day acting in command and Captain Roque Ablan as his executive. Where the north had held loose bands, it now built numbered regiments with rolls and orders. The silent army of the Cordillera was taking a soldier's shape.

The new regiment was one day old when the enemy came for it. A mixed force of Japanese and constabulary raided Piddig, and in the fighting Lieutenant Luna Puruganan was killed — the first officer the 15th Infantry lost. The north's new army learned at once the price it would go on paying.

On Panay the Bicol guerrilla Juan Miranda folded his Tangcong Vaca men into Lapus's 54th Regiment, then made ready to carry weapons home across the sea to Bicol. The islands' resistance was learning to lend a hand from one to another — a band raised in one province arming itself in a second to fight in a third.

This time the Gar found her mark. Off Darigayos in La Union, Major Calvert's shore party unloaded thirty-five tons of weapons and supplies and a half-ton of food, and took aboard a downed American flier, Ensign Mosko, plucked from the enemy's country. The Aid came ashore and the airman went to sea. The north's coast was open to the return.

The harvest came in thin. The seized rice, the burned fields, the taken carabao, the young men in the hills — all of it told at the threshing floor. Late in 1943 the famine that had crept through the whole year settled in to stay, and the year to come would be hungrier still.

Hidden in a railroad boxcar, on false papers a friend named Roeder had made for him, Ed Ramsey rode into Manila to work the city's underground face to face. The man who led the guerrillas of the eastern hills walked the enemy's own capital in disguise. The war of the shadows was fought as much in the city as in the mountains.

From Mindanao, Charles Smith led a coastwatcher team north toward Leyte Gulf and Manila Bay, to plant new eyes along the coasts the ships would one day come to. The net of watchers Villamor had begun in the south was reaching now toward the very waters of the return. The islands were readying themselves to see it coming.

The second Christmas of the occupation was leaner than the first. The Misa de Gallo was said in cold churches; the tables held camote and little more; the money bought nothing. Families counted the empty places — the dead, the imprisoned, the ones in the hills — and held to the whisper passed with the I-shall-return matchboxes: that the next Christmas might be free.

On Christmas the Czech consul Schmelkis found Ramsey and warned him: a double agent, known only as CIO-12, had marked him. Ramsey went to ground inside Roeder's gas-company compound while the Kempeitai threw a nine-day hunt across the city for him. He kept his freedom by an inch, and the underground learned again how deep the enemy's eyes now reached.

In the north a traitor did what the sweeps could not. The double agent Franco Vera Reyes got hold of the roster of Enriquez's Baguio intelligence headquarters, and with it the names of the men in the net. To save the rest, several had to surrender themselves. One bought informer had unraveled what a year of the enemy's patience had not.

The terror left the land itself in ruins. Across Panay the rice paddies were burned, the coconut groves cut, the carabao dead in the fields, whole valleys black and empty. To starve the guerrillas the enemy had scorched the island, and the wound went deep into the soil. It would take the land far longer to heal than the war would last.

As the year of independence ended in famine, Laurel reorganized his government and called the landowners of Luzon to Malacanang. If it came to it, he told them, the country might have to sacrifice a third of its people to save the other two thirds. It was a terrible arithmetic, spoken aloud by the head of a state that could not feed its own.