I was excited to start reading this book. I thought it was going to be an in-depth and tell all book about General Pio Del Pilar, similar to the other book of the author: The Tinio Brigade: Anti American Resistance in the Ilocos Provinces, 1899-1901. 

However, the part about Pio Del Pilar is only half of the book, about 99 pages. The rest of the book were filled with the foreword and afterword of his friend, Frank A. Hilario, which reached 69 pages combined. I didn’t even know you could have someone write the afterword for your book, isn’t it usually the musings of the author itself? But here, the afterword is almost as many pages as the book’s subject. The friend ranted on about all his personal heroes, and why they made his vaunted list. Then it hit me: that’s why the 2nd part of the book’s title is the way it was. Pio Del Pilar & Other Heroes. These were the other heroes! Silly me of course to expect that the “other heroes” were Del Pilar’s comrades in battle. 

I did like the parts about Pio Del Pilar though. One scene described how Del Pilar led his battalion into a melee armed with just bolos. I’ve grown tired of bolomen just being used as canon fodder in battles but here it described how the marvelous bolomen of Del Pilar persisted and won the battle. From the revolutionary paper La Indenpendencia:

Pio del Pilar and his heroes have won for themselves a foremost place in the annals of the present generation. Through the wilds of Malapatnabato (sic), his intrepid bolomen showed once and  for all their undoubted efficiency at a time when musketry is powerless to make an end of the enemy. General Pio del Pilar, with marvelous intuition, sent his bolomen against a mass of American troops, as a huntsman lets loose his hounds to drive out the wild beasts trying to hide in the depths of the woods, The episodes of the last few days have been so brilliant and so numerous that it is difficult to find a parallel in history in great military achievement.