THE

DEATH
MARCH
BIENVENIDO N. SANTOS

RICA A. MOYA
3-B
01 RICA A. MOYA | REPORT 2022
 BIENVENIDO
NUQUI SANTOS
BRIEF BACKGROUND

Bienvenido N. Santos (1911-1996) was a Filipino-American fiction, poetry and non-

fiction writer. He was born and raised in Tondo, Manila on March 22, 1911. His family
roots are origanally from Lubao, Pampanga, Philippines. He lived in the United States
for many years where he is widely credited as a pioneering Asian-American writer.
March of Death is a poem that express the suffering of many Filipino in Bataan Death
March by the time of Japanese Occupation.

He received his Bachelor of Art Degree from the University of the Philippines where he
first studied creative writing under Paz Marquez Benitez. In 1941, Santos was
government pensionado to the United States at the University of Illinois, Columbia
University, and Harvard University. During World War II, he served with the Philippine
Government in exile under President Quezon in Washington D.C.,

Santos received an honorary doctorate degree in humanities and letters from the
University of the Philippines,and Bicol University in 1981. After his retirement, Santos
became Visiting Writer and Artist at De La Salle University in Manila; he university
honored Santos by renaming its creative writing center after him.
oo

02 RICA A. MOYA | REPORT 2022

THE DEATH MARCH
BIENVENIDO N. SANTOS

Were you one of them, my brother

Whom they marched under the April sun
And flogged to bleeding along the roads we knew and loved?

March, my brother, march!

The springs are clear beyond the road
There is rest at the foot of the hill.

We were young together,

So very young and unafraid;
Walked those roads, dusty in the summer sun,
Brown pools and mud in the December rains;
We ran barefoot along the beaten tracks in the canefields
Planted corn after the harvest months.

Here, too, we fought and loved

Shared our dreams of a better place
Beyond those winding trails.

March, my brother march!

The springs are clear beyond the road
There is rest at the foot of the hill.

We knew those roads by heart

Told places in the dark
By the fragrance of garden hedge
In front of uncle‘s house;
The clatter of wooden shoes on the bamboo bridge,
The peculiar rustling of bamboo groves
Beside the house where Celia lived.

03 RICA A. MOYA | REPORT 2022

THE DEATH MARCH
BIENVENIDO N. SANTOS

Did you look through the blood in your eyes

For Celia sitting by the window,
As thousands upon thousands of you
Walked and died on the burning road?

If you died among the hundreds by the roadside

It should have been by the bamboo groves
With the peculiar rustling in the midnight.

No, you have not died; you cannot die;

I have felt your prayer touch my heart
As I walked along the crowded streets of America.

And we would walk those roads again one April morn,

Listen to the sound of working men
Dragging tree trunks from the forests,
Rebuilding homes- laughing again-
Sowing the field with grain, fearless of death
From cloudless skies.

You would be silent, remembering

The many young bodies that lay mangled by the
roadside;
The agony and the moaning and the silent tears,
The grin of yellow men, their bloodstained
blades opaque in the sun;

04 RICA A. MOYA | REPORT 2022

 THE DEATH MARCH
BIENVENIDO N. SANTOS

I would be silent, too, having nothing to say.

What matters if the winters were bitter cold
And loneliness stalked my footsteps on the snow?

March, my brother, march!

The springs are clear beyond the road
Rest, at the foot of the hill.

And we would walk those roads again on April morn

Hand in hand like pilgrims marching
Towards the church on the hillside,
Only a little nipa house beside the bamboo groves
With the peculiar rustling in the midnight
Or maybe I would walk them yet,
Remembering... remembering

05 RICA A. MOYA | REPORT 2022

INTERPRETATION

It talks about how life was so cruel to our people during the Japanese
Occupation in our country and how they managed to get through the pain and
brutality. {April 9, 1942} 12,000 American and 58,000 Filipino soldiers
surrendered. The next seven days the captured mens form into long columns
that were forces to walk 65 miles in tropical temperature over 100 degress
given no food or water and rested rarely. Over 5,000 would die on the march

On the lines such as "No, you have not died; you cannot die; I have felt your
prayer touch my heart as I walked the crowded streets of America" I think
Bienvenido Santos acknowldeges the power of belief or, perhaps, Faith. It was
as if he imagined the people in the death march beginning to lose hope, to lose
the will to live and, with this, told himself that he had to hope when they no
longer did; to believe that they would make it through alive; to keep his faith
in the same God they prayed to. The poem was full of emotional suffering one
went through knowing his or her loved ones were going through undeserved
torture, possibly to the point of death. It was sorrowful because Bienvenido
Santos wrote this piece as elegy to a frined who died in Bataan Death March.
The lesson I learned in reading the March Of Death is that there is a rainbow
always after the rain and it's like a wide and deep canyon from which to
explore myself and find out what made me who I am today.

06 RICA A. MOYA | REPORT 2022

INTERPRETATION

It was called the death march, because of the way they killed you, If
you stopped walking, you died. If you had to defecate, you died. If
you had a malaria attack and if you fell down, you died. The Japanes
would even force prisoners to stand to attention in the midday sun
until some would drop of heat exhaustion. Many artesian wells lined
of the path of the march but any prisoners who tried to approach
was killed. Despearation would lead men to resort to drink whatever
they could find. You would see water in the side of the road in
carabao wallows that result of dysentery. They marched ten more
miles when they arrived at Camp O' Donnelt the minisiter of War
Hideki Tojo said "A POW who does not work, should not eat" other
POWs continued to die from starvation and disease, the camp diet
was lugao and to survive for their food, prisioner supplement their
diet with prisoner stew, which made from anything edible that they
stole such as turnips, or rats and sick prisoners were sent into zero
ward for patients with zero hope.

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REFERENCE

https://philworldliterature.wordpress.com/march-of-death/
https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/bataan-death-march
https://www.slideshare.net/vintagedevonne/march-of-death-by-bienvenido-
santos
https://docshare.tips/philippine-literature_5872a896b6d87f59088b4b40.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AuNlxr5Gg0

08 RICA A. MOYA | REPORT 2022