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his passengers to sleep ashore in Manila that night because the Japanese might try to bomb the ships in the harbor. He told them the
Grant
would leave for Australia the next morning. If only. The La Salette fathers left their luggage and provisions aboard the ship and went in search of a place to stay at one of Manila’s religious communities. The Jesuit priests at Ateneo de Manila, six blocks from the piers, invited them to stay. The students had been sent home when war broke out, so there were plenty of beds. But when the fathers returned to the pier the next morning, the
Grant
was gone, along with their luggage and provisions and a four-hundred-pound church bell for the mission in Burma. What little money the fathers had they soon handed over to the Jesuits at the Ateneo for room and board. Father Julien was very aware that he was penniless and stuck in a foreign country now engaged in war.
    The mysterious lady in black asked him once more if he was Padre Hulian, a La Salette priest.
    â€œAre not there three of you stranded in my country?” she asked.
    â€œThat is correct,” Father Julien answered.
    She reached inside the folds of her dress and fished out an envelope and handed it to the priest. She told him that someone had asked her to give it to him. Then she turned and walked away.
    Father Julien opened the envelope and gasped. He counted the money. One hundred pesos.
    He began asking the Jesuits about the lady in black. One of them told him her name. Josefina Guerrero. He’d see her again.

 8 
BOYS
    T he convoy entered Lingayen Gulf after nightfall on December 22—eighty Japanese ships carrying Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma and his Fourteenth Army of forty-three thousand soldiers who disembarked and fought ashore. The only challenge to the massive fleet was from a few 155-millimeter guns. On land, it quickly seemed like they knew exactly what they were doing. More and more it seemed as though the enemy had been living among the unsuspecting Filipinos, watching, waiting. The Japanese fishing fleets, friendly before the outbreak, knew every landing. The kindly Japanese photographer, who owned a legitimate business, had been taking pictures of the rapidly built fortifications. The laborers and farmers and merchants, it would be learned, were part of a patchwork of thousands of spies who for years had been turning over information to the empire in preparation for this day of conquest.
    Maybe if the Filipino fighters were better trained or weren’t fighting with World War I-era rifles, they could have driven back the attacking force. There was no choice but to retreat, lest they be easily overrun and slaughtered. And when Japanese troops landed at Lamon Bay on the east coast of Luzon, forty miles south of Manila, General MacArthur saw a nightmare coming: two forces working toward each other like the jaws of a “great military pincer,” he later wrote.
    MacArthur was shocked, according to those around him. He was unable to give commands to his staff officers. When he finally got his bearings, he ordered troops from all over South Luzon to withdraw to Bataan, where the US and Philippine soldiers would make a final stand, side by side. They streamed through Manila, saying good-bye and “It’ll be a long time before you see us again,” then rushed toward the peninsula, calling home one last time along the way, blowing up bridges behind them. He ordered the units fighting the Japanese in the north to “stand and fight, slip back and dynamite,” a delay-action retrograde maneuver that would give troops from the south time to get to Bataan.
    The ROTC boys from the Ateneo and cadets from the Philippine Military Academy—the young ones who weren’t commissioned but refused to go home—began trying to organize. They wanted to fight. They wanted to go to Bataan. There were about forty-three boys from the Ateneo alone, and they joined together with the military