Authors: William Dietrich
“Then you must ask for help, from Dessalines.”
“Will he care about my mission?”
“If you care about his.”
I
still didn’t have a comprehensible answer to the riddle of the jewels that the dying L’Ouverture had given my wife, but I at least had a new destination and, I hoped, new allies. My thought was to persuade Jubal to come with me to Martinique, but to get his loan from the rebel army I needed to make partnership with Dessalines. So I returned to the black general’s camp, explained in private the treasure all sides were after, and asked for men to help find it. This black king had given me opportunity by sending me to Cecile Fatiman. Now I had to make best use of it.
“This is a very colorful tale you tell,” Dessalines said, eyeing me shrewdly. “Aztec emperors, lost jewels, and flying machines.”
“Some of it must be true. I’m not that imaginative.”
“I do not believe it true, but I don’t believe it untrue, either. I don’t have much confidence in your courage, Ethan Gage, but I sense an instinct for survival that sets some men apart. I can only spare you soldiers after I take Cap-François and force out the French. I’ve received word a British squadron is approaching to blockade Rochambeau, and an attack on land could decide the issue. To which side are you actually allied?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? “To whichever side helps me get wife, son, and emerald. Which is your side now, and I must succeed before British and French catch up to me.”
He nodded. Ambitious men understand expediency. “You promised an idea of how to surprise the French lines, and you must first help me win my battle before I help get back your wife or son. Otherwise, it’s easier to impale you on a pole and plant you, alive and screaming for your mother, in front of the French fortifications. This will demonstrate what will happen to white men when we finally win. Your shrieks would dampen their morale, I think.”
He suggested this alternative rather matter-of-factly. In thinking back to forbidding acquaintances such as the Egyptian Rite’s Alessandro Silano, Djezzar the Butcher, the warrior chief Red Jacket, or Pasha Yussef Karamanli, the one thing that unites them is an appalling indifference to my health. There seems to be a discouraging correlation between power and ruthlessness. My instinct for sympathy probably disqualifies me for high command; I couldn’t bring myself to execute as many innocents as seems to be required.
I am, however, a clever adviser, with no desire to be left on a stake. “I will win your battle, or help win it, at least, with a scheme that will crack the French lines and bring an end to this war. But I
am
a white man, so you must promise you’ll let the defeated French flee, once they give up.”
“They don’t deserve to escape.”
“What they deserve is irrelevant. If cornered, they will fight even harder.”
He considered, then nodded. “I might let them go if it saves the blood of my people. But how do you propose to win the siege when my entire army cannot?”
“With an idea from my three-year-old son.” And I explained in detail what I intended to do.
T
wo storms gathered before the morning of November 18, 1803. One was the tower of rain cloud building on the horizon, a roiling interplay of sun and impending shower. The other was the final approach of the black rebel army toward French lines.
It was a human tide that couldn’t be disguised. Cane fields were trampled as regiment after regiment moved into position, cannon were hauled, temporary breastworks built, shot stockpiled, and bivouacs pitched. The French were equally busy, and through a glass lent to me by a Negro officer I could see the bustle of a defense readying against attack. Bugles called. Earthen redoubts were heaped a little higher in hopes that a last spade full of dirt might stop a fatal bullet. More tricolors were raised to snap in the tropical wind, to convince those charging that they faced impossible odds. Cavalry rode importantly about on both sides to advertise menace with the thunder of their hooves. French artillery fired ranging shots to reinforce their point. Dessalines’s cannons barked in reply. This pawing and snorting reminded me of stags in the dust and heat, which know that the key to any fight is not just to rip the throat, but to open the gut of churning fear on the other side. War is bluff, shock, surprise, desperation, and scarcely contained panic.
Precipitating
more
panic was my job.
While the armies postured, I prepared to lead a night march in the hours before the final attack. Jubal, Antoine, and a dozen handpicked comrades would follow me to the left of the rebel lines toward the mountains that anchored the French flank.
We deliberately kept this party small. A large black force could be spotted and ambushed as it slowly climbed the tangle of jungle that matted the hills around Cap-François. But my doughty group would trot in bare feet without a firearm among us so that no gun would accidentally discharge and give us away. Instead, we were equipped with captured cutlasses and plantation cane knives. Dessalines had decreed me a captain and offered a pair of blood-spattered epaulettes that I declined, but as their leader I was armed with a spear. It was an African weapon the rebels had forged, with a tear-shaped spearhead as long as my forearm that was attached to an ironwood shaft.
“Our forefathers used this against the lion,” Dessalines told me.
“Had to get rather close, didn’t they?”
“They smelled its hot breath.”
“I prefer to use my brain.”
In fact, I was inclined to leave this prehistoric baggage behind. But Jubal persuaded me that it was foolish to go into battle unarmed, and that the spear made a rather convenient standard, walking stick, tent pole, and mark of authority. The spear seemed entirely savage, but once my hand closed on the polished wood I did feel rather fierce. This was the first real weapon I’d possessed since losing my rifle in Tripoli, and it fortified my confidence the way a primitive might have felt when going up against one of Jefferson’s woolly mammoths. The former slaves seemed to regard it as a badge of rank, signifying the trust Dessalines had placed in me, and followed my lead without complaint. I was so unaccustomed to this (most of the time, no one listens to me at all) that I was rather excited. There’s definitely a thrill in being warlord.
So we waited until the dusk before the battle, then set off.
Even with sunset my squad was soon panting and sweating. We each had a thirty-pound black powder keg strapped to our backs (another reason not to risk firearms, lest one set off a barrel of gunpowder and turn us into a chain of eruptions) and when game trails turned the wrong direction, we had to hack at foliage to get through the jungle.
For refreshment we had calabash gourds carrying water cut with mobby, that bitter brew fermented from sweet potatoes. The drink eventually made some of the men want to hum, and Jubal had to hush them, since it’s a danger to be too jolly when sneaking about. I’d also brought a flask of rum, a swallow of which I shared with each man to keep up morale.
Jubal was our guide once we reached the mountains. He knew the trails like a puma, leading us up a twisting ravine where a tropical creek cut through the ferns with a steady murmur that masked our footfalls. It was so dark under the trees that I could barely make out my guide’s broad back, so I stopped us, had a volunteer tear his ragged white shirt to shreds, and tied one on each gunpowder barrel so we’d keep the man ahead in sight. Jubal retained the lead, Antoine the rear, and I marched in the middle.
We slipped, scrambled, and stumbled. Admirably, any curses in English, French, Creole, and African were kept under our breaths.
Higher and higher we went. The trees dripped and steamed from earlier showers, and I could hear wild pigs grunting and moving out of our way. I thought again of lurking devils, but the superstition seemed silly when I was sober of voodoo drugs and banded with a group of soldiers. We stopped periodically to listen for French patrols or to spy the light of a sentry’s pipe, but we seemed to have this world to ourselves.
None of my men was allowed to light a cob, lest we blow ourselves up or give ourselves away. So I just watched the whites of their eyes as they tilted their heads back to enjoy their mobby, while they said I glowed like a ghost.
The hike seemed to be taking forever. “I want to climb above the French lines, not crest the Alps,” I complained to Jubal, wiping at my sweat.
“Mountains are steep in Haiti, yes?”
“And muddy. Infested with vermin, feral livestock, and sharp thorns.”
“We’ll crest a ridge soon and come down where we need to be. Don’t worry, Monsieur Ethan, Jubal knows the mountains. Dessalines preaches that a drop of sweat can save a drop of blood.”
“I’m sure that’s true. But we’re doing the sweating, and saving him the blood.”
My companion laughed. “I’d rather have our sweat than his worries.”
Finally our route leveled at a crest, and a welcome breeze blew off the Caribbean. We were above the French stronghold, the dark sea beyond. As I’d planned, there was no moon, and only a few lights shone in distant Cap-François. I could also see the low campfires of the French line to its east. If my calculations were correct, we were above the dell where I’d climbed with Colonel Aucoin to see his redoubts and water supply.
Now I was going to use this geography to help end the war.
The night was already half gone, and we didn’t have much time to implement my scheme. “We’d best hurry. Your army will attack at dawn.”
“Yes, but we’re already atop the French like an ax poised atop a block,” Jubal said with satisfaction. “And these boys are hard workers, aren’t you, my uglies?”
They grinned, a dozen crescent moons in the dark.
“Good,” I replied. “Otherwise, we’re all dead.”
Descending was easier on the lungs though harder on the legs, and we quickly heard the murmur of another stream and broke out of jungle. We’d come to the small mountain pool in that cup of hills on the heights before the stream dropped to water the French. We crept along the creek like panthers. Then the smallest and quietest of us, a former slave named Cyprus, volunteered to scout ahead. We waited silently for ten minutes, trying to ignore the mosquitoes, until he slithered back to report.
“Six soldiers, four asleep and two on guard, at the lip of the stream.”
Half a dozen cane knives came out from sheaths.
“No sound,” Jubal reminded. “From them or you.”
I swallowed. This was war, at its closest and most horrible.
The assassins crawled ahead, with us bringing up the rear for a reinforcing rush if needed. I feared gunfire, shouts, and struggle. Instead, the silence was profound. We slunk along the pool until we were at the lip overlooking the French fortifications. I’d heard nothing, seen nothing. But six severed French heads were lined up next to the stream outlet like a row of melons. Their eyes were shut as if relieved it was over.
Where the bodies went, I never learned.
“Very fine,” Jubal complimented.
I tried not to identify with the pale skin, taking a shaky breath. “Now, like beavers, we must dam the creek as vigorously as my son did in France.”
“What’s a beaver?”
I was at a loss for its African equivalent. “Like an elephant,” I finally said. Those beasts built things, too, and Harry had watched one work in Tripoli.
“What’s an elephant?” These former slaves had apparently never seen one of those creatures, either, in Haiti or in Africa. What zoology did we have in common?
“A beaver is a hairy, very hardworking mule,” I described. “Come, let’s drag this wood.” And we set to work as industriously as my boy.
S
unrise came from behind Dessalines’s army, shining in the face of the French. Given our height above the impending battlefield, it was in our view before anyone else’s. I watched the Battle of Vertiers unfold as if studying the diagram of a military textbook, columns of soldiers moving like arrows on a map. Some black, some white.
The purpose of my dam was twofold. One was to cut off the flow of water to the garrison below. Indeed, at first light there were shouts of surprise when the soldiers’ watering pond began to drop. A company of infantry was roused and began climbing laboriously up toward us to investigate why the stream had suddenly gone dry. We had to finish before they got in musket range, or we’d all be killed.
Our second objective was to create a timely diversion. We’d turned the lazy stream pool into a substantial reservoir at our altitude by dragging logs and rocks, cutting saplings, and hurling mud. Now we took the kegs of powder and strung them along the dam’s base, each with a jutting fuse. We had to surprise the French lines below at the precise moment when Dessalines’s best regiments were prepared to storm the defending redoubt. My plan was to send a flash flood into the enemy rear just the way Harry and I had broken our own dam at Nîmes, enjoying the havoc it created by swirling away leaves, sticks, and insects. Astiza had shaken her head at our excitement.
I watched the reservoir fill, enjoying my own cleverness with the satisfaction of a child. The blacks lay on the crest of the dam, watching the French climb toward us. Between each was a severed head. My men had arranged them like trophies, recalling the worst days of the Terror back in Paris.
“I suppose we should prepare to light the fuses,” I told my band. I was so slathered in mud by this time that we looked identical, a dozen grubby, grinning beavers, or mules. The reservoir would soon top our dam and threaten to wet the powder kegs. I felt in my vest pocket for a tin I’d brought with some coals, and brought it out with some tinder I’d carried from camp.
I frowned. The tinder was soggy. The tin was cold.
In my enthusiasm for dam construction, I’d failed to remember I was getting quite wet. Water and mud had penetrated the ventilation holes of a coal tin I’d neglected to nurse, thanks to enough swigs of mobby and rum. I opened the container. My little bit of fire had gone out. I looked at it stupidly. Well, hell.