Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [359]
No matter. Toussaint brought his heaviest artillery to Fort Tavigne, and from that height commenced to shell that town. The fiery rain, he pointed out to the troops under Dessalines, was now falling on their enemies.
The rumor that Pétion was commanding at Jacmel, which the doctor had reported to Arnaud, proved to be incorrect. Up until the taking of Fort Tavigne, another officer named Birot had been in charge of the town. After the fort was overrun and the bombardment began, Birot and his officers concluded it would be best to evacuate as best they might; however, the men in the ranks refused to follow them. With a handful of officers who shared his pessimistic view, Birot slipped out of Jacmel in a small boat and sailed west to Les Cayes, where he reported to Rigaud the parlous situation in the besieged town.
For months, Rigaud had done little enough to prosecute the war he had started. Above all he hoped for relief from France, if only in the form of an endorsement. While he waited for news, he could not settle on a course of action, but rather poured himself into his pleasures, which were various and exotic. But now he set out to relieve Jacmel, though with a contingent of only five hundred men. This mad sally was shattered by the regiments of Dessalines and Charles Belair. No matter how many were killed, the black soldiers of the north kept coming down, till finally Rigaud’s troops broke under the wave and began to flee. Rigaud dismounted his horse and snatched at their shoulders or their coattails, trying to turn them back to the battle. When he failed, he began to scream at them: Run then, you cowards, since honor is not enough to make you face death. Finally Rigaud himself was dragged from the field by his own officers, lest he be killed or taken prisoner.
Following this catastrophe, Rigaud sent Pétion to Jacmel by sea; he managed to reach the town intact, paddling a canoe underneath the cannonfire from Toussaint’s new batteries on the shore. The situation when Pétion arrived was still worse than what Birot had described. The soldiers were so weak from privation they had barely strength to hold up their weapons, and ammunition was so low they had to gather the missiles that rained down on them day and night to fire them back from their own guns.
All this news was vaguely known to the besiegers through several spies inside the town. And yet the resistance was still very stubborn. Christophe’s best effort to take the Grand Fort a second time had been deflected, with heavy losses. Every day there were heavy losses, and the doctor labored hour after hour in the infirmary tent, up to his elbows and shoulders in blood. He had insisted that both Giaou and Riau be sent down from the front line to help him in these efforts.
Picking bullets out of Arnaud had become a regular activity for these three. Arnaud was hit half a dozen times, but never fatally, in spite of his enthusiasm for exposing himself to the enemy guns. “Creole courage,” Captain Maillart muttered, at night under the tent he shared with the doctor. “You may call him cruel, call him foolhardy—call him a wastrel of the lives of his men. But the man will stand and fight.”
The canvas of the tent flared red in the light of a shell bursting over the town. Maillart’s face appeared, drawn and exhausted, in the crimson flash. The doctor knew he hated the siege, the spectacle of their opponents hemmed in to suffer and starve like rats in a trap. They might all hate it equally, but it made no difference—the doctor could barely register his own feeling, through the layers of his fatigue.
Arnaud would return to combat as soon as the doctor had him bandaged. No wound he took seemed to affect him, till finally, at the end of another terrible, interminable day, he came stumbling into camp with a look so deathly that the doctor thought he must have been hit in the vitals at last. But Arnaud protested that he was unhurt,