Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [360]
Both the doctor and captain offered to share their small portions of cornmeal mush. By that time rations were short even for the besiegers, whose numbers had picked the surrounding area nearly clean. In the shadows at the edge of the ring of firelight, Riau and Guiaou were probing goat bones for their marrow. From the infirmary shelter, a bit farther off, came cries of delirium and occasional groans of pain. Arnaud would accept no nourishment, but when rum was produced, he reached for it eagerly. Finally, in fragments, his story spilled out.
That afternoon, Pétion in his growing desperation had concluded to send the women and children out of Jacmel to throw themselves on the mercy of the enemy. Some three thousand of them had drifted toward Christophe’s position. The order was given to fire on them with grapeshot.
“The women?” Maillart hissed, leaning forward.
“Indeed,” said Arnaud, “and also the starving infants they had at the breast.” But not all of them had been killed. For the survivors, Christophe had scattered some old bread on the ground. “They pecked it up like chickens,” Arnaud said. He stopped, and stared into the fire as if it were alive with devils.
“And then?” the doctor asked unwillingly.
Arnaud pulled on the gourd of rum. “The surviving women were rounded up and herded to Habitation Ogé. There they were forced to descend into a dry well, covered with firewood and burned alive.”
Captain Maillart was on his feet. “I cannot believe that Christophe ordered such a thing.”
“Where the order came from, I can’t say,” Arnaud told him. “But you may believe that he carried it out. And what would you believe of me?”
Maillart lowered his eyes, looked this way and that. The doctor was frozen, cross-legged on the ground. Guiaou and Riau held their goat bones unconsciously in their tallow-streaked hands.
“What choice did you have?” Maillart muttered.
“What indeed?” Arnaud said, and rose himself. “I feel that I should have found some alternative. But perhaps I am best suited for such work.” He turned and left the circle of firelight.
“Wait, man, wait,” the captain called after him, but the doctor caught him before he could follow.
“Let him go,” the doctor said, and with a bewildered shake of his head, Maillart subsided.
It had been six weeks since Pétion had come to the relief of Jacmel, and soon after the ill-fated exodus of the women, he concluded that the men must try to fight their way out. One of the garrison had told him of a little-used path which led out of Jacmel across Habitation Ogé on a short route to the mountains. Throughout the day, Pétion bombarded the road in the opposite direction, as a diversion, and after nightfall he led his men out by the other way suggested to him, under cover of a fort called the blockhouse.
One of the spies had escaped Jacmel the day before, and informed Dessalines of Pétion’s escape route. So Dessalines’s response to the diversion was itself no more than a pretense. Once the darkness was complete, Dessalines shifted the entire twenty thousand men of his command to block the retreat of the Jacmel garrison, now reduced to fourteen hundred. Against those odds, and with no hope of quarter, Pétion’s men fought to the death and even, almost, beyond it. Tumbled in the mêlée, the doctor saw more than one man spurting blood from a severed arm and continuing to do battle with the other. Dessalines was impressed as well, enough to call a cease-fire. But the men of Jacmel used the respite to re-form themselves for one last desperate effort—they cut through Dessalines’s lines to reach the mountains and the jungle.
Of the fourteen hundred who’d left Jacmel, only six hundred survived the battle. “What I could do,” the doctor heard Dessalines remark, “if I had such men in my command.”
For all his ruthlessness, his thorough mistrust of white blood, Dessalines respected courage wherever he found it. Before the campaign against Jacmel had begun, a young mulatto officer in Port-au-Prince had broken his own sword over his knee, to demonstrate