Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [168]
The first days after they’d fought their way on shore at Fort Liberté had not been so very difficult. Though much of the Northern Plain had been put to the torch, there was no other resistance to their progress, and the way was flat, though scorching underfoot sometimes, when they had to cross fields of cinder. But the destruction, though extensive, was not so complete that the men could not find ways to supplement their rations. Sergeant Aloyse proved to be an expert and resourceful forager. It was this, he told Guizot confidentially, that the Little Corporal had understood so well—a soldier on the march prefers to conquer meals than territory. Not to mention the high importance of wine and brandy, durable shoes and dry clothing . . . Guizot listened, rapt and mute, fascinated to be in the presence of someone who still had the temerity to speak of the First Consul, even behind his hand, as the “Little Corporal.”
In a few days’ time the Northern Plain was brought under a reasonable degree of control, and Rochambeau received new orders: to move his force through the mountains of Grande Rivière and up onto the Central Plateau. Thence they would maneuver to encircle Gonaives from the east; it was there that Toussaint Louverture was believed to have retreated, after the burning of Le Cap and the battle on the roads of Acul and Limbé. Their maps were accurate enough, but the trouble of getting through Grande Rivière belied the negligible distance noted on the paper.
On the first day they met no enemy, though they felt the enemy must be near. This region was supposed to be occupied by a detachment of the Fifth Colonial Demibrigade under command of one of those African officers, Sans-Souci. But Rochambeau’s columns encountered no regular troops as they set out through this country. Nor had the plantations been burned here, as in the lowlands. There were few large plantations in these mountains, mainly small caféières and provision grounds—but these latter were denuded of provisions.
They could come near to no one. Rounding a bend of the broad river, they might see in the distance a party of laundresses washing and drying clothes on the gravel shoals, but no sooner had they come within view than the women gathered up their bundles, balanced them improbably on their heads, and faded calmly away from the open banks to vanish in the jungle. Sometimes they might arrive in sight of a country market at the crossing of two trails, with bananas and mangoes and corn laid out for sale, but as the French soldiers picked up their pace, the marchandes would quietly pack their wares and recede, mirage-like, among the trees.
The country was all cliffs and gorges—with next to no land that would have been found usable in France, but these Africans had managed to plant almost sheer faces with crazy, spiraling, whorl-shaped gardens, had somehow secured their little huts to outcroppings laddered up the cliffs. But every village was abandoned by the time the soldiers reached it, and every garden was picked bare: the only mangoes left on the trees all green and hard; the corn stalks broken, stripped of ripe ears; and only rows of holes remaining where potatoes had been dug. They met no able-bodied men, not at close range, though sometimes men came out to spy on them from ledges on the opposite side of some deep, verdant chasm.
With all the inhabitants invisible, they could find no reliable guides, and the trails, like the plantings, twisted maze-like up and down the peaks and cliff walls, curving, ascending, never seeming to advance. In the first part of the day a bend in a pathway might sometimes bring them in view of the smoldering plain and the pall of smoke that hung over Le Cap. By afternoon there was nothing behind or before or beside but more mountains, and when they marched through