Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [171]
Their losses in the ambush had been light; it was more a nuisance than anything else. It slowed them down. For the next several days it was the same. Sans-Souci harassed them with snipers, surrounded their line of march with skirmishers. None of the enemy would stand to face an organized assault, so they could easily be driven off from any point, but they would as soon return. It wore upon the nerves of the French soldiers, who grew weary of the endless climbs that never seemed to achieve a peak, and irritable with their short rations. Some began to sicken from the combination of suffocating, sweat-soaked days with damply chilly nights. Others showed signs of dysentery, probably from gnawing at the hard green fruit which was all that had been left on any tree. Guizot’s best comfort was that his wound showed no sign of corruption. Also, he seemed to have won his sergeant’s warm respect. Aloyse was solicitous of him now, boiling water every night and fussing over his bandage.
They were meant to pacify the whole region of Grande Rivière before they moved on, but this will-of-the-wisp resistance seemed impossible to suppress. If it disappeared before their march, it sprang up again behind them. Rochambeau, of a choleric temper at the best of times, lost all patience in a week of this futile maneuvering. Concluding to leave Grande Rivière to its elusive defenders, he marched his men onto the Central Plateau, where with small difficulty they occupied the town of Saint Raphael.
Here, finally, they found stores: dried beef aplenty and more on the hoof, with barrels of flour and dried beans, yams and cassava, and all sort of fruit. There was also a good supply of tafia, the local rum produced by a distillery on the southern outskirts of the town. Guizot was dispatched by Rochambeau to ensure that this enterprise would continue its operations. Sergeant Aloyse could not have been better pleased with this assignment, and he had soon arranged for Guizot’s company to better protect the distillery by camping within and around it, with officers taking shelter from its roof. There was a sour smell to contend with, true, but this placement gave them control of distribution to the rest of Rochambeau’s troops, not to mention the easy access for themselves— though Aloyse and his brother sergeants took care that the men did not drink so much as to become disorderly.
Morale much restored, Rochambeau’s troops set out the next day and by a speedily executed encirclement captured a fort at Mare à la Roche, taking nearly four hundred prisoners and half a dozen cannon. Later that day they reached Saint Michel de l’Attalaye and occupied the town with no opposition. Established at Saint Michel, Rochambeau received a dispatch that General Hardy, in the presence of Captain-General Leclerc himself, had won a hard fight at Morne à Boispins. Though Leclerc declared that this was the most formidable position he had encountered since he had first begun to make war, the French grenadiers finally carried the day, and so flushed Christophe’s troops out of the town of Marmelade. Conditions thus looked most auspicious for the closing of the pincers on Gonaives.
That afternoon, Rochambeau sent Guizot with his troops to reconnoiter in the direction of the passes which opened from the Central Plateau toward the coast. They marched across great rolling grasslands, on the alert but meeting almost no one. After the mountains of Grande Rivière, the going seemed almost ridiculously easy, and the terrain was so open that the risk of ambush was nil. Now and then an oxcart crossed their way, and once Guizot