Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [246]
The garrison left in the fort was light: a total of seven hundred men, about, under command of Lamartinière and Magny. The two cavalry squadrons were still somewhere outside the fort, though there was no sign of them, and Placide Louverture must still be with Morisset, the doctor thought. But none of that cavalry appeared for the next two days. Maybe Dessalines had abandoned Toussaint’s plan and there would be no great battle here after all. There was, so far, no sign of any French approach.
Three days after the burning of Petite Rivière, the doctor was roused by Bienvenu from his afternoon siesta and hustled to the wall. Bienvenu needed his sling no longer—he could gesture expansively with his right arm. The doctor rubbed his eyes and wiped his glasses and looked where he was urged. The camp was evacuating itself from the hillside opposite. Most of the wounded from Petite Rivière had either recovered or succumbed by now, though some still went limping on sticks and rough crutches. And in fact the whole bitasyon was emptying out: children and the old and infirm carrying bundles on their backs, women balancing baskets of hastily harvested yams and corn on their heads.
The doctor couldn’t guess the reason for this exodus, till Bienvenu took the spyglass from him and crossed hurriedly to the embrasures overlooking the Artibonite. Well past the river and below the town, he could now make out a worm of dust, sidling along the road across the plain. When he recovered the spyglass from Bienvenu, he could make out French battle flags and a few horsemen riding back and forth along the infantry column.
They were still an hour off, or more, but the atmosphere in the fort had electrified. The artillery men were all priming their cannon, laying out charges of mitraille. The doctor retreated to his ajoupa, where he turned back a corner of his sleeping mat and dug his fingers in the loose dirt to touch the cloth-wrapped barrel of his rifle. If he ran down to meet the French column, would he get a bullet in the back as he left the fort? He touched the scab on the side of his head. Maybe it would be better to follow the people of the bitasyon to the trail they were taking deeper into the mountains. Or simply sit it out where he was.
Before he could come to any conclusion, the gate of the fort had been shut. He watched the advancing column until daylight faded. The French had camped somewhere below the town. Lamartinière and Magny were rushing back and forth between the fort and the surrounding ditches and new watch posts just established further out from the walls. Attack would most likely come at dawn.
The doctor lay awake for a long time on his mat, wondering how Fontelle and Paulette had progressed on the road north, trying to picture them bringing the news to Nanon or Elise or Paul or Xavier Tocquet that Doctor Hébert was waiting out the trouble at La Crête à Pierrot. The doctor had studied the column well enough before darkness to reckon its strength at two thousand or better—two thousand crack French troops of the line against a few hundred of this black army and no more than a dozen cannon at the embrasures of this little fort. The place would be overrun in an hour. Yet he thought he had a chance to survive, if the French grenadiers identified him as white, if the defenders did not decide, in some rage of defeat, to blow up the powder magazine.
The new sentry posts were quietly alert below the walls. In the woods to the northeast, firelight was trembling—probably against orders the doctor supposed, when he got up around midnight to relieve himself. The stars of the Great Bear hung from the top of the sky, illuminating the body of a sergeant who’d been caught asleep at his post and tossed on the ground before the trenches to encourage others not to doze. Bienvenu did not have guard duty—he slept innocently, profoundly, on his mat beside the doctor’s. When he resumed his own place the doctor was expecting several more hours of insomnia, and so he was very much surprised to wake at first