Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [265]
Sylla was waiting, between those old trees, but he did not have many of his men with him there. He had sent for them when he saw what was going to happen in the valley, but they were far off, on the other side of the mountain, where they could ambush supply trains on the road between Limbé and Gonaives. Until more men came there was nothing we could do but watch what happened from where we were. Sylla had a long-seeing glass, which he passed around among us, but I could see well enough without the glass, and voices carried a long way in those hills.
The shooting had already started by the time we got our horses hidden in the acajou. The blanc general Desfourneaux had a lot more regular soldiers than Toussaint did, though it was hard to know just how many men of the hoe had joined Toussaint with their hidden muskets, on the way from Ennery and Marmelade. Toussaint was much outnumbered, that was plain, and even so he had divided his men in half.
Yet when the fighting started on the right, Toussaint and Gabart broke the French advance and drove them back. Those French blanc soldiers had to retreat, but they kept tight in their lines and squares. Even when Toussaint sent a charge of horsemen on them, he could not break them up. These were tough soldiers. But if Pourcely’s men came upon them from behind as they were falling back, I saw they would be in a bad place—Toussaint might wipe them all out then, and that was the way he had planned it.
I was watching, with my heart swollen high in my throat, to see the men Pourcely was leading come out of the woods on the left. But Pourcely was a man of Jean Rabel, on the northwest coast, and he did not know his way very well through the Plaisance valley or these mountains. He got all his men lost in the bush somehow, and that is why they never came where they were meant to be. Instead, Desfourneaux’s blanc soldiers began to work their way around to Toussaint’s left, because Pourcely was not there to stop them, and soon those blanc soldiers began to get up on the trail that Jean-Pic and I had just ridden across a little while before.
Then Toussaint must have understood what was happening, because he took his horsemen and a lot of Gabart’s foot soldiers across to the left. We could see well enough it was Toussaint, because of the one red feather set high above the white feathers in his hat, though he was riding a different horse today, not Bel Argent. The French blanc soldiers were getting ready to meet him on the trail, not far below where we were watching from the grove of acajou. There were black soldiers in the front of their line, and they were near enough for me to see that they wore uniforms of the Ninth Demibrigade, the soldiers from Port-de-Paix.
That meant that Maurepas must have surrendered, or been killed or captured by the blancs. That would be very bad news for Toussaint, because he had set a lot of his hopes on joining with Maurepas. But I did not have much time to think about this much before Toussaint himself came riding around a bend of the trail below.
Now I did take the glass from Sylla’s hand, to see if Maurepas was among the men of the Ninth who were with the blancs now, but if he was I did not see him. It looked like the man leading the Ninth was Lubin Golart, who had been commander of the Fourth Battalion of the Ninth for a long time. Golart had always been against Toussaint, since the war against Rigaud or even before. He was leading his old battalion now at the head of the French blanc soldiers, but there were a lot more men of the Ninth with him now than just that one battalion.
Toussaint came around the bend of the road with a lot of his horsemen around him, but when he saw the uniforms of the black soldiers, he rode on to meet them all alone. Golart gave the order to fire, but the men of the Ninth did not obey, not even the men of the Fourth Battalion. Though Toussaint rode within twenty-five paces of the line, those soldiers did not fire. Golart screamed at them till foam from