Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [282]
“Open the gate,” Dessalines said in a ringing voice. At the lower end of the fort, two puzzled sentries swung the two halves of the gate slowly outward.
Dessalines sat down on a pyramid of cannonballs beside the magazine’s open door. He held the torch with both hands between his knees and narrowed his eyes on the flame. Now he spoke in a much lower tone, so that everyone must press closer and lean in to hear him.
“I will have no one with me but the brave,” he said. “We will be attacked this morning. Let all who want to be slaves of the French again leave the fort now.”
He thrust the torch with both hands toward the open gate. A few heads turned, but no man moved in that direction.
“I don’t suppose we are included in that invitation,” Descourtilz muttered. Gaston, who’d lowered his violin, merely gaped.
“Let those with the courage to die free men stay here with me,” said Dessalines.
A cheer went up: We will all die for Liberty! The doctor noticed that Marie-Jeanne, Lamartinière’s wife, cried the affirmation as loud as any man. She was a tall and striking colored woman; he was rather astonished to see she was still here.
“Quiet.” Dessalines chopped a hand in the air to cut off the cheer, then swung the torch toward the magazine’s open door. “If the French get over the wall, I will blow them all to hell, and us to Guinée,” he said. “Now, all of you, get down against the walls, and no man let himself be seen.”
In the cool damp of the early morning, Maillart got up and washed his face in the river and moved out in the midst of Boudet’s column, his bones a little creaky from sleeping on the ground. On the cliff above them, the unremarkable fort was quiet, half hidden in lifting swirls of morning mist. Boudet’s men filed into the strip of woods outside Petite Rivière. A stench of smoke and scorched flesh lowered over them; this town had been burned, like the others.
Boudet called a halt outside the town. With Pétion, Maillart, and Saint James, he rode out of the ranks up the low grade until they were just out of musket range of the first earthwork, outside the fort. Cannon mouths showed at the embrasure, but no guard was visible anywhere. There was no flag flying anywhere, though Maillart thought he could pick out a thin thread of smoke rising somewhere within the walls.
Boudet scrutinized the position with a spyglass. “It looks deserted,” he declared. “These murderers will not stand to fight. I think they’ve spiked their guns and run away.”
“Beware an ambush,” Pétion said softly.
“What ambush? Their defenses are all apparent here.”
The sun broke fully over the peak of the hill and the walls of the fort. Raising one hand, Boudet shaded his eyes against the blaze.
“Leclerc is supposed to come out from Saint Marc to join us,” he said, twisting in the saddle to look toward the west. “No sign of him as yet . . . I think we may as well take this place. We’ll carry it, if it’s manned or not.”
They’d ridden halfway back to their ranks when firing began in the trees to the west. Pamphile de Lacroix, scouting through the woods above the town, had come upon an enemy camp and, as it seemed at first, routed it. The blacks were in full flight as they broke from the trees and rushed across the open slope toward the fort, with the French troops pursuing them full tilt, already hooking and thrusting with their bayonets.
Boudet gave a quick order to send his own men into the charge. Maillart could feel the force of their rage as the first line swept around his horse. This charge would wipe out the shame and horror of the Verrettes massacre, wash all that away in blood. But then the fleeing blacks all jumped down into the ditches and the cannons of the fort belched out mitraille across the suddenly cleared field.
A hundred men must have gone down in that first volley. Maillart