Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [287]
“Take that fort!” Leclerc, livid with rage, was screaming. He stepped ahead of his line, whipping his sword forward and down. At once the line swept past him. Drums beat the charge. Maillart watched Captain Daspir riding into the stream. He held his own horse back. Someone bumped against him—Paltre, who’d managed to remount. His nose was held in place with a blood-soaked bandage which gave him the look of a demented agouti.
“I’ll get my own hat back,” Paltre muttered and rode forward.
Maillart grasped at him, angry—he was moved to pursue, but held himself in. Better not to let his anger sweep him along, as it was sweeping everyone else on the field. He had never liked Paltre much anyway, not since the days of Hédouville, but today he’d been impressed with the young captain’s lunatic bravery. And since he’d invested something in saving Paltre’s life, he didn’t like to see it wasted now.
Yet he stayed where he was and watched, a little surprised at his own detachment. Leclerc’s small, incongruously dapper figure was setting an example for his men. He was well to the fore, his life on the line, urging, encouraging. It was what Napoleon would have done, in the days when his men worshiped him as the Little Corporal. Maillart had heard those tales from a distance. The men who’d landed at Port-au-Prince with Boudet were full of them. But it was an ill moment for Leclerc to be enacting such a dream, however bravely. This charge was driven by rage, contempt, and incomprehension of the enemy. Most of the troops had been piloted over the country by overseers or landowners of Arnaud’s old stripe, who still somehow managed to believe they had only to show their slaves the whip to return them to abject submission. In the end it was misleading guidance.
The former slaves stood calmly, neck deep in the ditches before the fort, elbows bracing their muskets on the ground. They held their fire till the very last moment, and when they did fire the effect was withering; yet the French charge did not abate. Now it was all hand-to-hand fighting in those trenches, and the momentum of the charge had carried a couple of dozen grenadiers to the base of the wall. But now, of course, came the mitraille, mauling the French advance beyond the ditches. The storming party was cut off and would be slaughtered.
“Look there.” It was General Lacroix, leaning into Maillart’s shoulder and pointing as he shouted in his ear, toward a small round hilltop north of the fort, covered by a sparse grove of slender trees. “Do you see that eminence?”
Maillart nodded.
“Take the seventh platoon of musketeers there,” Lacroix said. “I’ll wager you can do some damage from that place.”
Maillart saluted; Lacroix thumped his shoulder and moved on. The maneuver was accomplished quickly enough, and proved to have been very well conceived. From the little hilltop Maillart could see plainly down into the fort, boiling like an anthill disturbed by a boot. After a moment he discerned that no cannon were aimed to cover the hill, and that Dessalines sat on the step of the powder magazine, conducting the fight with a lit torch he held in his right hand.
“Kill that general,” Maillart said and fired his own pistol among the muskets, but too quickly. The range was a little long for these small arms; cannon would have been more useful. Dessalines lifted a hot musket ball from the ground at his feet, then smiled up at the hilltop. At once he got to his feet and ordered two cannon to be rolled to the embrasures facing the hill.
Maillart reloaded, fired again, again to no effect. Either the range was simply too long or Dessalines was protected today by some enchantment. He could hear the black general’s voice very plainly,