Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [296]
When he woke, it was already dark; he lay motionless but for the blinking of his eyes. Bienvenu’s voice droned in the darkness, giving the news of the evening’s scout to the man who’d lost his hands that day. Apparently General Hardy had brought in a French column to join the siege line north of the fort. At his arrival, Morisset and Monpoint had withdrawn their cavalry and ridden off in search of Toussaint. “Papa Toussaint will come,” Bienvenu’s whisper kept assuring. “He will come to kill all these blancs and make us free.”
Cautiously the doctor rolled back a corner of his mat and pushed his fingers into the dirt until they stopped on cloth-wrapped steel. The touch of his octagon rifle barrel scarcely reassured him. He withdrew his hand and let the mat fall into place, wondering whom he’d fire on when the end came, if he fired at all.
To the right of General Lacroix’s line, two hundred cadavers of white civilians slain by Dessalines for many days had been stiffening, then deliquescing, in their clotted blood. The stench grew more unbearable every day, and every day there were more flies. Lacroix put Major Maillart in charge of burning the corpses. It proved to have been a bad idea, for the bodies burned sluggishly, incompletely, and blanketed the area with a stinking black smoke that choked the men all across their lines. The cloth Maillart tied across his nose and mouth did little good. At least he had the advantage of light cotton clothing. Most of the men, Lacroix included, had come out wearing woolen uniforms, and the foul miasma sank deep in the wool, and seemed like it would linger forever.
Lacroix was the senior surviving officer, after Leclerc, whose dangerously bruised groin kept him mostly confined to his tent. For an hour a day the Captain-General would tour the developing siege positions, moving on foot as he could not possibly bestride a horse, biting his lips to hide his pain. Then he’d disappear into his convalescence. The task of encirclement thus fell to Lacroix.
To Maillart, Lacroix made the observation that in war as in agriculture, it was foolish to try to tear out a huge boulder all in one piece; better to use patience to chip away at it and carry it off by shards. Toward that end, Lacroix detached General Bourke to cross the river and block the ford southwest of the fort. By this passage the rebels had got reinforcement on that one day of pitched battle which had been so disastrous for the French. With Bourke in place, they could no longer even fetch water from the river, much less cross into the open country beyond. Bourke held the position without much difficulty, though lightly harassed, mostly at night, by the troops of Charles Belair, who still maintained an elusive presence south of the Artibonite. When General Hardy’s division arrived to flush the honor guard cavalry out of the woods above the town, it seemed that the net must soon draw tight.
Maillart spent his days riding from post to post—his familiarity with the terrain made him valuable. Lacroix had put the captains Paltre, Cyprien, and Daspir mostly in his charge, to be instructed in the lie of the land. Maillart observed the junior officers with a degree of ironic distance. There seemed to be some rivalry among them, though he could not quite devine its source. Paltre and Cyprien he remembered from the season the mission of Hédouville in 1798. He had distinctly disliked both of them then, for an unseasoned pair of wastrels, arrogant without cause and overly given to the vices of women, rum, and gambling (and for Maillart to register such a reproach was in itself extraordinary). These weeks of real and terrible warfare seemed to have embittered Paltre,