Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [300]
“Pétion!” came a shout from down by the gate. “There is Pétion!”
Bienvenu was on the screaming horse in a flash, letting the blood from its throat with his coutelas. Several other men ran up to help him skin and dress the meat. Descourtilz and the doctor still huddled by the wall. Now and then another shell landed in the fort, but the main bombardment was directed at the redoubt. The doctor dared not lift his head to see, but the damage must certainly have been dreadful. And the butterflies, driven from the field, were streaming west like a plume of yellow smoke.
All afternoon the shelling continued; it ended only after dark. Two hours after nightfall, Lamartinière crept in with the remnant of the two hundred men who’d manned the redoubt, now too shattered to be held any longer. Lamartinière looked sick with exhaustion; Marie-Jeanne seemed a little brighter, though her dress was torn and bloody and her face was streaked with dirt. They dined that night on horseflesh half roasted, half dried over small hot fires, and after this repast, Magny ordered the musicians to strike up the “Marseillaise.”
At dawn they saw that the French had used the cover of darkness to occupy the redoubt Lamartinière had left. The earthworks had even been a little reconstructed, to form a semicircular battery bearing down on the main fort. The doctor felt his stomach drop before the first shell fired.
“Pétion! Gare Pétion!” The cries from the defenders were half rage, half respect and grudging admiration for a dangerous adversary. Lamartinière and Pétion were both mulattoes, though Lamartinière had remained loyal to Toussaint when Pétion threw in his lot with Rigaud. With Magny, Lamartinière now supervised return fire from the cannons of the fort, but Pétion’s guns were too well emplaced to be dislodged.
All day the bombardment went on and on. It was too dubious to try to throw the shells out of the fort before they blew. A new system developed, as if spontaneously. When each shell landed, one man rushed at it crying, “M’alé nan Ginen!” and covered it with his body. I am going to Africa! The doctor couldn’t say where these men went for certain, but when the shells exploded very little of them remained in the fort.
One shell, one man. There were now some nine hundred defenders surviving. No man who covered a shell in this fashion lived, except in rare cases where the shell did not explode, but the injuries to others tended to be less than fatal. Still, the doctor felt too demoralized to treat these lighter injuries at first. There seemed to be no point; the scope of the problem surrounding him was too large for his mind to contain a solution to it. It was Marie-Jeanne, who’d laid down her rifle for a bandage roll, who by example and her urging got him to return to his work. Bienvenu and Descourtilz also worked tirelessly through the day, bandaging and when necessary sawing. Without water, without sufficient nourishment, these men would almost surely die, but there was nothing to do but move against that probability, keep on swimming against the tide. Deafened by the roar of shelling, the doctor did his duties automatically. He’d fallen into a kind of trance, almost as comforting as drunkenness, though his small reserve of rum had been exhausted long ago.
At night when the shelling had finally stopped, they ate the balance of the horsemeat and sang French patriotic songs till they were hoarse. The doctor stretched out, thinking he would never sleep, and woke from a tomb of black unconsciousness with Descourtilz’s sour breath in his ear.
“Come on. We’re going over the wall.”
The doctor sat up cautiously. Behind Descourtilz he could just make out the figure of one of the trumpet players. Bienvenu was asleep, or pretending to be, on his mat nearby. The doctor scrabbled in the dirt for his rifle, then thought better