Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [313]
For that reason he was more completely dressed than most when the sortie from the fort struck Rochambeau’s lines a little before dawn. He bolted straight up from his blanket and ran for the general’s tent, cradling his bad arm with the good one, across his belly. Since the destruction of his company he’d been billeted to staff. He found Rochambeau stuffing his chubby legs and the tail of his nightshirt into his trousers. Purple with agitation, the general had no more to say than “Fight them! Hold them!”
With Aloyse at his side, Guizot scrambled toward the noise of fighting, to find that their earthworks, much less substantial than those of Lacroix opposite, had already been breached. What came through was a swarm of figures from a nightmare, stiff-legged and jerky-limbed as marionettes, skull bones cutting through the skin—they looked all nails and teeth as they swept forward screaming. Once their muskets had been fired, they let them drop on their slings and fought on with their long knives. The French fell back and the blacks poured through. On the crest of the wave of them rode a tall gaunt Amazon with piercing gray eyes, gesturing, striking through the breach with a long sword. To all the actions of the men there was a weird, unified rigidity, as if they had no awareness of their own but responded as one to the woman’s will. Shoot her, Guizot thought, and maybe the rest will lose their animation. He let his hurt arm fall limp to his side, but somehow failed to draw his pistol with the other. What if she were not real at all? He would be firing at a phantom.
Then they were gone, all those survivors, streaming through the French camp into the heavy bush behind it and finally vanishing into a steep, vine-tangled ravine that writhed its way into the Cahos mountains. After what had happened to him in the mountains of Grande Rivière, Guizot was not eager to pursue, and no one else seemed moved to follow either.
Rochambeau appeared on the scene for the first time since the attack had been launched. Not troubling to greet his own soldiers, or even to look at them, he walked toward a wounded black who’d been felled by a musket ball through the knee, and gave him a rattling kick in the ribs. The black curled up, hugging his body with a moan, then uncoiled with the speed of a striking snake. The blade of his coutelas scored a white line on the general’s boot top as Rochambeau skipped back out of range. The black was up on an elbow, coutelas at the ready. Anyone might have shot him but no one did. Not Guizot nor Aloyse nor anyone moved to interfere. Rochambeau advanced with his own surprising speed. He trapped the black’s knife hand under his boot, set his sword point in the hollow of his throat, and leaned on the hilt with all his weight.
Guizot was inspired to look anywhere else. After a moment, Rochambeau sighed and stepped back, sheathing his blade and kicking the blood-clotted dust from his boots. Hand on his sword hilt, he addressed the various subalterns who’d gathered around this scene.
“Shame, gentlemen, shame on you all.”
At that, most of the junior officers looked at their shoes or away into the air, except for Guizot, who now fixed his eyes on Rochambeau’s twisting features.
“Let the sentries, if any survive, be shot at sunrise,” Rochambeau said. No one replied.
“Does no one hear me!”
“Oui, mon général,” an aide-de-camp squeaked. “It will be done.”
“The enemy has cut his way through us.” Rochambeau paced, stamping the dirt with his blood-stained boots. “You have allowed him to get away with his whole ragtag band of a few hundred wild niggers—when he is surrounded by twelve thousand crack troops! He leaves us nothing but his dead and his wounded—and two thousand of our best men dead upon