Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [135]
Now wandering in the Grand Cahos mountains, Rochambeau's column never found Toussaint, who was by then far north of where he was believed to be, and Rochambeau also failed to engage Dessalines, who eluded him in the mountains on the way to Mirebalais. Rochambeau's men did manage to intercept the pack train carrying the treasuries from the Western Department into the interior; it is likely that the legend of Toussaint's “buried treasure” really ends here. Meanwhile, some divisions of the French army had captured stupendous sums on the coast, and when news of Rochambeau's huge score spread, units that so far had found no plunder grew all the more eager for their opportunity.
On March 4, General Debelle reached Petite Riviere with a force of two thousand men. Outraged by the butchered white bodies strewn over the town, the French grenadiers were easily provoked into charging a skein of black skirmishers outside the walls of the fort on the hill above. By some accounts they were also intoxicated by the illusional prospect of loot. At the last moment the skirmishers dove into trenches just below the walls and the fort's cannon raked the French charge with grapeshot, doing incredible damage. Then a detachment of Toussaint's honor guard cavalry rode out of the woods north of the fort to sweep the field. Lamartiniere had a garrison of only three hundred, but this dismal quarter hour cost the French four hundred dead, and Debelle himself was seriously wounded, along with another French general, Devaux.
Dessalines, meanwhile, had been leading Rochambeau on a merry dance through the Grand Cahos mountains, pausing here and there to slaughter white civilians—a task he always undertook with enthusiasm, though sometimes he would spare a few whites whom he found accul-turated enough “to eat callaloo.” On March 4, a detachment from General Boudet's division found the ruins Dessalines had left at Mirebalais. On March 9, Boudet's main force reached Verrettes, just south of the Artibonite, where eight hundred white civilians lay stiffening in their coagulated blood. Furious at this spectacle, they moved west along the river and forded it during the night of March n. At first light on March 12, they found black soldiers apparently sleeping outside the wall of the fort at La Crete a Pierrot.
Rochambeau's force was approaching this formidable position as well, but no one wanted to wait for its arrival. The other French generals had all been captivated by the illusion of treasure inside the fort (in fact there was none), and none of them wanted to share it with Rochambeau's unit. General Boudet launched his charge without waiting for support, and the defeat Debelle had suffered during the previous week repeated itself in every detail: hundreds of French grenadiers were slain, and Boudet himself was put out of action by a wound in the heel. Just minutes later, another division commanded by General Dugua fell into the same trap, charging from the town of Petite Riviere. These two efforts cost the French a total of nearly eight hundred casualties, and General Dugua was struck by two balls. Captain General Leclerc, who had accompanied Dugua from Port-au-Prince, was knocked down with a badly bruised groin, and would have been slain by the sabers of the black cavalry if an officer named Dalton had not carried him away from the battle lines on his back. Greed, opined a civilian observer, had made the heroes of Marengo forget the most important military maxim: Never despise one's enemy.
For the moment, Pamphile de Lacroix was the only French general left standing on the field; he paused for a moment to “recognize just how adapted to war the Blacks of Saint Domingue had become.'70 Aside from Toussaints organized troops, all the French movements were constantly harassed by the armed field hands who sniped at their flanks from cover. “It was obvious that we no longer inspired moral terror,” Lacroix brooded, “and that is the worst misfortune that can