Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [137]
From the start, Toussaint had devised a strategy of double encirclement. Once Leclerc had been lured to besiege La Crete a Pierrot, Toussaint, reinforced by Maurepas and the Ninth Regiment, would fall on his rear, surround him, arrest him, and deport him to account for himself in France—following the same route taken by Hedouville, Sonthonax, and most other representatives of the home government who had had the bad judgment to antagonize Toussaint Louverture. But the Ninth was lost, and by the time Toussaint (severely battered in his battle with Desfourneaux) could rally men enough to try the plan, it ‘was too late.
On March 24, as he toured his posts, General Lacroix found some of his men flogging an elderly black couple ‘who supposedly had been caught leaving the fort. He rebuked the soldiers and ordered the old people released. Once they had limped to a safe distance, however, they mocked the French soldiers by dancing the chica, then fled with the speed of young antelope. Appalled at his error, Lacroix guessed that they must have been couriers from Toussaint Louverture, who was known to be advancing on Leclerc's rear. In fact, they had come from Dessalines with an order to evacuate the fort. That night, Lamartiniere took the survivors of the nine hundred men Dessalines had left him twelve days before and cut his way out through the French siege lines, leaving Lacroix with his jaw dropped: “We surrounded his post with more than twelve thousand men; he got away without losing half of his garrison, and left us nothing but his dead and his wounded.'76 The latter were all butchered on Rochambeau's order when his men entered the fort the next morning.
Ravine a Couleuvre, February 22-23, 1802
It was a bitter disappointment for Toussaint to have so nearly missed his quarry. After a doleful meeting with Dessalines on the heights of Morne Calvaire, he retreated to Chasseriaux Plantation, near Grands Fonds in the Petit Cahos mountains; his family had already found shelter in that area and his honor guard was waiting for him there. The French, meanwhile, limped back to Port-au-Prince in scarcely a cheerier frame of mind; they had lost two thousand men at La Crete a Pierrot. Pamphile de Lacroix ordered his men to march in squares with empty centers, so that the citizens of the capital would not realize the extent of the French losses.
Like Ravine a Couleuvre, La Crete a Pierrot is best understood as a loss for both sides. The French had technically gained ground, but they had the same difficulty holding it that Napoleon would soon encounter in campaigns against guerrilla resistance in Spain. “This is a war of Arabs,” Leclerc wrote to Napoleon. “We have hardly passed through when the blacks occupy the neighboring woods and cut our communications.”77 “Though victorious everywhere,” wrote Lieutenant Moreau de Jonnes, “we possessed nothing but our guns. The enemy did not hold anywhere, and yet remained master of the country.”78 Or in the words of a nineteenth-century French historian, Antoine Metral: “Everywhere this ground hid enemies, in a wood, behind a boulder; Liberty gave birth to them.”79
Also at Toussaint's camp at Grands Fonds were Sabes and Gimont, the two emissaries whom General Boudet had sent ashore at Port-au-Prince before forcing his landing there. Since Lamartiniere had taken them prisoner, they had been dragged all over the country, and narrowly missed being slain with the other white captives by Dessalines at Petite Riviere. NowToussaint summoned them into his presence, debated with them the legitimacy of Leclerc's actions versus his own, then sent them under safe-conduct back to General Boudet, with a note suggesting that his nephew Chancy, captured while carrying dispatches to Dommage several weeks previously, might be released