Caribbean: a novel Part 27

On the appointed day the British officers rose early, dressed in their brightest regimental uniforms laden with braid and medals, and marched behind the band to the edge of town, where they greeted in full panoply the two black generals. As those victors approached, the British had to smile, for tall Toussaint took such big strides that stubby Vaval, a head shorter, had to pump his chubby legs twice as hard to keep up. Joined by the Scot, they formed the front rank of the parade, and entered the town to the wild cheering of the black citizens and the polite applause of whites. At the local church Toussaint was handed a silver cross, which he bore proudly to the banqueting hall, and there he listened in solemn grandeur as the Scottish officer, a gallant adversary, said: 'At the start we British had every advantage-controlled all your ports, occupied most of them, drove you inland. Total victory for our side.'

The British officers applauded, and the speaker continued: 'We overlooked these two-General Toussaint L'Ouverture, who could not be pinned down no matter how hard we tried, and this stubborn little fellow Vaval, whom we could never quite catch but who struck at us again and again.'

Here the British officers turned to face the black generals and applauded loudly with cries of 'Hear! Hear!' Then the Scotsman asked: 'Honestly. How did you do it?' and the two black generals sat silent, tears coming to their eyes.

Toussaint and Vaval stood at the dock until the last British troops withdrew, and as the seven s.h.i.+ps left the harbor Toussaint said, almost plaintively: 'Vaval, our own French leaders never treated us with half the respect that enemy out there did. It could have been so different if they'd only dealt with us honorably.'

'It was never possible,' Vaval said, and Toussaint replied: 'Now let's take this country for ourselves.'

'You mean the slaves? Us?'

'We can tend the land as well as the French.'

'But why would you risk fighting a lion like Napoleon?'

Toussaint, a slave who had been allowed no education or access to books or the friends.h.i.+p of learned men, fell silent, for he too was amazed at what he was now proposing-grappling with the foremost military genius of his age.

'Time's at hand, old friend, when we must strike out against the French.'

'Wait!' Vaval pleaded, raising his voice to an unaccustomed level. 'You can't go on doing this. First we side with the French, then the Spanish, then the French again, and now against them. You make yourself look foolish.'

'No man is foolish when he calculates strategies to gain his freedom. Besides, we'll have no choice.'

'Why not?'

'Because Napoleon will never let us exercise any control in this colony. Sooner or later he'll send troops against us.' Bringing his shoulders forward, as if he were a boxer preparing either to attack or defend, he said grimly: 'Now we prepare for whatever Napoleon throws against us, and what a shock we'll have for that one.' And off the two black generals went to prepare their troops for the battles that could not be avoided.

Napoleon, during his march through Europe, often found recreation at night by reading reports from his colonies, and insofar as the Caribbean in general was concerned, he was not unhappy: 'Guadeloupe back in our hands, slave uprisings under control. Our Martinique does remain in British hands, but in retaliation we've captured three of their richest islands. Now, what is happening on that d.a.m.ned St.-Domingue? What do those slaves think they're doing? Are English officers leading those black troops? Some outsider is.' Whenever he voiced that suspicion, he concluded: 'We've got to teach those slaves a lesson. About who controls France these days.'

An aide, who had recently returned to Europe from St.-Domingue and traveled to Austria to meet Napoleon, reported: This fellow Toussaint, a kind of homemade military genius. You know, of course, that he came back to our side after fighting for a long time against us ... with the Spanish.'

Napoleon stopped him right there: 'He did desert to the Spanish, didn't he?'

'With that able a.s.sistant, General Vaval.'

'Sounds French.'

'Black as midnight, but a manly little fighter. Helped Toussaint kick the British completely out of St.-Domingue, and now there's talk among the slaves that they'll throw us out, too.'

'Never!' Napoleon growled. 'Time's come to discipline them. Get them back to the sugar plantations ... all of them.'

Once he voiced this decision his aides saw his eyes gleam with conspiratorial delight, and they supposed that he had suddenly imagined some stratagem which would startle and subdue Toussaint and Vaval, but that was not the case. What pleased him was the prospect of finally discovering how to get his obstreperous younger sister Pauline out of Paris. For the past five years she had presented him with one difficult problem after another; only twenty-one, she had already weathered some half-dozen tempestuous and even scandalous love affairs, and seemed quite prepared to add to that list whenever she encountered one of his handsome colonels or married generals.

Some months ago he believed he had solved the problem: he had married her to a fine young officer of good family named Charles Leclerc, medium height, erect carriage, das.h.i.+ng, and with a ready wit. Napoleon had attended their wedding, had given his sister away, and had then rushed the promotion of the bridegroom to senior general. Now he said: 'We'll put Leclerc in charge of the St.-Domingue expedition, let him win his spurs and make him a duke or something. That would please Pauline.' When the announcement was readied, Napoleon warned his aides: 'We won't put it in writing, but most important-Pauline must accompany him. We've got to get her out of Paris.'

So an expedition of enormous magnitude was mustered, utilizing at least nine ports from Honfleur in the north to Cadiz in the south, thirty-two thousand battle-tested soldiers and gear enough for a yearlong campaign in the tropics. When Napoleon saw the final report of what was being sent to St.-Domingue-the munitions, the extra uniforms, the medical kits, the presence of small, fast s.h.i.+ps to serve as messengers back and forth between the scores of big ones-he remarked: 'Young Leclerc may not be a Marshal Soult or Ney, but he'll have older aides of proven merit to keep him headed in the right direction.' It was a ma.s.sive expedition, a tribute to Napoleon for having been able to a.s.semble it and to France for having the men and equipment to spare. As its components sailed forth from their various ports, Napoleon could be forgiven when he claimed: 'We've thought of everything,' but not even he could have foreseen what kind of enemy his troops were about to face.

On the evening of 1 February 1802, Cesar Vaval, now forty-six, stood on a breakwater at Cap-Franais and looked in awe as eleven big French s.h.i.+ps dropped anchor in the roadstead while small boats scurried back and forth bearing messages. General Toussaint stood silent beside him, calculating the number of trained French soldiers the s.h.i.+ps must carry. Finally he said, with no emotion: 'Maybe twelve thousand,' and suddenly springing into action, the wily Toussaint dragged the speechless Vaval back into the town, where he gave him surprising orders.

'Things look perilous tonight. But we shall drive that crowd waiting out there right back to Paris ... if you do your job right.'

'I'll try.'

'Don't try. Do it. Tomorrow, the next day too, and for as long as possible, fend them off. Don't let them land. Say there's a plague ... any trick to hold them aboard s.h.i.+p for two days.'

'Where will you be?'

'Bringing our troops down from the mountains. And while I do that, you see to it that every white man or free-colored who remains in this town is driven out ... out!' Then, to Vaval's surprise, Toussaint started running like a hare through the empty streets, shouting: 'Pile stacks of wood here! Stack dried tree branches here! Bring in hay from the barns! We're going to light a fire that will be seen in France!' Showing Vaval which houses to ignite first to ensure a giant conflagration, he said grimly: 'No matter what general is waiting out there, when he looks ash.o.r.e I want him to catch a fiery taste of what's ahead when he puts one toe on our land.'

Toussaint's guess that the French troops would take some days to deduce that Vaval, the courteous little local manager, was playing them for a fool proved accurate, and those two days of waiting gave Vaval time to carry out orders. He did drive out the remaining whites and coloreds, most of them, and he did pile the street corners with combustibles, but in two of his major a.s.signments he was forestalled by men as brave and resolute as he. The two-storied stone Chteau Espivent he was unable to capture from a group of grands blancs who had a.s.sembled there under the leaders.h.i.+p of its owner. They resisted all attacks. Nor could he combat a collection of do-or-die free-coloreds who had fled to the big theater at the summons of Xavier Premord, and who fired at the blacks with deadly accuracy.

On the second evening, when the rat-a-tat of gunfire ash.o.r.e echoed through the fleet, Leclerc issued his order: 'We land at dawn. All forces in small boats to storm the beach.' But about an hour before dawn Pauline awakened him: 'Charles! The town's on fire!' and with his other generals Leclerc went up on deck, to see wild flames rising above the town that was to have been his capital.

It was a ghastly day, with houses and buildings burning to their foundations. Most of the handsome town was leveled, but the two centers so stoutly defended by Espivent and the free-coloreds still stood defiant when the embers died. From the walls of the chteau the grands blancs had fired such withering blasts at any blacks who tried to storm the place that the arsonists were kept away, but even so, at one critical moment the defense might have collapsed had not General Vaval himself-as he had once defended Colibri-rushed up with a curt command: 'Draw back. That one was decent,' and the chteau was saved.

The lovely theater also survived, for there Premord's free-coloreds maintained a fusillade so resolute that the rioting slaves had to fall back, the fiery brands in their fists useless against guns.

General Leclerc, who could not from his distant point of observation know that anything of the town had been saved, nevertheless put up a brave front. His eyes reddened from the smoke that drifted across his fleet, he cried: 'Men, prepare to storm the beaches! I shall lead!' and the little boats were loaded with fighting men. But before Leclerc himself could leave, Pauline gripped his arm and whispered: 'When you're the leader, first appearances are everything,' and she made him dress in one of his finest uniforms, with sash and c.o.c.kaded hat, so that when he stepped gallantly ash.o.r.e with Pauline on his arm, she also in her best, they were indeed emissaries of the great Napoleon come to command a capital town from which the reconquest of the colony would be launched. Because they came properly dressed and apparently unafraid, they gave the white survivors of Le Cap a courage that would otherwise have been lacking.

As the handsome couple moved through the desolated town, one local resident left his stone chteau overlooking the sea and came forward, waving aloft a French flag and shouting: 'Soldiers of France! Come ash.o.r.e and save us!' It was Jerome Espivent, who had an amazing story to tell the Leclercs: 'The black general who burned the town has kept his men away from my place. He'd been one of my slaves and he respects me for the charity I'd shown him.'

'A good omen,' Pauline said graciously, whereupon Espivent flourished his blue cape, bowed low, and kissed her hand: 'My house is your house,' and to the general: 'My town in ashes is your capital, for I'm sure you will rebuild it,' and on these emotional terms Leclerc took possession of the chteau and plunged into the maelstrom of the colony he had been sent to subdue and rule. While Pauline remained below directing the four Espivent house slaves how to rearrange what furniture was left, her husband withdrew to a room on the second floor, where, apart from others, he unsealed a secret letter which Napoleon had handed him eight weeks before in Paris.

It was one of the most Machiavellian doc.u.ments in history, and a treasure for those scholars who would seek to unravel the mystery of how Napoleon's mind worked. Why the great general allowed a copy to survive is a mystery, but there it rests in the harsh glow of history, revealing the immorality and duplicity of the man.

Napoleon gave Leclerc minutely detailed instructions, not knowing that his orders in many ways duplicated the ones with which King Philip of Spain had saddled Medina-Sidonia, his unfortunate admiral general of the Armada; had Napoleon been aware of the similarity, and the pitiful results King Philip obtained, he might have given his brother-in-law and sister more freedom to make their own decisions.

The recapture of St.-Domingue, Napoleon wrote, would be relatively simple if a rigid schedule was followed: fifteen days to occupy all port towns, perhaps another month to strike at the slave armies from many different directions, then not more than half a year to track down isolated units that would no doubt try to take refuge in the mountains-after which, victory would be proclaimed and the troops could come home.

This military strategy was first cla.s.s, even though the time allowances would have been more practical for an a.s.sault on a settled European princ.i.p.ality without mountains, but the subsidiary orders were venal. Leclerc was ordered to conduct himself differently in each of the three stages of occupation: As soon as you have secured the victory you will disarm only the rebel blacks, you will parley with Toussaint, promise him everything he asks until you gain control of all princ.i.p.al points in the colony. During this period all Toussaint's chief agents, white or colored, shall be loaded indiscriminately with honors, attentions and a.s.surances that under the new government they will be retained in their posts. And every black man occupying an office of any kind will be flattered, well treated and given whatever promises you think necessary.

At the end of fifteen days, when the second stage was to begin, the screws were to be tightened, and so much pressure was to be applied to Toussaint that he would see the impossibility of relying upon isolated units in the mountains to continue the struggle: On that very day, without scandal or injury but with honor and consideration, he must be placed on board a frigate and sent immediately to France. And on that same day throughout the colony you will arrest all suspects whatever their color, and also all black generals no matter what their patriotism or past service.

You will allow no variation in these instructions; and any person talking about the rights of those blacks, who have shed so much white blood, shall, using any pretext whatever, be sent to France, regardless of his rank or services.

The infamous fourth instruction was so shameless that it could not be put into writing, for Napoleon did not want anyone to see the inflammable words a return to slavery, but during the final meeting in Paris between the two men, Napoleon had said: 'Slavery is a word never to be spoken. But it is a system to be reimposed as soon as conditions permit.'

Governed by these duplicitious rules, Leclerc went downstairs for his first meeting with the leaders of the colony and, as in old times, he found waiting for him a group of only white men, and he a.s.sured them that with his troops from the home country, he, with a.s.sistance and guidance from them, would quickly restore order to the rebellious colony. At the meager dinner, Jerome Espivent gave the toast: 'To our saviors from France,' after which he offered stern counsel: 'Keep your hands clean of the free-coloreds. They can only stain you. And never trust black troops. They're as fickle as the wind. The men and women in this room are the only ones you can rely upon. We stand ready to die for France, if only this disgraceful rioting and destruction of our property can be halted.' These were no idle words; at every convulsion since that first horrible uprising in 1791, Espivent had been willing to lay down his life in defense of the principles by which he had been reared, and now in his sixtieth year he felt the same way.

Now began the historic battle for St.-Domingue. In the coastal regions of the north, General Leclerc and his immense French army controlled everything, and enthusiastically supported by blancs led by Jerome Espivent, laid careful plans to subdue the slave uprising and capture Toussaint and his main aide Vaval. To accomplish this, the French troops would compress the rebellious slaves into ever-smaller enclaves in the center and southern portions of the colony, and when the noose was so tightened that the noirs could no longer obtain arms, supplies or new conscripts, Toussaint and Vaval would have no option but to surrender.

Leclerc handled his task superbly, displaying a talent for military tactics which startled even his own subordinates. He made not a single mistake, and almost on the schedule that Napoleon had dictated, he had Toussaint's men driven completely out of the northern areas and so hedged about in the mountains that he could confidently report to Napoleon in Paris: 'We have completely demoralized the slaves, and the surrender of their generals can be expected at any moment.'

Toussaint and Vaval refused even to consider surrender. 'Trusted friend,' the powerful black general said whenever prospects looked bleak, 'we grow stronger with every backward step we take ... more compact on our side ... more scattered on theirs,' but at the close of one day in which Leclerc drove his men six miles deeper into the mountain retreats, Vaval leaned against a tree, exhausted, and asked: 'Does Leclerc never give up?' and Toussaint replied: 'He will. Time, and the mountains, and events we cannot foresee will force him to get back aboard his s.h.i.+ps and return to France.'

Meanwhile, Jerome Espivent, still in charge of his chteau, which served as army headquarters, was perplexed by unsavory incidents occurring there. He noticed one French officer after another coming to his chteau to take tea or wine with Madame Leclerc when her husband was away with his troops, and when such visitors, one by one, were taken to her quarters on the second floor, he began to suspect that this handsome young woman was going to be more difficult for General Leclerc to handle than the black generals. But he always reminded himself that she was Napoleon's sister, so he kept his counsel. After one scandalous incident he said to himself: After all, she is Italian, and maybe that accounts for it, for as a gentleman of near-n.o.ble breeding, he could not believe that the French wife of a commanding general would so conduct herself with junior officers.

Once, when he watched Pauline dallying with a married colonel, he lost his temper and asked a lieutenant: 'That one, is she never satisfied?' and the young man replied with a leer: 'Not too soon, I hope.' Espivent thought that as a member of one of France's n.o.ble families, he ought to discuss this matter with General Leclerc, but when he saw the fighting little fellow stagger in exhausted from pursuing Toussaint, he had not the effrontery to badger him with Pauline's behavior: What that man needs is not lecturing, but sleep. And when the two dined together, for Pauline was usually out in the ruined town with someone else, he asked only about Toussaint.

'We have him worried,' was all Leclerc would say. 'I can see it by the moves he makes.'

'How can you tell a thing like that?'

'I've seen it three times. He's had a clear run to the south. Might even do us real damage on the way down. But he refuses the escape we've left him ... and do you know why?'

'My mind doesn't work like a noir.'

Leclerc laid down his napkin: 'He's not a noir, Espivent, d.a.m.n him, he's a full-fledged general. And if I didn't have three more armies in the field than he does, I'd never catch him.'

In March and April 1802, Toussaint L'Ouverture made military history by conducting a Fabian operation of strategic retreat which lured Leclerc ever farther into the mountains, and won the gasping admiration of not only his French adversaries but also those American s.h.i.+p captains who arrived in Cap-Franais with cargoes of powder and ball sent down from a.r.s.enals around Boston: 'Haven't they caught the n.i.g.g.e.r yet? No? You better watch out; while he has you trapped in the mountains, he'll slip around and burn this town again.' One captain brought a newspaper from Charleston, featuring a story about the evil effect Toussaint's exploits were having on South Carolina slaves: 'Napoleon must settle this man's hash permanently, because his example must not be allowed to infect our docile slaves in the southern states.'

But despite the brilliance and courage of the black generals, Leclerc proved himself such a bulldog, hanging tenaciously onto the heels of his enemy, that the day came when Toussaint had to face the fact that he could not continue the campaign indefinitely. So on a dark night at the end of April, he asked the one man he could trust to walk with him in the darkness: 'Dear friend of battle, I can't continue this fight.'

'Toussaint!' Vaval cried. 'We have them on the run.'

'What nonsense from an old friend.'

'I mean it.'

'Leclerc has never let up. He's trailing us right now, out there.'

'I don't mean the troops he has in the field. I mean the ones in their graves.' And he told Toussaint about the information their spies had brought: 'That hard fighting unit who saw duty along the Rhine ... gave us so much trouble at the start? Why don't we still face them? A black woman who helps nurse them explains why. Three months ago they started with about thirteen hundred men.'

'How many now?'

'Only six hundred alive, and four hundred of them in hospital, that leaves only two hundred able to fight.'

'But they keep bringing in replacements,' Toussaint said, and Vaval replied: 'They do, but always from the north of Europe.'

'What does that signify?'

'They aren't accustomed to the tropics. Watch how many are able to face us at the end of two weeks.'

Toussaint, who felt his life and his efforts drawing to a close, could not afford to wait even the two weeks which would have verified Vaval's prediction, and next morning he awakened Cesar before dawn: 'Old friend, I have no escape. You must come with me,' and together, under a white flag, they approached the French lines to arrange the honorable terms under which Toussaint, Vaval and all others in the vicinity could surrender. French officers, speaking for Leclerc, who was overjoyed to receive the news, offered the black leader the exact terms Napoleon had prepared and on which Leclerc and Touissant shook hands like honorable generals: 'France awards freedom to all your black troops. Never again slavery. You and your other officers, like Vaval here, induction into the imperial forces of Napoleon with no reduction in rank. And if as you say you would prefer to live on your old plantation in retirement, do so, and France will give you an honor guard of four of your staff for life.'

This was more generous than the black revolutionaries could have hoped for, and Vaval saw it as a testimony to the integrity of Toussaint, who had rarely killed civilians and who had resolutely clung to one abiding principle: 'The slaves must be free.' In the entire world since the first efforts of Spartacus, he was the first slave general, and a black one at that, to have attained his goal.

On 6 May 1802, exactly three months after the arrival of General Leclerc, the French army units stationed in Le Cap were given a late and generous breakfast at eight, ordered into their dress uniforms at ten, and mustered at eleven to give the salute to Generals Toussaint L'Ouverture and Cesar Vaval as they surrendered their swords to the superior power of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte and his able brother-in-law Leclerc. Pauline, watching the ceremony from a small thronelike affair in the square, thought: What a handsome man that Toussaint is. Sixty, they say, and he carries himself like a young stallion.

On 5 June 1802, after a month of idleness at his plantation, Toussaint was invited to a gala dinner at the neighboring headquarters of the local French commandant, a General Brunet, and he looked forward so avidly to an afternoon of relaxed military recollections that he asked his aide, General Vaval, to join him: 'Give the French a bottle of wine, they talk better than anyone, and I'd enjoy that,' but as they neared the plantation where Brunet waited, Vaval had a blinding apocalyptic vision. Reining in his horse, he ordered the black troops accompanying the two generals to move ahead, and said, with panic in his voice: 'Toussaint! Death awaits if you go in there. For G.o.d's sake, turn back. For G.o.d's sake, don't go!'

'What's the matter, old friend?'

'Terror! I'm shaking with terror,' and he held out his trembling hands.

'Fool! Grab your reins and let's get on with our little celebration.'

'I cannot! The angel of death hovers above that house,' and with that, Vaval turned back and galloped away as if the fiends of h.e.l.l were at his heels, never to see his hero again.

Toussaint and his nine enlisted attendants rode on, entered the plantation compound, and saluted the French soldiers waiting there. They, in turn, saluted Toussaint, who threw his reins to one of his men: 'Rest the horses out here,' and, giving the French soldiers orders to feed his people, he went in to join the officers.

He had barely stepped into the room when General Brunet hurried forward, embraced him like a brother, and excused himself for a moment to tend the wine. The moment he left the room, the French officers around Toussaint drew their swords, pointing the sharp ends at his heart and throat. 'Citizen Toussaint, you're under arrest,' and when Brunet, visibly shaken by the disgraceful thing he had been forced to do, returned to the room, thus able to avow in later questioning 'I had nothing to do with the arrest of General Toussaint,' he said merely: 'You're to be sent back to France ... bound hand and foot.'

Betrayed by a breach of honor so foul that all men in uniform reviled the act, Toussaint was immediately thrown aboard a small French s.h.i.+p, abused as a prisoner who had dishonored France, and taken to Brest, from where he was whisked to a fortress prison on the Swiss border. There, in the care of a s.a.d.i.s.tic jailer, he was starved and ridiculed as a black who had preposterously aspired to equality with the French.

Often during the days of his degradation he reflected upon the contrasting treatment he had received from his two enemies. 'The English, who suffered greatly from me,' he told his jailer, 'gave me a banquet, toasted me as an honorable foe, and embraced me as they sailed away. You French? You lured me to a meeting, your general betrayed his honor, and you threw me into this filthy dungeon.' He stared at the jailer and asked: 'How could you do these things to a French citizen who fought for France against the Spanish and the English to protect your rights?'

The jailer understood not one aspect of this moral dilemma, and on a spring day in 1803, when he came to bring General Toussaint L'Ouverture his breakfast, he found the great black general dead of exposure in his ice-cold cell, protected by only one thin blanket.

With the arrest and deportation of Toussaint, General Leclerc felt certain that final victory was near, for as he a.s.sured Espivent's a.s.sociates during a dinner at the chteau: 'I have only to subdue that pestilential Vaval and the pacification of St.-Domingue will be complete. Our troops can then return to France.'

Had Leclerc been able to consult at that moment with his last major opponent in the field, General Vaval, he would have found that the black commander had a.s.sessed the situation in identical terms, for the general was deep in the mountains with only a handful of black troops, and even that force diminished each week. His fellow generals, the murdering monster Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the mercurial Henri Christophe, had gone over to the French side, while the free-colored leaders, Andre Rigaud and Alexandre Petion, had fled to Paris, where men with their cast of skin were safe for the moment.

Only he was in the field with anything that might be called an army, and one night, when defeat and surrender seemed inevitable, he sat with his wife at the edge of a forest and lamented not his fate, for he was prepared for anything, but that of his n.o.ble leader, Toussaint: 'Marie, he defeated everyone. He was magical, a genius. He beat the Spanish before we joined them. He drove the English back into the sea. He defeated armies of free-coloreds when they came at him, and most of all, he defeated the French before they threw thousands of fresh men at us. And what did he achieve? Nothing. He won all the battles and lost the war.'

His wife would not accept that: 'He won us our freedom. We're not slaves anymore.'

'From what I understand, that was mostly the work of good-hearted men in France.'

'But we are free, and even if you have to surrender tomorrow, you can't change that. Even in his jail, Toussaint couldn't take credit for that.'

Such a nebulous victory gave little consolation to Vaval, who could foresee only the impending defeat of the last of his army and his own surrender as the black general who had held out to the end, and he slept that night on a rude pailla.s.se under the trees, a.s.sailed by this gnawing sense of failure.

But he was awakened at dawn by sentries bringing before him a pitiful black straggler who had tried to infiltrate the lines. He was in his seventies, an emaciated man whose lank, bent body showed the hurt and hunger he had undergone in order to join the rebelling slaves of St.-Domingue. He stood head bowed as his captors pushed him before their general.

'Who are you?' Vaval asked, aware that the shuffling fellow who was afraid to look up could be of little use to an army, and he and the black soldiers standing by were surprised when the man replied in excellent French: 'I was a slave on Guadeloupe ... joy like never before when the people in Paris sent us the wonderful news "You are slaves no more, freemen forever, just like us in France." We could buy land, work for wages, marry, and have homes like men and women are supposed to.'

'Like we have here,' Marie Vaval said. 'Slaves no more.'

The man turned to look at her, and said: 'My wife said the same: "Slaves no more!" but then he came, that monster Napoleon, and shouted at us: "You're slaves again, and slaves you will remain forever." '

'What?' Vaval shouted, and the soldiers who had captured the stranger called for others to move close to hear the appalling news.

'Yes! Slavery crushes us again in Guadeloupe. And it will return here too, unless you fight it to the death. It will come here on the next boat ... or the one after that. Look at my back,' and the man pulled up his flimsy s.h.i.+rt to show a crisscross of welts on his black skin. 'They did this when they caught me trying that first time to sneak off the island: "You're not to tell any of the other islands about slavery coming back. They'll receive word when we think it's proper." They were desperately afraid some slaves might hear the news at a bad moment for them-like now, on this island-while you still have armies in the field. They're afraid the news might make you fight harder.'

Although Vaval was thrown into a sullen rage by this news, he could not be sure that the man was telling the truth; he might well be an agent sent by the French to goad the final black army into precipitate action: 'How did you get to us? All the way from Guadeloupe?'

'With difficulty-hiding from the search dogs, beaten near to death on my first try, relying on companions who lost heart when they saw the bigness of the sea they were supposed to cross. No food ... fight in the cane fields ... a stolen canoe ...'

As the refugee spoke, Vaval heard only the first portion of his words, for he was remembering the days in the sugar fields in the southern part of St.-Domingue when his father, the slave Vavak, told his children almost the same story: 'A stolen boat ... a beach in Puerto Rico ... escaping the chase dogs in Santo Domingo ...' The story of black refugees seeking freedom never ended, never changed, and sometimes, as in this dawn confrontation, the words and images exploded in terrible fury, blinding men to the risk even of death.

'You are one of us,' Vaval broke in. 'You are to work with me ... close ... because I need to hear your words: Napoleon will drive us back to slavery. No! By G.o.d, he will not!' And he gathered about him his wife, the messenger of doom and all his lieutenants, and they swore there at the edge of the forest overlooking a gully that stood between them and the French troops in Le Cap: 'We will defy Napoleon to the death! We will never again be slaves!' And from that day on, General Vaval, fighting alone, became a military hurricane comparable to the natural ones that periodically ravaged the Caribbean. In battle after battle he surprised the trained French armies whose troops outnumbered his sixty thousand to ten.

But because Charles Leclerc was also a heroic man who knew how to use his superiority in numbers, he was able to drive Vaval's ragtag army slowly backward into the final valley from which there would be no escape. Vaval, realizing this, grew ever closer to his wife, who had supported him during so many bleak midnights, and they took an oath between them: 'We will never again be slaves. The French shall not capture us alive.'

Despite the valiant boast of its general, Vaval's collection of former slaves certainly would have been pushed back into the final closed valley had not an ally stormed into St.-Domingue to fight on his side. It was a remorseless antagonist, General Yellow Fever, and the prediction made earlier by Vaval was about to come true in terrible dimension. The disease struck the French troops with such fury that the Europeans were overwhelmed by the a.s.sault. Carried by mosquitoes, a fact then unknown, it attacked the liver so that jaundice resulted, but it also produced a debilitating fever which caused unrelieved aching in the head and back; then tiny ruptures occurred in the soft tissues of the throat and lungs, resulting in dreadful hemorrhaging from the mouth.