“Then it will all have been for nothing.” His voice was resigned. Defeat starts weeks or months before an actual surrender.
“It seems a desperate strategy.”
“For desperate times.” He reined up, looking at me squarely. “I am happy to show you about, monsieur, but telling the truth is depressing, and I think we won’t tarry into the evening because you should return to your wife. Our general has a taste for other men’s women.”
“I trust Astiza.”
“Which could be exactly the problem. Her loyalty could make you an inconvenience in Rochambeau’s eyes. My orders are to keep you safe, but don’t count on that forever. You do not want to make her a convenient widow.”
“What do you mean?”
“Rochambeau and Admiral La Touche recently gave a dance aboard the admiral’s flagship, the deck turned into a garden. There were plants and flowers on the bulwarks and vines suspended from the rigging. It was lovely escape, letting one pretend war didn’t exist. But a young beauty not entirely in love with her husband came in a Parisian dress so scandalous she was almost naked. This Clara danced the night away with our commander, and the next day her husband was assigned to a column sent to smoke out the blacks. It was ambushed, and he never returned.”
“And Clara?”
“Seduced, and then packed off to Paris.”
“Astiza is entirely in love with me.” Even as I said it, I wasn’t sure. Her words echoed: What if it was a mistake to marry?
“Then you’re a lucky man.” His tone said he wasn’t sure, either. “But anyone can be tempted. What does she most desire? Rochambeau will find that out and then offer it to her.”
My son, I thought. “I’m not to volunteer for a sally, then.”
“And not to take for granted the fidelity of your wife or the word of our esteemed general. No disrespect for her. It’s just friendly advice, monsieur, for a treacherous island. Fear makes people do strange things.”
“No offense taken, Colonel Aucoin. General Rochambeau gives fair warning by his manner, doesn’t he? Is he simply greedy?”
“Afraid, I think, a man who doesn’t know what to do. That’s why he slaughters and tortures the Negroes, out of fear they’ll do the same to him. It will only make it worse in the end, which he knows, and yet he can’t help himself. I think he ruts so much simply to postpone his nightmares. Servants have heard him screaming in the night.”
I liked this man’s realism. But rarely are the most sensible in charge.
“You must keep this conversation secret, of course,” Aucoin went on. “I am a soldier and will do what I am told, but I try to tell the truth to protect the innocent.”
I hadn’t been called that in some time.
“By the same token, you must not tell the truth about me to him,” the colonel added.
“But of course. I appreciate your trust.”
He shrugged. “I’m afraid, too. It puts me in the mood to confess.”
While the city’s eastern boundaries were flat and seemed to invite invasion, the French had used the terrain as best they could. At a low rise just to the right of the major trunk road, Rochambeau had ordered the construction of a sturdy fort of stone, earth, and logs that had just enough altitude to command the approaches. It was anchored to a much steeper mountain so precipitous that no sizable body of men could flank it from that direction. This fort, I judged, would be the key.
Aucoin led me up a causeway to the top of the bastion.
No enemy could be seen. The flat plantation country beyond seemed deserted, and with the loan of his spyglass I could make out the blackened shells of destroyed houses and sugar mills. Abandoned cane waved in the wind, a sea of ten-foot-high stalks hiding whatever was out there. Once-harvested fields had grown back wild, and smoke hazed the horizon.
“Where’s Dessalines?”
“Watching us as we watch him, and hoping disease finishes his campaign for him. He’s tried some assaults on our redoubts, and we’ve taught his men that voodoo doesn’t protect them from bullets. They charge fanatically, even the women, and it only adds to the carnage. You can smell the dead.”
Yes, there was a hint of the sickly sweet rot of abandoned corpses out there in the grass, apparently too close to French guns to be retrieved.
“So now he waits, licking his wounds. I’d like to go after him, but the general doesn’t believe we have the strength to retain any ground we capture.”
“So it’s stalemate.”
“Yes. He cannot conquer us, and we cannot capture him. Without siege artillery and the expertise to dig the proper approach trenches, I don’t see how he can take our fort here at Vertiers. He must wait for us to sicken or starve.”
I nodded. The French had splendid fields of fire, several batteries of cannon, and magazines crammed with powder. It might still be a long war. “I admire your engineers.”
“You were at Acre, so we respect your opinion.”
My expertise was exaggerated, but I’d developed an artilleryman’s eye in the Holy Land. I saw a crease in the terrain that could be seen from up high but was probably invisible to Dessalines. The ravine was a negligible ditch snaking into the cane, but it pointed at the French walls like a siege trench, and it was hard to see its bottom. It might provide cover in darkness. Well, that was something. “Do you have enough artillery to cover every approach?”
“Not if surprised. The key is that we learn what the blacks are going to do before they decide themselves. We can see them coming when they move; the sugarcane shakes to betray their march.”
“Kleber and Napoleon used the movement of wheat to their advantage in the Holy Land at the battle of Mount Tabor,” I said. “What about flanking you?”
“The mountains are too treacherous for more than a small patrol. A regiment would bog in mud and snakebite. Things will be decided here, in the open, on flat, firm ground. If a French naval squadron arrives, we might still hold out.”
I looked at the mountains, most so steep that attackers would fall at the French as much as charge them. Organization goes to pieces in terrain like that.
But I also saw a stream that sprang from a jungle canyon in those same mountains, emptying into a little pond right behind the French batteries. “You have a water supply, too.”
“Yes. Wells are brackish here, and while we can haul barrels from Cap-Francois, it’s laborious. Our engineers diverted that creek closer to our lines. On a hot day, that rivulet is a real asset. There’s no water on the rebel side, except the brackish river, which keeps them from camping too close.”
I saw a track in the ruddy soil led along the stream into the jungle. “Is there a vantage point up there?”
“It provides a view like a map. Come. We’ll have a swig of wine.”
We left our horses and climbed up along the stream, sweating in the heat. A brow of hill several hundred feet above the French lines finally gave me a clear vista. Here up high, the stream leveled briefly in a hollow, hills cupping either side of the rivulet before it disappeared into jungle. The waterway ran over the lip where we stood and down to the French camp below. I could see the snake of the defensive lines, the ominously quiet sugarcane fields, the sprawl of Cap-Francois, and tangled mountain ranges.
“What will you tell your government, Gage?” Aucoin wanted reassurance, even though my opinion was no better than his.
“It depends on the size and expertise of the opposing army, I suppose,” I said neutrally. “Perhaps I’ll tell them that either side can still win.”
“I called you honest. Now I’m not so sure.” He offered me a flask.
I sipped and glanced about, and an idea occurred. Perhaps I did have a scheme to offer Jubal, who in turn could take me to Dessalines, his mambo priestess, and legends of Montezuma’s treasure.
“Your engineers have expertise,” I went on. That was true enough. “It’s possible you could hold out forever with enough food and powder.” So an idea had tickled my brain, an idea inspired by my son Harry. I looked uphill.
