Caribbean (86 page)

It was done with bayonets, but only by the Poles, while the French stood, prepared to use their guns if any blacks escaped. It was grisly, horrible, and swift. Unarmed men were gutted with one powerful swipe, or took bayonet thrusts to the heart, or fell wounded to their knees to be clubbed to death. Those few who managed to dash into nearby houses were dragged screaming back into the square, where they were stabbed as they knelt, begging for mercy. Not one black soldier escaped and not one French soldier had to fire his gun. The Polish troops did it all.

When news of the massacre reached General Vaval, who had been waiting to welcome the detachment into his army, he was revolted. “Who did the killing?” he demanded, and when someone said: “The Polish battalion,” he remained silent for a long time, then said: “They shouldn’t even be here. Yellow fever will kill half of them.” Then he
took an oath: “I shall hunt them down, man by man,” but his informant added: “I was there, sir. It was the French general who gave the order and the French soldiers who lined the square.”

“Naturally,” Vaval said, but nevertheless, in subsequent months, he sometimes marched far out of his way in hopes of coming to grips with that murderous Polish unit. He did not succeed, but spies informed him from time to time that these Europeans were succumbing to the ravages of yellow fever even faster than he had predicted: “Two out of three Poles are either dead or in the hospital.” But his dogged tracking of their movements continued.

More than a year later, when his slave army had been victorious in many battles and when he was considered by the mass of blacks to be their finest general, he was on a drive which carried him to a mountainous corner of his old Colibri Plantation. As his aides were pitching his tent, a spy brought disturbing news: “Troops occupying that high hill. Guns all pointed this way.”

Vaval studied the height: “We’d lose lives trying to take that one,” and then the spy said: “The soldiers are all Polish. Second Battalion.”

When Vaval heard this he was paralyzed with indecision. Those men up there were the vicious crew who at St.-Marc had massacred defenseless black soldiers. Those Poles had outraged decency and the rules of war, and they deserved to die, which they surely would if he surrounded the eminence to prevent escape and then launched an assault upon it. But if he did, he would lose many of his best men, and uselessly. For once he did not know what to do, for he feared that if he ordered a costly assault at dawn, he would be doing so only to settle old grudges, and to lose good men that way would be dishonorable.

So at midnight, with the moon dropping low toward the horizon, the black general asked for three brave volunteers to move ahead of him with torches showing that he was carrying a white flag, and when the party was formed the four marched into the night: “Truce! Truce! We want to save your lives.”

As they reached the point where the path started climbing sharply upward, they were challenged by French troops led by a lieutenant who came forward, gun at the ready, to parley. At this point the black soldiers quickly thrust their torches into the ground and leveled their own guns at the Frenchmen.

“I am General Vaval.” The torches lit up his grave, determined face. “I come to offer you honorable terms to get off this peak. Who’s in command?”

“I’m not allowed to say. But he’s a colonel. Good fighting man.”

“Tell him he can accomplish a good thing if he’ll talk with me … an honorable thing.”

The lieutenant gave an order to his men waiting behind him in the darkness: “Three step forward. It’s a legitimate truce party,” and when they appeared, to face the black soldiers, he and one of Vaval’s men disappeared up the hill.

“What will happen?” one of the black soldiers asked, and Vaval replied: “Common sense will win out, I hope.”

Rather promptly the French lieutenant and the black soldier came down the hill, bringing with them four well-armed white soldiers, in the midst of whom came a Polish officer, who said stiffly: “Colonel Zembrowski, Polish Second Battalion.”

Vaval moved forward, extended his hand, grasped the Pole’s in a warm clasp, and asked: “May we talk alone?” When they moved to a hill with guns from every direction pointed at them, Vaval remembered the dignity with which the English officers had treated him, and his first thought was: I must do no less. And so he said: “Colonel, as you no doubt saw before sunset, we have enough troops to take this hill.”

Very calmly Zembrowski, a man in his late thirties and far from home, said: “And you surely saw that we have the men and ammunition to make that very costly. That must be why you’re here.”

To the Pole’s surprise, Vaval changed the course of the conversation completely: “How is it going?” and Zembrowski, as soldier to soldier in a moment of military frankness, repeated almost to the word what Vaval himself had said months ago: “We should never have been sent here. Napoleon was afraid of us.”

“Fever?”

“We came with five thousand. Now we have not quite one thousand.”

“The British had the same experience when they tried to defeat us.”

“And you? Shall you win a nation for yourselves?”

“We already have.”

“We should never have tried to stop you. But in the end, Napoleon will.”

Quietly, but with enormous conviction, Vaval replied: “Even he will fail. The whites tried, and we overcame them. The free-coloreds tried, and we drove them into the ground. The Spanish tried, the English
too, you Poles and even traitors within our own group tried, and they’ve all failed.” Then the harshness in his voice vanished, and he said with deep regret: “Even the French tried … to destroy their own children. Napoleon sent his legions against us, and soon they’ll be leaving forever.” He stopped in the darkness and looked at his black soldiers with their torches and the Poles with theirs, then said: “I’ve never understood why the fever kills whites and leaves us alone.”

Then Vaval asked: “How is it … your soldiers fighting alongside the French?” and Zembrowski replied: “The French don’t like Poles, but of course they don’t like anybody. The generals, though, they’re brilliant. Trained. They know history. They study terrain carefully.” He broke into a soft chuckle: “Mind if we sit? My left leg took a small shot.”

When they were perched on rocks, he laughed outright: “Sometimes I don’t blame the French. One general came to me with a piece of paper: ‘What are we going to do about this, Zembrowski?’ and I saw that he had written the names of two of my junior officers: Źdźblo and Szczygieł. ‘We can’t handle names like that,’ and I said: ‘We’ll make the first one Dupont, the second Kessel.’ ”

After a pause he said: “They can’t accept us. Because we don’t do things their way, they’re quick to call us cowards. Claim we don’t do our share of the fighting. When our men hear this, when I hear it, we think our honor has been smeared, and to a Pole honor is everything.”

For some moments, as the torches flickered, the two soldiers looked only at moving shadows, then Zembrowski felt compelled to speak honestly out of his respect for this powerful black general: “Perhaps you know that our battalion was at St.-Marc?” and Vaval replied: “Yes, I’ve been trailing you ever since, hoping to catch you like this.”

“You know, of course, that it was French officers who gave the commands? Threatened to bayonet us if we didn’t bayonet you.”

“I supposed so,” Vaval said sternly, at which Zembrowski dropped his head in his hands. “Dishonored. General Vaval, we dishonored ourselves that day and I pray you can forgive us.”

“I have … tonight … meeting you on the battlefield, man to man. But in this colony, as you yourself say, Poles are without honor.” He hesitated, then rose and started back to the troops, but as they walked together he said: “In the morning, of course, we shall come up and take this hill,” to which Zembrowski made a strange reply:
“General, you’re a man who has kept his honor intact. I beg you, do not lead your troops tomorrow. Do not.” He said no more, but as they stood under the torches for their farewell, Zembrowski reached out impulsively and embraced his black enemy.

Early next morning when the former slaves, with Vaval in the lead, climbed up the hill to wrest it from the Poles, they were astonished to see two French officers running down toward them, waving white flags and shouting: “We surrender! Flag of surrender!” and they had scarcely reached the bottom, their faces white with fear, when a series of titanic blasts enveloped the top of the hill, shattering it and killing every soldier there, including Zembrowski.

The honor of the Polish troops, whatever that means, had been restored. Rather than surrender, they had blown themselves to eternity.

Despite the stubborn heroism of generals like Vaval and the ravages of General Yellow Fever, Leclerc was painfully carpentering a victory pretty much along the lines Napoleon had laid out; black units, seeing the futility of trying to oppose the entire French empire with its endless resources, were beginning to defect in huge numbers, so that even an improvising genius like Vaval had to realize that defeat was at hand. The French were too strong, Leclerc showed a fortitude no one had expected, and the black cause seemed doomed.

French victory would probably have been attained had not Napoleon, believing that he had unlimited power over men, issued the appalling decree which restored slavery in Guadeloupe. This devastating news, which up to now Leclerc had kept suppressed in his colony, seeped out, and now the blacks could not blind themselves to what lay ahead, especially when refugees from Guadeloupe at the eastern end of the Caribbean arrived with tales of what disruptions had occurred on that island when slavery was reinstated.

Leclerc, still trusting that he could dominate the slaves, assembled all his senior officers at the château to inform them: “I’m sure one more push will do it. I’m heading into the mountains to catch that damned Vaval,” but before departing on what he hoped would be his final maneuver, he told Espivent: “Look after Pauline for me,” and off he rode.

Espivent, standing in his gateway, watched as the gallant general headed for the mountains where Vaval waited, and was swept by feelings
of compassion and remorse: We laughed at him when he landed. Napoleon’s brother-in-law, a know-nothing, make-believe general. But by God he drove Toussaint into surrender and he’s pinned down that pesky Vaval. And as he rides off to his final battle, he leaves here in my house … what? A brothel superintended by its only occupant, his wife.

As soon as Pauline was certain that her husband was securely gone into the hills, she began entertaining a series of his officers, and was so blatant about her upstairs sessions—a different man every three days it seemed—that Espivent felt he had to intervene, for it was his château that was being contaminated and his friend’s honor defiled: “Good God, madam! Can’t you control your appetites?” But even as he reprimanded her he was uncomfortably aware of her dark Italian beauty. She was twenty-two that turbulent year, a gorgeous human being who knew full well her effect on men and her skills of coquetry.

“Now, Seigneur Espivent,” she said gently, biting her left thumbnail, “you’re certainly not talking about the last century, are you?”

“I’m talking about all centuries. About the dignity of France. About the sister of the chief of state. And especially about the honor of a brave husband who is absent leading his troops into difficult battle.” As he thundered these words he was dressed in a red skullcap and one of his blue capes, and with his neatly trimmed Vandyke and flashing eyes, he could have been mistaken for some moralist of a preceding century, but he had little impact on Pauline, who that very afternoon entertained a colonel from Espivent’s hometown of Nantes.

During this assignation he remained on the ground floor, pacing in such a growing rage that when the colonel descended, smiling and adjusting his sword, Espivent jumped out to bar his way: “If you ever step into my house again, sir, I shall kill you.”

“What are you saying?”

The altercation brought Pauline down from her well-used bedroom, and stepping between the two men, she demanded: “What goes on here?” and Espivent said through clenched teeth: “If he comes here again on such a mission, I shall kill him.”

“Are you crazy, old man?” she shouted, and in growing anger he shouted back: “Leave my house. I’ve protected this château through fire and riot and disorder, and I will not have it dishonored in my final days.”

The imbroglio ended with Espivent saying righteously: “I shall inform General Leclerc,” at which Pauline and the colonel could not refrain from laughter, but they did have the decency to refrain from sneering as they giggled: “He’s always known.”

Espivent did fully intend to clear this disgraceful matter with Leclerc when the latter returned, but in the middle of October 1802, a brief eight months after his arrival at Le Cap, the general, while on a chase after Vaval, felt the onset of a virulent fever, and turning to his aide, he gasped: “I think it’s got me.”

He was rushed from the battlefield to the Espivent château, but by the time he reached there his exhausted body had passed into the second and third stages of the dreaded disease, and everyone who looked at his ravaged face and twitching body knew that recovery was impossible. Now Pauline, confronted with the certainty that this honorable man whom she had so abused was dying, became a true sister of Napoleon, fighting the disease with her constant ministrations and ignoring the warnings of her friends: “But, madam! You may become infected yourself.”

“He needs me,” she said defiantly, and through the long tropical nights she bathed his fevered body and did what she could to alleviate his pains. But on the fifth morning, when he began to hemorrhage from the mouth, she screamed for Espivent: “Help me!” and together they wiped the blood from his face, but to no avail. Charles Leclerc, who had proved his valor in the most unrelenting corner of the French colonial world, was dead at the age of thirty.

Four officers were assigned to accompany the cadaver and Pauline Buonaparte—she spelled her name the Italian way—back to France, and during the extended voyage, for the French ship had to dodge English prowlers, she found solace with three older officers, each of whom had been her lover at Le Cap. An officer, who was never invited to her cabin, was heard to say to one of the sailors: “Looking at those four, I feel like the fifth wheel on a cart,” and when the sailor asked what he meant, he said: “I’ve never been part of their merry games,” and the sailor asked: “Would you like to be?” and the complaining officer laughed: “Who wouldn’t?” and the sailor said: “Trip’s not over.”