‘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 Vavel 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 Szczygiel. “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.’
When the funeral ship reached France, Leclerc was buried with the honors he had won as a courageous fighting man, and Napoleon paid him respect, but the latter’s attention was on other matters, for when he realized that he might lose St.-Domingue, he quickly disposed of the other prospering colony he held in Louisiana, selling it at a shockingly low price to President Jefferson of the new American Republic, for in his opinion, probably correct, Louisiana without St.-Domingue as a way station to support it would be indefensible.
He also attended to his rambunctious sister, finding her with amazing celerity an Italian nobleman, a member of the great Borghese family, as her second husband. As a gesture of appreciation, young Borghese sold Napoleon for pennies the vast Borghese collection of art and supervised its removal to Paris. To reciprocate, Napoleon made Pauline a duchess, but this only served to spur her bedroom activities.
With Leclerc gone and the bulldog Vaval still at large, command of the French troops in St.-Domingue fell into the hands of the son of an illustrious general who had helped the American colonies win their independence. Donatien Rochambeau turned out to be one of the horrors of the Caribbean, known for his disgraceful behavior and his Nero-like propensities.
To strike terror into the hearts of Vaval’s black remnants still opposing the French, he imported from Cuba a large number of savage dogs specially trained to attack Negroes, introducing the animals at a gala evening performance attended by eager whites. Three black men, stripped to the waist, were brought into an enclosed space, and while they huddled together, unaware of what was about to happen, hatches were thrown open and the dogs leaped into the arena. But they were quickly greeted by a chorus of booing, for the dogs merely sniffed at the blacks, circled them, and withdrew to fight among themselves.
Rochambeau, infuriated by the cries of derision, shouted to his soldiers: ‘Draw some blood. That’ll get them started,’ and men with bayonets went out, protecting themselves from the dogs who wanted to attack them and not the blacks, and jabbed at the bellies of the three blacks until blood spurted, whereupon the dogs leaped at the men, tore them apart, and devoured them. The audience applauded.
Like Leclerc before him, Rochambeau was domiciled at Espivent’s château, where nightly he was encouraged by the owner to continue his assaults on blacks and free-coloreds: ‘I must show you my studies, General. How one drop of black blood contaminates a family through thirteen generations, 8,192 descendants. So anything you can do to eliminate blacks and even part-blacks is commendable,’ and these two patriots, representing not more than 40,000 whites among nearly 500,000 blacks, seriously believed that through terrorism they could control the blacks and force them back into slavery: ‘Finest thing Napoleon’s done so far, General, is the reintroduction of slavery, but we may have to kill off all those who knew freedom under Toussaint and that infamous Vaval. They won’t surrender, so don’t hold back.’
Espivent applauded when his new friend disciplined a fractious black brigade in a manner that General Leclerc could not have approved. The hundred or so black would-be mutineers were marched to the public square, surrounded by French soldiers with rifles at the ready, and forced to watch as their wives were then brought into the square and executed in various ways, one by one. Then the guns were turned on the men, and all were slain.
Espivent himself participated in a general elimination of any Cap-Français blacks who were reported by white informants as ‘being so badly infected with the disease of freedom that they will never again make good slaves.’ He set up an open-air office on the docks and from it directed some eight thousand blacks to board ships that would, he promised, ‘take you to freedom in Cuba.’ When the ships were loaded, one by one, they sailed about a mile out into the bay, where sailors armed with guns and swords killed the blacks, pitching their dead bodies into the sea at such a rate that the nearby shores were lined with decomposing corpses. Espivent remedied this unfortunate development by instructing the captains: ‘Sail your ships farther so the currents will carry the bodies out to sea.’
Espivent did not personally participate in one of the more ingenious assaults on blacks, but he did provide a slaving ship for the experiment and supervised the engineering details: belowdecks a small furnace was erected in which wet sulfur could be burned, and the prodigious amount of smoke it produced was then conveyed by pipes into a lower hold where the blacks were crammed. One potful of burning sulfur gave off enough gas to suffocate sixty blacks, killing them without the waste of bullets or the construction of gallows.
But these atrocities, and there were others, gained Rochambeau nothing, for whenever a new one was reported to General Vaval in the mountains, he listened, did not interrupt, bowed his head and clenched his fists till the nails bit into his palms—and dedicated himself even more furiously than before to a single task: ‘We shall evict every Frenchman from this colony. There can be no negotiation, no truce.’ Ten years before, he had not even known words like evict and negotiation, but now he was using them fluently to help build a new nation.
Each night before his men launched some paralyzing move against Rochambeau’s forces, he moved among them, saying in his soft voice: ‘Tomorrow we win Toussaint’s victory for him,’ and next day when he struck, his drive was so relentless, so composed of cold fury, that the French could not withstand the waves of destruction that crashed down upon them. Toward the end of 1803 an infuriated Rochambeau told his generals: ‘Dammit, there’s no handling that little fiend,’ and one afternoon he simply gave up the effort. There was no grandiloquent gesture, no honorable acknowledgment that the blacks had won. He simply called in his ships, then spent a night drafting a report to Napoleon explaining how, through trickery and deceit, Vaval had gained a few unimportant skirmishes but would have been totally defeated had not yellow fever intervened.
At the railing of the last French ship to leave St.-Domingue stood Jerome Espivent, headed for exile from the colony he loved. He was now in his sixties, his hair and Vandyke completely white. He had about his shoulders one of his black capes, and in his eyes there was a mist of profound regret as he watched his stone château growing ever smaller. ‘We should never have lost that land,’ he said to a young officer from the Loire Valley. ‘It was all because of the free-coloreds,’ he added, and when he turned back to see Le Cap, both it and his mansion had disappeared from view.
br /> The attempt to whip the blacks of Toussaint and Vaval back into slavery had failed. The great Napoleon, having lost the richest colony in the world and nearly a hundred thousand of his best European troops, would now turn his attention to his own coronation as emperor and his chain of rampages through Europe, culminating in his retreat from Moscow. In his immortal journey he would humble a dozen kings and humiliate a score of generals, but he managed to outsmart the slave Toussaint only by an act of trickery and dishonor, while General Vaval defied him to the end.
In 1804, César Vaval, like the Roman general Cincinnatus in 458 B.C., retired to his land after a chain of significant victories and the establishment of the only black republic in the world. Since he had been a slave in its fields, he was entitled to claim the entire Colibri Plantation of Espivent, but he took only the western portion, the part that contained the hill on which the Polish troops had chosen mass suicide rather than surrender. There he lived with his wife and three children, and sometimes in the evening he told them not of his own exploits, which he felt had been duplicated or excelled by several of Toussaint’s other generals, but of the extraordinary heroism of his father, the slave Vavak on the Danish plantation. And as he did so, the past became very real for his children. They could visualize themselves in Africa, or under the Danish lash on St. John, or in a small boat escaping to Puerto Rico and on to Haiti. Vaval drummed into them that they were descendants of exceptionally heroic people, and they felt obligated to sustain the tradition. Of their father’s heroics during the war of liberation they never spoke, nor was there need, for it was assumed that they would behave as he had.
Now, as a man nearing fifty, he was not happy with what he saw in his new nation. One of Toussaint’s vindictive generals, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had recently proclaimed himself Emperor for Life. And what a vicious man, Vaval thought one evening as he sat atop the Polish hill. Last year Dessalines had broadcast an amnesty to all the islands of the Caribbean and even to South Carolina: ‘You whites who fled Haiti, come home. The past is forgotten. Come back and help us build a great new nation!’ They came back, yes they did, white people homesick for the colony they had loved. And what happened when they got here?