Explosion in a Cathedral, page 15
XVIII.
Ravages of War
Goya
Chrétien and Victor Hugues departed in one of the first boats—perhaps to show the army that, when the hour of action struck, they were no less daring than the soldiers themselves. When the troops reached land, they heard a few disparate shots, followed by a brief exchange of gunfire that faded into the distance. Night fell, and silence overtook the ships, where navy troops remained behind with the two companies of the Huntsmen of the Pyrenees under the command of Captain De Leyssegues. And three days passed without incident, nothing heard, nothing learned. To still his anguish, Esteban fished in the company of the typesetters, who for the moment were unable to exercise their profession. With most of the army gone, space was so abundant on the ships that the decks resembled theater stages after the end of a grand spectacle. Abandoned bundles, empty crates, and loose robes hung about. A man could walk at ease, nap in the shadows of the sails, have his bowl of soup wherever it pleased him, pick at his fleas in the open air, play cards with his eyes ever drawn to the horizon, imagining, between antes, the apparition of an enemy supply ship’s sails far away. It might have seemed a pleasant respite in the Windward Islands, had the absence of news not soured so many spirits. There was no point in scrutinizing the landscape of the coast. There, nothing changed. A child pulled clams from the sand; dogs tussled, chest-deep in water; a family of negroes passed, enormous bundles on their heads, as though their wanderings were never to end . . . Some assumed the worst when, on the morning of the fourth day, a mail boat came level with the Thétis with orders to guide the fleet to Pointe-à-Pitre. But the Army of the Republic was victorious. After a skirmish upon disembarking, the French advanced cautiously without encountering the expected resistance. Victor Hugues attributed the retreat of the English troops to the terror of the monarchist colonists whose filthy white flags they knocked aside with their Republican ones. The crews of the merchant ships were more spirited. Taken by surprise in the port, they had organized a resistance at Fort Fleur d’Épée with sixteen pieces of artillery. Just last night, Cartier and Rouger attacked their redoubt, catching unawares the nine hundred men defending it, and overtook it by saber and bayonet without firing a shot. Chrétien, excessively gallant in his desire to set an example, had fallen facing off against the enemy. The English, demoralized by their loss, were entrenched now in Basse-Terre behind the Salt River—a minuscule stretch of water thick with mangroves, which, despite its slenderness, divided Guadeloupe into two different territories. Victor Hugues had been in Pointe-à-Pitre since midnight installing his government. Eighty-seven merchant ships had left the port since the French took power. The warehouses were bursting with merchandise. The squadron was urgently needed . . . They prepared to depart as the transport canoes were returned to their bays. An immense, heartfelt, almost visceral joy moved the men from the lookouts to the holds, and they climbed, ran, pushed the cannons, raised the sails, unfurled, furled, heaped. Victory, that was fine. But better still, there would be wines and fresh hams studded with cloves of garlic, lots of wine, and ox with new carrots, all that very night; much wine, and the finest of rums, and the kind of coffee that leaves a stain in the cup, women even, maybe, red-skinned, copper-skinned, pale, dark—some with high heels under the lace fringe of their petticoats; others who smelled of frangipane, of orange blossom perfume, of vetiver, and most of all, of female. And with chants and shouts and hurrahs for the Republic, raised on the jetties and echoed back from the ships, the squadron steered into the town port on that day of Prairal of Year II, with the guillotine erect on the prow of the Pique, so polished it looked new, unveiled for all to see, that they should come to know it well. Victor and De Leyssegues embraced. And they went together to the former building of the Sénéchal—where the Commissar proceeded to install his offices and chambers—to bow before the body of Chrétien, laid out in his ribbons and rosettes over a black mound flowering with red carnations, white spikenards, and blue plumbago. Esteban was dispatched to the Grain Exchange for foreign commerce. Today he would begin his employment, composing a Registry of Confiscated Property to tally the goods of the many ships the enemy had abandoned. Posters were hung all round proclaiming the abolition of slavery. The patriots jailed by the White Lords were set free. A dense, jubilant multitude wandered through the streets cheering the recent arrivals. Another cause for celebration was the discovery that General Dundas, British Governor of Guadeloupe, had died in Basse-Terre the night before the French disembarked. This was propitious for the Army of the Republic. But the debauchery the sailors had promised themselves that evening was long in coming: soon after midday, Captain De Leyssegues ordered them to start work on fortifications and defenses in the port, sinking old ships in the silt to block access and arranging cannons along the docks, their muzzles facing the sea . . . Four days later, their luck changed. A battalion on Morne Saint-Jean, beyond the Salt River, began systematically bombarding Pointe-à-Pitre. Admiral Jarvis, landing his army in Le Gosier, laid siege to the city. Terror overtook the population. Projectiles fell from the sky, hammering wantonly, collapsing roofs, piercing floors, sending tiles flying in deluges of red clay, rebounding off the masonry, the pavement of the streets, the corner posts, before rolling with thunderous clamor toward whatever could be toppled—a column, a balustrade, a man stunned by the speed of everything bearing down on him. A scent of quicklime, dry and ashy, enveloped the city in an atmosphere of demolition, parching throats, burning eyes. A cannonball, crashing into a quarry stone wall, rose up over the wooden houses, hurled itself down a set of stairs, struck a cabinet full of bottles, a vitrine of fine china, a cellar, where its trajectory ended in a chaos of shattered staves atop the destroyed body of a woman in labor. Loosened by the impact, a bell had fallen with a clangor of bronze so tremendous that its sound reached the enemy cannoneers. It was the sorriest of refuges against ordnance of iron, that domain of blinds, partitions, dainty balconies, slats, wooden grilles, trellises, and battens—all made to take advantage of the softest breath of breeze. Each shot was a mallet blow against a wicker cage, leaving corpses under the walnut table where a family had sought refuge. Soon more horrors came to light: a battalion with ovens posted on Morne Savon was peppering the town with red-hot shells. Everything still standing began to burn. After the quicklime came the fire. The first fire wasn’t tamed before another started, further off, in the cloth shop, at the sawmill, at the rum cellar which, when touched by the blaze, sent forth a slow stream of blue flames that followed the footways down the surrounding slopes. Many of the humbler houses had roofs of leaves and braided fibers, and a single heated projectile sufficed to destroy an entire block of them. The lack of water meant they had to fight the flames with axes, sawdust, and machetes. Added to the destruction descending from the sky was another waged conscientiously by the children, women, and the old. A black, dense smoke from the basements, where old and filthy things burn, cast sudden midday shadows across the tortured city. Though intolerable, impossible to bear for even an hour, it stretched on through day and night, in a perpetual racket of ruin mingling with the cry, the crackling of fire and the thundering on the ground of things that roll, strike, collide, thrusting like battering rams. Disaster was in the air, and after each apparent climax, some bit of news came that made matters worse. Three offensives against the murderous battalions had come to nought. Haggard from insomnia and fatigue, and ill-suited to the climate, General Cartier died. General Rouger, struck by a projectile, was agonizing in a room of the building making do as a field hospital. Stealthy Dominican friars had re-emerged from their hideouts and stood tall at the beds of the ill with a potion or tisane in hand. At the time, no one paid attention to their habits, accepting the care and solace they offered, which was soon followed by an unveiling of Crucifixes and Holy Oils. Religious contraband slithered in where gangrene and wounds were most abundant, and many clamored for last rites, throwing their insignia to the ground, when they sensed the proximity of death . . . Thirst was now added to the numberless torments. Dead bodies had fallen into the reservoirs, and the poisoned water couldn’t be drunk. The soldiers boiled sea water to make salty coffee that they would sweeten with huge quantities of sugar and alcohol. The water carriers who supplied the population with barrels borne on boats or carts couldn’t reach the local streams under enemy fire. Rats teemed in the streets, scuttled through the rubble, invading everything, and, if that weren’t pestilence enough, gray scorpions climbed out of the old wood, aiming their barbs at whatever they could sting. Several ships in the port were reduced to drifting piles of charred planks. The Thétis, struck by a possibly mortal wound, keeled in a panorama of broken masts, of shattered hulls, their ribs like bones. On the twentieth day of the siege, Miserere Colic made its appearance. Within hours, people were exhausted, their life draining from their intestines. A Christian burial being impossible, the bodies were interred wherever they could be, at the foot of a tree, in a pit, by the side of the latrines. Falling on the Old Cemetery, the cannonballs had unearthed bones, hurling them over the sunken tombstones and uprooted crosses. Victor Hugues, with his best troops and his last remaining generals, was entrenched at the Morne du Gouvernement, a hill overlooking the city, with the walls of a stone church protecting its perimeter . . . Numb, stupefied, incapable of thought in the midst of the cataclysm that had lasted nearly four weeks, Esteban passed the time lying in a sort of lair, a horizontal pit that he’d dug between sugar sacks in the storehouse in the port where the bombardment had surprised him while he was taking inventory. The Loeuillets, father and son, had followed his example, and were sheltering in front of him in a roomier hollow in the sacks, where they had preserved some of the parts from their printing press—in particular, the box of types, which was impossible to replace in these lands. Thirst didn’t afflict them, as there were several butts of wine stored there, and for refreshment, from fear, or simply to have a drink, they drained pitcher after pitcher of that turbid liquid, which grew sourer by the day and left a purple crust on their lips. In those moments of misery, Loeuillet the elder, son of a Camisard, brought out the family Bible he’d kept hidden in a box of paper. When the bullets struck close by, and his drinking had stoked his courage, he would shout, from the depths of his hovel, a few verses from Revelations. And nothing accorded better with reality than those words John the Theologian had uttered in prophetic delirium: “The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.” “Our many impieties,” the typographer moaned, “have brought the End Times upon us.” And just then, he heard in Jarvis’s artillery the exemplary ire of the Old Great Gods.
XIX.
One morning, the gunfire died down. The tension eased; the animals rested their ears; the prone remained there lying prone, undisturbed by further shocks. Waves lapped in the port, and when a boy throwing a rock shattered the last intact window, people were frightened by the noise’s strange clarity. Survivors emerged from their pits, their caves, their pigsties, covered in soot, in grime, in excrement, filthy bandages dangling a palm’s length from their wounds. The cause of the portent was soon revealed: two nights before, Victor Hugues, warned that the English were decapitating his vanguard and were on the verge of entering the city, had made a desperate, fevered descent from the Morne du Gouvernement, repelling the enemy repeatedly and at last giving them chase, until they crossed back over the Salt River and retreated to their trenches in the fields of Berville in Basse-Terre. In this part of the country, the French were victors . . . A convoy of water sellers appeared at midday, and a multitude in rags fell on it bearing marmites, buckets, troughs, basins. The families threw themselves on the ground to drink, pushed past the muzzles and snouts of their beasts, sinking their heads in the vessels, fighting, licking, vomiting what they had drunk too quickly—stealing pitchers from each other in a tumult that had to be broken up with blows from the rifle butts. Thirst slaked, they set to clearing the main roads, dragging corpses up from the rubble. Now and then, an enemy projectile still fell, toppling a passerby, tearing down a grating, splintering an altarpiece. But no one cared about such trifles, after what they’d suffered for four terrible weeks. It came out that General Aubert, the last of the expedition’s military chiefs, was on his deathbed with yellow fever. Victor Hugues was the sole remaining lord of the Grande-Terre. Calling the Loeuillets to his office, with its shattered windows and half-burnt curtains hanging like festoons of misery, he dictated, to their astonishment, a proclamation of a state of siege and the formation, by forced conscription, of a militia of two thousand men of color fit to bear arms. Any inhabitant who spread false rumors, who proved himself an adversary of Liberty, or who tried to pass over to Basse-Terre would be summarily executed, and good patriots were encouraged to betray their confidants. Promotions were granted by decree: Captain Pelardy became Division General and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, and Commander Boudet was made Brigadier General, tasked with instructing and disciplining the local troops . . . Esteban admired the energy the Commissar had shown since the day they had disembarked in Les Salines. He was a powerful commander, and incomparably lucky. The successive deaths of Chrétien, Cartier, Rouger, and Aubert were uniquely propitious for him, as now, the only men who might in some way have been capable of opposing him were gone. Tensions between the military command and civil authority were nullified de facto. Victor Hugues, who had argued bitterly at times with the expedition’s generals—prone to flaunting their braid, their plumes, and their seniority—relied from that day forward on two fanatically devoted underlings who knew, moreover, that it was up to him whether the Convention would confirm their promotions . . . That night, wine coursed like water through the town, and the soldiers who had energy enough found relief from their prolonged estrangement from women. At a banquet of officers Esteban attended with the Loeuillets, father and son, the Commissar was jovial, witty, eloquent. Mulatta waitresses brought glasses of rum punch on trays, and didn’t anger when they felt a hand grab them around the waist or pinch them under their skirts. Between toasts, Victor Hugues announced that the Morne du Gouvernement would henceforth be known as the Morne de la Victoire, and that the Place Sartines, so beautifully open onto the port, would now be called Place de la Victoire. As for Pointe-à-Pitre, its new name was Port de la Liberté. (“They’ll go on calling it Pointe-à-Pitre,” Esteban thought, “just as Chauvin-Dragon never stopped being Saint-Jean de Luz.”) At dessert time—some early hour of the morning—the young man heard calls for the maidservants to sing nostalgic verses by the Marquis de Bouillé, a cousin of Lafayette who had been the governor of Guadeloupe in his youth. Summoned home to France twenty-four years ago, he composed a lament in the island’s local dialect that still echoed in everyone’s memory:
