Eagle's Cry

by David Nevin

  Her office door opened a little and Clinch Johnson gave a tentative little knock, looking as if he would flee if she frowned. So she smiled and waved him in and watched him seat himself with his suit encasing him like a sausage and his yellow hair standing up. She told him she was afraid, and soon she was pouring out the whole range of her fears for New Orleans and for her business and for her adopted country as well, how Pirette had trembled and Louis had looked near tears and Mr. Madison was implacable and friends in New Orleans—Henri really was none of Clinch’s business—showed a mad arrogance that ultimately must work evil on them.

  “Well, Miss Danny,” he said, with such easy calm that she instantly felt soothed, and she cried, “Oh, Clinch, just ‘Danny’ will do—we’re friends, aren’t we?”

  He smiled with infectious pleasure. “I do hope so, Miss D—ah, that is, Danny. Yes, ma’am.”

  “Tell me it’s not as bad as it looks. I need cheering.”

  “Couple of things. I do business with some British houses, and I hear tell the French ain’t having that easy a time in Santo Domingo. And the way the British tell it, they’re ready to crank up their war with Napoleon again.”

  Britain had struck a truce with the French back in March, which was universally assumed to be merely a momentary cease-fire sure to collapse soon. But meanwhile it made things worse in America, freeing the French as it did to pursue their dreams of empire.

  “Way I hear it,” Clinch said, “British ain’t willing to give up Malta, and Napoleon says he must have it. In London they figure the Frenchman wants it as a stepping stone to grabbing Egypt again and maybe going on to India, and they don’t intend to make that easy for him. Rather fight than do that, so they say.”

  She liked the sound of that. Santo Domingo, an essential stepping stone—and Malta, an equally essential stepping stone on the other side of the world—both making trouble that could only benefit the little United States. Clinch chatted on about what he’d heard in that easy voice of his, and after a while moved on to business talk and soon they were swapping gossip of the shipping world and laughing over some buffoon’s marvelous faux pas and presently she took a bottle of Madeira from a cabinet and poured two glasses, and altogether, she felt much better.

  In Boston, John Quincy Adams agreed to stand for Congress—and he lost! It was devastating. The Democratic incumbent, likeable Dr. Eustis, squeaked through by scarcely fifty votes.

  The blow was made worse by his family’s elation. Since his father’s defeat, his mother felt politics was an evil field beneath an Adams. She wanted John Quincy to be pure, whereas he saw the world turning and wanted to be part of it. Dutifully he said, and sometimes even half-believed, that being spared a political future relieved him. But then Jonathan Mason and Benjamin Foster of the U.S. Senate said they were quitting. Both Massachusetts Senate seats open!

  John Quincy stopped talking to his family and started talking to State House leaders, where new senators would be elected. Timothy Pickering, leader of the Essex Junto with its plans to make New England and New York into a separate nation, demanded the first seat. It would serve six years; the second was for two years. Pickering haunted the General Assembly. Mr. Adams couldn’t bring himself actually to politic, but he was available day and night to the members. Pickering, glaring often at Mr. Adams, kept his loud voice ringing in the halls.

  Shouting, gesticulating, spittle flying, he denounced the Adamses for traitors, the old man for his craven failure to fight France, the son for seducing the old devil into seeking a peace as dishonorable as it was disgraceful! And the outcome today—now we have a lascivious whoremaster in command, a man so pitifully in thrall to Parisian doctrines of revolution and murder that he sounds no alarm as the French prepare to make us their slaves. On the eve of invasion that can sweep our entire nation under the rug of history and make us a mere satellite to the French empire, he fears even now to confess to the Congress. But lo!—at this moment a French army is subduing the blacks of Santo Domingo and preparing to invade Louisiana! But does this lecherous master of lewdness raise the alarm? No … He raises not even his voice. What is the State of the Union in the face of the most serious crisis the nation has ever faced? Why, it’s just fine, just what he wanted, as he planned it. You read that message, all of you read it! Don’t you see? We are doomed with this lecher in command. We must fight and fight even to the last ditch to hold on against him long enough for our citizenry to wake and see the clear path and understand the danger and hold to the true faith. Oh, my friends, I implore you, send a man to the Senate who will fight the evil conspiracy to his last breath! Don’t saddle us with one whose pretense of fairness covers the nature of an arrant coward! The truth is before us all and to that we must hew. Give us a man who will fight the good fight under the nose of the whoremaster!

  It flirted with the stuff of challenges, though of course John Quincy would never so lower himself. But he was very receptive when Dock Bartlett herded him into a corner of the lobby. Dock was short and heavy, soup stains usually on his waistcoat, hank of gray hair tousled awry, but he was a party kingmaker, his power unquestioned.

  “Tim spits all over you when he gets really excited,” Dock said. He talked around a toothpick in his mouth. “Makes it a little hard to take him seriously. And then, him and his Essex bunch, they want to split off from the rest of the country and go it alone. Cozy up to Britain. But that talk’s too easy; I don’t trust it. Yes, it might come to that someday—national Democrats keep on this mad submission to the French—but I think we need a calmer voice in Washington than ol’ Tim will give us.”

  Dock was a good Federalist, as John Quincy knew himself to be, but he wasn’t a mad dog. He removed the toothpick to fire a gout of brown juice into a shiny brass spittoon and moved closer, voice sinking to a confidential whisper. “But Tim, now, he’s right on this French invasion business. I read that State of the Union message in the Boston Transcript, I wanted to puke. This is serious—I need to be sure you’re right on it. You’re an independent cuss, all right, I admire that; but on this one you ain’t getting my vote, nor nobody else’s, if you’re not right on that.”

  John Quincy swallowed. This was gut politics. His mother’s image flashed in his mind; but then, she wasn’t here. He weighed his answer. He wouldn’t stand supinely while the administration gave away Louisiana, but he remembered his talk with Madison and felt confident that neither he nor Mr. Jefferson would do any such thing. Indeed, he had the feeling that we were much closer to war than Dock, let along Pickering, understood. The French must give up their mad scheme or we soon would be fighting with whatever weight we could muster.

  “Let me be clear,” Adams said. “If you elect me, I’ll disagree with you at times and I’ll follow my own counsel. But on this question of Louisiana, we’re agreed.”

  Dock gave him a long, level look. “Betray me on this,” he said, “and I’ll never forget it. And neither will you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “All right. Now, Pickering got to the boys early and some of ’em pledged. But pledges are only good for a couple of votes. After that, he don’t make it, they’ll swing to you.”

  Adams nodded. It was an arrangement and arrangements were keys to politics. But he saw Dock wasn’t finished.

  “Now, Pickering has friends. He can’t just be whupped and tossed aside. He loses the first seat, he’ll want the second. I want your agreement you’ll support him in that.”

  Deals didn’t get any more crass and direct. Pickering was an enemy. Henchman to Alexander Hamilton in trying to destroy President Adams, he had undermined everything John Quincy’s father had done. He would be an awful senator. But supporting him was the price of victory. “I understand,” Adams said.

  A slow smile settled on Dock’s face. “You’ll do, Mr. Adams, he said softly.”You’ll do.”

  Montane … Felix Montane, the card said. Could it be General Montane?

  “One and the same,” Johnny Graham said. “In civili
an clothes, clean shaven, but the same man all right.”

  Yes, there was no mistaking the general with his pale, icy eyes, though now he wore a well-cut suit with snowy hose and wide lapels, doubtless the fashion in Paris. His slender form was neat and trim, and there was assurance and, indeed, authority, in the very way in which he took the unadorned wooden chair to which Madison gestured him. Yet he seemed different too, and it was not just that his manner was absent the old arrogance and suggested he wanted something. Slowly Madison concluded that the difference spoke of sadness and pain and perhaps even a new understanding of how hard the world could be, an insight that was prerequisite to wisdom.

  He drummed his fingers on the plain table that served him as desk. “Well, General, what brings you now?”

  “‘Monsieur’ will do very well now, Mr. Secretary. I am no longer a general. But I am here, sir, to offer my services. To put my sword at the service of my new country.”

  Madison allowed his surprise to show.

  “I wish to be an American,” the general said. “This is the land of people from elsewhere, is it not? People who come for freedom, to escape oppression?”

  Madison studied him, something liquid in his eyes. Yes, a man in pain. Could he be a spy? Possible, of course, though there was little to learn about the government that wasn’t already in the papers. He put his chin on his hand. “Why don’t you explain yourself, sir.”

  The story that emerged was surprising, Madison supposed, but only superficially. It was full of the muddled thinking, the maneuvering of power, the failure of heart and honor, the betrayal that marred so many human enterprises. It seemed that Leclerc blamed Montane for failing to force aid from America. Eventually Napoleon had choked up enough gold to feed the men, but by then they were in trouble and Leclerc needed a scapegoat. He broke Montane from general to captain and denounced him to Paris. Napoleon replied personally. For destroying the French campaign in Santo Domingo, Montane was to be cashiered, and if Leclerc chose, placed before a firing squad.

  Hope fluttered in Madison’s heart. “The campaign destroyed, you said?”

  “Certainly, sir. And for that someone must pay, and I was chosen.”

  He fell into a silence that he somehow made dramatic. Then a bitter little smile flickered and disappeared as he said that Leclerc had been his idol and had turned worship to hate. Of course the first consul loved Leclerc, they were peas from the same pod, hard, ruthless, cruel, supremely confident, ready to crush all who stood in their way. Once he had admired that …

  With this verdict from on high came impassioned letters from Montane’s family in France. His perfidy had brought them under suspicion, and they were being watched. If he returned they would be destroyed, and he would be a marked man. Stay away …

  So the man’s pain was genuine. While Madison could sympathize and so forth and so on, what stirred him was that magical phrase, “destroyed campaign.”

  Montane, after a suitable pause, for effect or to regain control, Madison didn’t much care which, said in softened voice, “So, sir, with humility, I wish to be an American. I proffer my sword because I believe you will have need of it before long.”

  “General Leclerc is coming then?”

  “Oh no, sir, General Leclerc is dead.”

  “Dead? What do you mean?”

  “He died of yellow fever. You understand, do you not, that the French army in Santo Domingo has been destroyed? It doesn’t exist as a fighting force. You hadn’t heard?”

  Madison’s heart was hammering. “Tell me …”

  The slender officer then unfolded a disaster of such magnitude as to leave Madison stunned. First, the fighting grew worse and worse. When the French seized Toussaint and declared slavery reinstituted, every able-bodied man and many women took to the brush. Leclerc issued obscene extermination orders. It was no quarter and no prisoners for both sides. Armed with machetes and muskets taken from the French, the rebels slowly ground the invaders down. Growing fear, fueled by constant evidence of grisly death by torture and mutilation, crushed French morale.

  Did Madison know Santo Domingo? No? Dense tropics, incredibly beautiful, vivid green against vivid sky, flowers that burst from every plant in explosions of color, beauty to make the heart ache, beauty that mocked the horror. That was in the winter. But in the summer … under relentless sun, air steamy as a farmwife’s wash tubs, mosquitoes in droning clouds, a Frenchman understood what hell might be like.

  Soldiers in tight uniforms pushing through heavy brush that itself snarled bayonets, listening for the slither of feet on grass that said the enemy was out there somewhere, drawing nearer, nearer, tensed for that sudden slithering rush that meant they were coming, about to burst from hiding in an insane screaming attack, swinging blades glittering in the sun—or sometimes the rush started and then stopped, the silence eerie, nothing happening, and you push on a hundred yards and it comes again, and finally you can’t trust your own senses. You hear the voodoo drums at night, and you come to believe that spirits really can leave their bodies and invade yours and eat your heart from within. You push into a clearing and find another stack of heads, and you march always with a shovel so you can bury what you find and keep the wild hogs away.

  “These are my men, do you understand,” Montane cried, real tears now in his eyes at the memory, “nice young French lads, the tough old sergeant prodding them on, their eyes rolling, starting at every sound—ah, God! Your heart ached for them. Every patrol I lost a few, and they knew in advance when they set out, some wouldn’t be coming back; and they’d look at each other and not talk much because the man you talked to might be dead in an hour. Young, you see, most of them had never known love, never had a woman. Their hands shook, they screamed at night in their dreams, and those Goddamned awful drums beating and beating through the night, their spirits come to steal your soul—”

  He broke off, staring, then slumped in his chair, blinking, as if surprised to discover himself here with the chill of winter outside, so far from what haunted him.

  “Forgive me, Monsieur,” he murmured. He wiped his forehead with a kerchief. “They were good boys and almost every one is dead now. Almost every one …”

  And then the yellow fever came. Madison knew the fever from its visits to American cities. The great epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793 that took Dolley’s husband with seven thousand others had started, so they said, after the arrival of ships from Santo Domingo. Probably just coincidence, since it was widely understood that the cause was poisonous night air rising from fetid swamps.

  It struck with such awful blinding speed, Montane was saying. You’re healthy in the morning, dying in the evening. It’s the mosquito season, droning clouds that envelop you and drink your blood till your skin is raw. The disease struck down his emaciated, exhausted, frightened young soldiers as a farmer scythes hay, laying them out faster than those who remained could bury them. Ghastly deaths. Temperature soaring, skin hot to the touch, blood seems to boil. You vomit black bile full of blood, your guts turn inside out, the lining of your stomach comes out of your throat. You’re on your knees choking and gasping for air; you try to stand and you fall into your vomit and retch again and again. Then the bowels explode, streams of foul water, fountains of slime and filth geysering, men screaming for water, their systems expelling faster than drinking can replenish, men crawling about naked, out of their heads, blind, crying for mothers and wives and stopping on hands and knees to vomit into the slime someone else left. And those of us spared trying to save them, wash them, get them water, until the best you could do was try to give them a decent death, not covered with excrement. And much of the time even that was more than you could manage. And if you sent a party down to the stream for water to wash them, the enemy would come out of the night …

  The fever spared the blacks, understand, maybe because they were used to it. It spared some of the whites too, and some who contracted it recovered. But the plain fact was that the disease started in June and by Aug
ust men were dying by the hundreds. By late September, the army of twenty-five thousand was down to fewer than four thousand effective; and they crouched behind barricades, fearful the hordes would overrun them.

  “But you survived.”

  Montane shrugged. “Yes. I have no idea why. I prayed, of course, everyone does. But after what I saw in Santo Domingo, no, I don’t believe God watches over us. I saw too many good men, young men, praying men picked off like snapping flowers for bouquets in heaven.”

  “And General Leclerc?”

  “Lived long enough to know the despair of utter failure, I’m happy to say, then died in twenty-four hours covered with his own shit, not different in the end from the lowliest of his young soldiers.”

  This account was ghastly, and Montane’s grief was too stark not to be real. Still, after pausing in deference to horror, Madison cut to what mattered. “What will happen now?”

  Montane hesitated, then said, “I’m afraid they’ll be back. The first consul wants Louisiana, and I don’t think disaster on a faraway island will stop him.”

  Well, maybe not, but it would slow him! Madison told himself that he could take no pleasure in the deaths of twenty thousand men, but the rising of his spirits that had started with the first mention of a destroyed campaign continued until they were soaring. What precious time this gave them! Napoleon would need a year to overcome this disaster and any number of things might intervene, chief among them resumption of war between Britain and France, which should carry the French dictator’s mind far from America.