The War of Knives

by Broos Campbell

  I sat up, but Juge put a hand on my shoulder to indicate I should stay where I was. He crept past me in the shadows toward the river. Even though I could feel his boot touching my own, he lay so still that if I hadn’t known he lay there in the dappled moonlight I would have took him for a pile of stones or a heap of dirt. Perhaps a fathom beyond him I could see the creek sparkling in the moonlight, and hear it tinkling and gulping as it passed among the jumbled boulders and broken branches that littered its bed.

  The clatter to our left grew louder and more frequent, interspersed with hissed warnings to shut the hell up: “La ferme! Ta bouche!”

  From around the bend crept a grenadier. His white trousers and gaiters shone in the moonlight. Even his long dark coat was faced with white, and as he turned to gesture to someone behind him, the white X of his crossed equipment belts made a beautiful target across his back. He turned again and moved slowly up the middle of the stream toward us, stooping low and using the bayonet on the end of his musket to poke around in the underbrush. A file of men began to appear from around the far end of the bend. I counted eighteen of them as I peered through the thorn bushes. At last their officer showed himself, using his bayonet to pink the bottoms of men who stopped too long to look around them.

  “Grouillez-vous!” he said. “Get a move on!”

  “Doucement, citoyen lieutenant,” whispered the sergeant at his side. The drums thumped like heartbeats in the hills.

  “What do you mean by telling me to be careful?” said the lieutenant. “No one can hear us over that fucking voudou racket. How they screech and wail!” He took off his bicorn, adjusted its plume, wiped his forehead with his sleeve and put his hat back on. “We’ll be here all night at this rate. Pousse-toi,” he said, telling the man he’d just pricked to move aside. He threaded his way along the file of grenadiers, hopping from boulder to boulder to keep his feet dry. When he got to the head of the line he turned and said, “See? There is nothing to fear. Allons!” And pointing his musket to show the direction, he said again, “Come on!” He disappeared to the right around the far side of the bend.

  “You heard him, you miserable bastards,” said the sergeant. “And so did the niggers, if they’re about. On your feet, there.” He splashed along the line, kicking the men into motion. “Nothing for it now but to keep your eyes open and your powder dry! Move!” He slapped the men on the back as each passed him in the direction the lieutenant had gone. “Don’t worry, my little chicks, mother hen will watch your backs for you. Off you go.” When the last had gone he leaned on his musket and shook his head. “Ah me,” he muttered, “and what am I to tell their mothers? I know what I shall tell their sweethearts, ha ha!”

  He took off his hat and mopped the back of his neck with his kerchief. Then he lowered his hand to swab out his hatband. Juge rose to his feet and took a silent step toward him, raised both arms, and suddenly jerked his fists apart. The sergeant kicked his legs out and tried to turn, but Juge kept him in place with a knee in his back.

  I stepped up to see what I could do. The sergeant turned his bulging eyes toward me and held out his hat and musket, as if to ask would I mind holding them awhile. When I took them from him he fluttered his fingers along the cord biting into his throat. Then with increasing urgency he tried to dig his fingers under it, but Juge’s grip was firm. At last the sergeant’s hands fell away from his throat and his arms dropped to his sides.

  Juge laid him down in the stream and unwrapped the garrote from around his neck. “We take them one by one from behind,” he whispered. He took the musket from me. “Your turn is next.”

  We crept along the bank till we spotted a grenadier crouched down and peering upstream. Juge touched my shoulder and waved his hand before him, as if to say, “After you.”

  Somewhere there is a line between war and murder, but it isn’t drawn in San Domingo. I stepped up behind my man and swept the manchèt down with all my strength. Blood surged from his neck, filling my nostrils with its iron stench, pulsing hot on my hand, glittering in the silvery light. I thought of Mr. MacElroy’s hat, hanging on a peg in my cabin. I yanked the blade out of the bone and swung again. The head thumped off downstream.

  Juge gripped my shoulder. “Très bien, mon ami,” he whispered. “Allons. We see what fish the others have caught.”

  From a curious distance I noticed that my legs trembled. I ordered my lungs to take deep, regular breaths. It’s one thing to walk a deck while cannon balls and jagged bits of the ship are flying around: they either hit you or they don’t. But this sneaking up on men in the dark was something else entire.

  Upstream a musket fired, and another, and then a volley. Horrid cries intermingled with the shots. As we rounded the bend I saw half a dozen grenadiers tangled up in the thorn bushes, jabbing their bayonets at shadows—till they poked at a wrong shadow and a black arm knocked the musket aside and a cane knife snicked through flesh and bone. One by one the grenadiers joined their comrades sprawling in the creek or hanging grotesquely from the brambles.

  Farther upstream a mob of eight or nine grenadiers bunched together, trying to reload, trying to bite their cartridges open with mouths that screamed. Juge’s wild men rose from the bushes and swung their cane knives. They were pissing on the bodies by the time we reached them.

  I leaned against a tree to catch my breath. Beside me, a naked black man faced the grenadier lieutenant in the shadow of a limb that jutted out across the stream. The black man had his hands above his head and sported a ferocious erection. I turned away, not wanting to see what he was about to do to the lieutenant. But then I noticed the tip of the lieutenant’s sword-bayonet sticking out of the black man’s back, and that the black man was gripping the handles of his garrote, which looped over the branch and around the lieutenant’s neck. They hung together in the gross shamelessness of death, with their toes dabbling the surface of the clean water that rushed beneath their feet.

  The moon was full overhead now. By its light the Africans stripped the grenadiers of weapons, food, shoes, ammunition. They chopped their former comrade’s hands free of his garrote, slung him across the biggest man’s shoulders, and melted away into the shadows.

  “A good harvest this evening,” said Juge. He put his arm through mine. “Now, mon cher petit ami, we may walk upright like men again. Should you like a glass of wine? I have a thirst like the sponge.”

  As we hiked up the River of Orange Trees I heard more grenadiers clattering up the ravine behind us, and out of the corners of my eyes I caught the ghostly traces of men drifting down to meet them.

  Eight

  Apparently I had passed some sort of test. Juge still laughed when he saw me, but now it seemed more out of pleasure than amusement. I couldn’t rely on him for companionship, however. He was often off doing something or other that I wasn’t privy to. Our conversations were mostly limited to a hello and a wave as he trotted by on one of his unending errands with his dragoons and Grandfather Chatterbox trailing behind him.

  I spent my mornings sketching the black troops, disguising diagrams of the trench works and unit locations in them. I sketched and disguised Pétion’s defenses in the same way. I had no intention of going anywhere near speaking distance of the citadel, but I guessed if any of Dessalines’ officers found me with diagrams of the mulatto positions, he might wonder what else was in my sketchbook, and I had no doubt that Dessalines would be happy to think up an appropriate punishment for a white man caught spying. Not spying, I reminded myself, but I was uncomfortably aware that it might not seem that way. With my watercolors I painted a landscape that included a nice view of the trench works with the citadel in the background. It was the sort of thing that any visitor would wish to immortalize, and as it was a view that the black troops looked at every day I didn’t guess anyone would take it amiss.

  One gloomy morning I also visited the ruined fort at the far left of the lines, where the houngans conducted their rituals at night. It had been built without benefit of mortar, and t
he walls had scattered the stones in a disordered jumble. Vines had crept out of the forest and entwined themselves around the stones, and the roots of trees had further buckled the walls. An open-sided thatch-roofed hut stood in a clearing within the walls; it seemed ordinary enough at first glance, but it gave me the shrinking scrotes, as if it had been imbued with some black mystery far beyond my ken. As long as I kept away from the hut, however, it was an infinitely soothing place, with nothing to disturb me but the drowsy humming of insects and the trilling of birds. I stood for a while watching the pigeons I’d disturbed wheeling across the sky, their wings flashing white V’s against the gray clouds until they circled around and gathered once more atop the guano-streaked stones.

  The old fort had a commanding view of the citadel and the anchorage. A ramshackle wooden pier jutted out from the black-sand beach on the near side of the fortress. A few boats lay alongside the pier, and a sentry stood out at the end of it, but there were no coils of rope or stands of barrels or anything else to indicate it had been used recently. I had a wonderful view down into the fortress, too. I counted the guns and noted their positions, and estimated the number of troops and horses, and wrote it all down in my sketchbook.

  I turned to the north, to my right, and scanned the black army’s lines, looking for the American and British units the officer at the katye jeneral had hinted at. As I swung my glass around to the northeast I was startled to have a close-up image of a hussar officer picking his way on horseback toward me. He wore his short coat hanging from one shoulder, the way hussars do, and looked at me in a way that made me feel I’d been caught doing something filthy. I lowered my glass and saluted him anyway. “Comment allez-vous, compagnon?”

  He waved my greeting aside as if fanning away a stink. “Que faites vous la? What are you doing up here? Get away. You have no business looking around up here.”

  “I am an American officer, working with the staff of General Dessalines.”

  He reined up at the name, but he didn’t go away. At his gesture a pair of troopers rode up beside him.

  “Très bien, mes amis,” I shrugged, and they trailed along behind me until they were satisfied I was returning to headquarters.

  It was time I got back there anyway. From midmorning on I belonged to Connor. He kept me busy translating bone-achingly dull documents, which I memorized as best I could, not daring to make copies: notes on troop movements, readiness, morale; the unit number of every battalion in every demi-brigade, and the names of all nine captains, lieutenants, sub-lieutenants, and quartermasters in each battalion; remarks on the bloody stalemates at Jacmel and the Goâves up on the north coast of the peninsula; and guesses as to when, not whether, Toussaint would seize Santo Domingo, the Spanish side of the island, and how soon first Consul Buonoparte would try to reoccupy Saint-Dómingue, the French side.

  “Saint-Dómingue,” I said to Franklin in the little office we kept at headquarters. “Better make that ‘San Domingo,’ so whoever reads this in the War Department will know what Mr. Connor means.”

  “I have already done so, Mr. Graves,” said Franklin, scribbling away. “Just translate. Leave the thinking to me.”

  I wasn’t allowed in the meetings that Connor attended, though I could hear the muttering and sometimes shouting beyond the door, and had an occasional glimpse within. A skittish white secretary translated everything from Creole into French—when they spoke Creole, anyway; most of the officers spoke French—and I translated everything into English, and Franklin scratched it all down on his bits of paper and tied them up with his seemingly endless supply of red tapes.

  I sighed, reaching for another letter and squinting at the French script. Connor strode through the room.

  “Oh, Mr. Connor,” I said. “I really ought to get about my work, y’know. I still got my report to prepare for Commodore Gaswell.”

  He stopped with his hand on the latch of the far door. “I should think you would find everything you need to know in these notes.”

  “They’re a mountain of information, but I need to know for myself what’s reliable,” I said. As I spoke I realized I’d gotten some ink on my nose. I tried to wipe it off with my sleeve and then remembered my handkerchief. “I need to sketch out a proper map, which I can’t do without I see the ground. And there’s nothing about logistics here at all. For instance, where’s the landing place for these supplies they’re supposedly getting from us?”

  “Soon, soon,” he said, “you will be your own man again. In the meantime there is matter after matter that needs my urgent attention, and no one can help me as well as the inestimable Mr. Graves.” He went through the far door and shut it behind him.

  “There’s always some excuse,” I muttered. I scrubbed at my nose, but all I managed was to ruin my handkerchief.

  Franklin bent again over his portable desk. Even with a proper desk to work at, he used his portable one. I longed to smack the smirk off his face with it. Actually, I wouldn’t have minded stealing his traveling desk and all that was in it, but I didn’t guess that would go over too well—not with Connor, and probably not with Gaswell, neither. Certainly not with Dessalines.

  The door that Connor had gone through came ajar, and through the crack I saw Grandfather Chatterbox sitting in a corner next to Juge. The old man was playing with a little vial filled with corn kernels. Some of the kernels were black and some were white. He tapped it patiently until the black kernels were on top. Then he nodded to himself, shook the vial up and began tapping at it again. He never said anything, nor even seemed to be listening, and Dessalines and his officers paid him no mind that I could see. After a while he cocked his head at Juge and the two of them went outside. I watched them through the window as they mounted up, Grandfather Chatterbox on Bel-Argent and Juge on a handsome roan.

  Juge had discarded his torn-off trousers and old coat in favor of a regulation staff-officer’s uniform. The gold-trimmed blue pantaloons, tassled Hessian boots, and double-breasted white vest were regulation, anyway; but he’d found a silver-spangled tailcoat that was gaudy even by the standards of Toussaint’s army. Between the uniform and the dragoons that followed him around, I had begun to guess that Juge was more important than I’d first supposed him to be. Now, as I gazed out the window at him, he touched the brim of his hat to me and then thundered off in a cloud of dragoons with Grandfather Chatterbox at his side. He would outride his escort by evening, I knew, and would return to camp with only the old man left to guard him.

  I’d gladly have faced Joséphine again for the chance to ride with him. By day at least, the war was uncommon dull. Even the ogre Dessalines was a disappointment. The only time he had spoke to me was once at dinner. “Passez moi le sel, je vous prie,” he said. “Mais oui, mon général,” I answered. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing I’d be telling my shipmates over dinner for the next twenty years. I could just see it: “The monster Dessalines, you say,” I’d drawl, sprawling in my chair as the decanter made its rounds. “Sure, met him at the siege of Jacmel during the War of Knives. He even spoke to me. There he sat, across the table, as near as I am to you. ‘Pray pass the salt,’ he says, offhand like, just as if he weren’t a murdering fiend. And did I blench? Did I quail? I did not, gentlemen. ‘But of course, General,’ says I, and passed him the salt.”

  I’d have snatched myself bald out of sheer boredom if Juge hadn’t been there to see I was entertained of an evening. He was generous to a fault when it come to fighting. I was particularly curious about his troublesome hamlet down by the Grand Rivière, so we found a couple of muskets one night and went down there. It proved to be pretty much like repelling boarders in a ship-to-ship duel, what with the cannons banging away on both sides, and us jostling for space to poke our bayonets at the mulattoes as they clambered over the chevaux-de-frise. There was even the danger of drowning, what with the mud that got churned up underfoot.

  A cheval-de-frise, by the way, is a log pierced through with sharpened stakes. It has advantages over a boardi
ng net for keeping men out, the sharpened stakes being an obvious one. Trouble is, the stakes also make good handholds for climbing, and before too long the mulattoes found a weak place in our line and began to pour through it, shoving and kicking and clawing in the most ferocious no-holds-barred wrassling match I ever seen. I’d been schooled in the genteel art of gouging and biting at Judge Breckenridge’s academy when I was a boy, but adding guns and swords gave it a whole new twist.

  Major Matou, the commander of the blacks in that part of the line, kept packing in reinforcements until everybody was gummed up so close they couldn’t hardly use their cane knives. It didn’t bother them none—they went at each other like bulldogs and badgers tied together, trying to snatch each other’s throats out with their bare teeth. I figured out pretty quick I didn’t like it. I tucked myself into a hole under the breastworks. I got kicked and stepped on plenty, but it was a damn sight better than mixing with that crowd. It relieved my curiosity about infantry fighting, anyway—I was satisfied. But it ruined my night’s sleep, and in the morning Bertrand gave me Johnny-shitfire about the state of my clothes.

  A week dragged by slower than a dog chasing a porcupine in August. I soon got the better part of the commodore’s work done and was eager to be gone. How I was to accomplish that, I didn’t know; each morning and evening I climbed the hill from which I’d first seen Jacmel, but though I plied my pocket telescope over every wave from the bay to the horizon, I never saw so much as a hint of the Croatoan.