Before the Battle
“Advance,” said the Lieutenant, and we did.
It was hot, even in the mountains, a stifling heat that made the sweat run in rivers and sucked the air from our lungs. The air at twilight was alive with the buzzing of stinging insects, the chirping of bats, the rustle of leaves, the thunk of machetes as they cleared the brush. It was full of everything but the enemy.
“Advance,” the Lieutenant said.
We made five miles that day, maybe six, as we’d done the day before. We camped in a clearing by a stream; we washed ourselves and our uniforms, though the latter were so ragged they seemed like they would come apart at a touch. Only the Lieutenant laid his uniform on the ground before bathing, for if the gold braid washed off, what would separate him from the rest of us?
We slept, and in the morning, the Lieutenant said “Advance.”
“He’s glory-mad,” Étienne said, at the next night’s camp five miles further north. “He dreams that he’s Dessalines, the conquering hero.”
“No,” answered Pascal. “They took him from Port-au-Prince, put braid on him, and taught him one word. If he can’t advance, he doesn’t know what else to do.”
“Forward, always forward” said Josaphat. He was a Port-au-Prince man himself, drafted from the streets. “If we keep going forward, we’ll get somewhere eventually.”
“City people don’t go anywhere. To the shop each day, and home again – the streets take you only in circles.”
“And in the fields?” Josaphat asked. “Back and forth behind the ox all day – do you go anywhere then?”
“You can see in the fields. You can see in the streets,” said Romain quietly. “Here, you can see nothing.”
“Maybe the Lieutenant can,” Pascal replied, and went to sleep.
The next day was downhill from the night’s high mountain camp, into a valley with a swift-flowing river. We lost two hours crossing it, and we lost Sylvain – a shy Jacmel city boy who never said a word, and who was silent even as the waters carried him away and drowned him. “Advance,” the Lieutenant said, but we would go no farther that day; we sprawled, exhausted, beside the river that was Sylvain’s burial place.
“We should kill him,” whispered Josaphat. We all whispered here, though with the enemy nowhere to be seen, there was no reason to do so. It was quiet in these mountains, preternaturally so to southern ears; in the Republic, crofts went far up the hillside and peasants went still farther gathering wood for charcoal, but these hills were empty and graveyard-still. Their silence infected us.
“We should kill him,” Josaphat continued. “Kill him and go back. Do we all march to our death just because he tells us to?”
“Do you know the way back?” Romain challenged. Josaphat didn’t; none of us did. Maybe, if we’d turned back the first day we were separated from the army, we could have found it again, but now we were utterly lost. “And where would we go if we went back, but to our deaths?”
“To the army. To fight.”
“To die,” Pascal said firmly. “The generals know no more words than our lieutenant. Advance! Bury them with men and then bury their corpses. Sixty thousand of ours to beat ten thousand of theirs, even if half of us die in the doing. And those are the lucky regiments. The unlucky ones… beaten, separated. Driven into the jungle.”
“Maybe, now that we’ve been unlucky once, we will be lucky?” That was Alexandre, the youngest: sixteen, he said, though he was likely younger than that.
“If the world were just, maybe so,” answered Étienne. “But the world isn’t just, and bad luck piles on bad. There is only death now on the Artibonite plains. Better to stay in the mountains and follow our glory-mad officer. Maybe we will end up somewhere.”
He looked up, and we realized that the Lieutenant was standing behind him, had been standing there all along. He was silent, with the gold braid on his shoulder, and said nothing about Josaphat’s plan to kill him; there was no talk of court-martials or firing squads, as there might have been were we still with the army in Artibonite. The law, even martial law, had no place here.
“Tomorrow we will advance,” he said.
We did. It was uphill again.
Dye mon, gen mon: beyond the mountain is another mountain.
At midday the forest opened, and there were buildings: a plantation house, a village, a small stone church. We’d been told that the northerners lived like this, plantation-hands rather than crofters, serfs in fact even if no longer in law. But none of them were there. The buildings stood abandoned, and though crops were in the fields and the houses showed signs of recent use, there was nothing to show where the people had gone.
“They fled from us,” said Josaphat. “They heard us coming, and didn’t want to be shot.”
“Where are their tracks, then?”
“They covered them. They don’t want us to follow.”
“Someone magicked them out,” Alexandre answered. “A sorcerer, a houngan. And when we leave, he’ll magic them back.”
“Ridiculous!” Josaphat said. He didn’t whisper. “The houngans are charlatans, every one. I’ve never met one who can make even a mouse disappear.”
“At home, maybe,” said Alexandre, though he seemed unsure. “Here, though – in the north, the sorcerers are real.”
Child though Alexandre was, we all felt a chill – even Josaphat, though he would never admit it. He was only saying what we’d all been told: that the north was a land of dark magic, a land where the loa were closer to everything and walked among the people without disguise. The sacred places were in the north, were they not? The Bois Caïman, Vertières – the places where the land had given its wrath to the people and made us free. We were in the country of power.
Standing there, we all could believe it. They’d used black magic against our armies in ’52 and ’53, people said, and now there were stories of a prince who could command the loa even though he was just two years old. Maybe there were sorcerer-kings in the north, calling on the loa to confuse our armies. Maybe they were using it on us.
“We should camp here,” Josaphat said. “We can sleep in houses for once. In the plantation house there will even be beds, and maybe also food.”
The houses stood there, inviting. But no one save Romain would follow Josaphat toward them. Then the Lieutenant said “Advance,” and for once we were grateful: we followed him out of this phantom village, out of the reach of whatever sorcerer had made it empty.
There was a road, at least – there was always a road at a plantation. For a few miles, we walked as we might have on the fields of Artibonite. But then it ended in a tangle of growth, or maybe we simply lost it. We found a clear spot and made camp, and in the morning we advanced.
“There are supposed to be
cacos in these mountains,” Étienne said. “Where are they? Why haven’t they attacked us?”
“And where are the northern soldiers?” asked Pascal. “Where are their patrols? Surely there are men in the King’s uniform up here, to deal with lost lambs like us.”
“Maybe they’re all in Artibonite,” said Alexandre.
“All of them? Do you think they’ve emptied their whole country to fight us? Who would hold down the peasants, if all the soldiers were down south?”
“The houngans can magic them there, and bring them back.”
“Why do they march, then? Why do we trap them when we march faster?”
Alexandre shrugged. The answer to that question didn’t matter to him. He had crossed over to the realm of faith, where logic had no more sway than the law.
And then Pascal said something even worse. “I think we’ve seen these trees before.”
“How can you tell?” Josaphat fairly screamed. Others echoed him, no one whispering now. “One of these trees looks just like any other!”
“To you, maybe. To a Port-au-Prince man. I’m not from Port-au-Prince, and I’m telling you these trees look the same. We’ve been here before. We’re going south now.”
“I’m not a city boy,” said Étienne, “and I don’t recognize these trees either. You’re talking nonsense, Pascal.”
“We’re going south…”
“South?” said Alexandre. “There is no south here. No north, east or west. The houngans have hold of us, and we’ll go in circles until we die.”
“Someone climb a tree,” Romain said. His voice cut through the babble; he knew someone had to say something before the men panicked, and he knew the Lieutenant wouldn’t. “Climb a tree to where you can see the sun, and tell us if we’re going north or south.”
“Yes,” Étienne said, clinging to the words as he might a rope in a storm. He disappeared up a tree and we all stood silent, waiting.
He came down minutes later, and before he said anything, we knew his news would not be good. “The clouds are very heavy. I can’t see where the sun is. I don’t know which way we’re going.”
“There are no directions,” said Alexandre. “We’re going nowhere.”
“Because of him!” Pascal shouted, rounding on the Lieutenant. “The houngans put a spell on him when we lost the army, to make us wander through the mountains forever. ‘Advance, advance,’ he says – advance to death! We have to kill him to break the spell.”
“Yes, kill him!” others shouted.
“Kill him?” said Romain. “Do you want to make a human sacrifice of him, an offering to Maître Carrefour to show us the road onward? Is that what it will be, black magic to fight black magic, a curse taken on ourselves?”
“There is no magic,” Josaphat answered. “There are no curses.” He brandished his machete and rushed at the Lieutenant.
The Lieutenant said the first word other than “Advance” that we’d heard from him since Artibonite. No, he didn’t say it; he screamed it. “No! No!”
He tried to fight, too. Even a zombie will fight for its life if it’s cornered. But he’d grown up in a Port-au-Prince drawing room, and they hadn’t taught him how. Josaphat landed the first blow, a slash that tore open the Lieutenant’s side and set rivers of blood flowing. The others followed, slashing and chopping. The Lieutenant screamed again, without words this time, and then he screamed no more.
“Bury him,” Josaphat commanded.
“Leave him,” said Pascal. “There is evil magic on him.”
“There is evil magic in us,” Romain said, and for a moment it seemed that evil was about to work, for Josaphat and Pascal circled each other like men about to fight. But then Josaphat let his arm drop and said, “Leave him,” and we did. We went north, as best we could. Even without the Lieutenant, we were still advancing.
We camped in a valley again that night, our fire the only light, the bats above the only sound. We ate the last of our rations; from here, there would be no food. We drank deeply from the stream, filling our stomachs with water though we knew they wouldn’t stay full long.
“Krik?” said Romain –
do you want to hear a story?
“Krak,” we all answered without thinking, though none of us really did. There was something about this place that wasn’t right for stories. But nobody took it back – no one was sure there was even a way to take it back.
“I’ll tell you a story of black magic,” Romain said. “The story of Ti Malice and the first war. There were two villages of people, happy and prosperous, fields full of crops and houses full of children. Ti Malice went to one of them and said, ‘The people in the other village are evil sorcerers, who have set curses on your fields and on your mothers’ wombs.’ And she went to the other and said, ‘Your neighbors to the south are arrogant, evil, have lost the way of being truly human, and they will overrun you.’ So the people of both villages went out to fight each other, and many were killed. And while they were off to battle, Ti Malice went into the houses and picked them all clean, and when they came home, she went to the battlefield and robbed the corpses.”
A silence followed. “I think I’ve heard that story before,” said Josaphat.
“I think it’s been told to us,” said Alexandre.
“Half of it,” Étienne answered.
We slept, and had troubled dreams. But the next day, we came over the crest of a mountain and saw the sea. The north was below us, its plains and hills, its plantations and cities. There was no sign of fighting; we had surely come farther than any other soldiers of the Republic.
“Are there sorcerers there?” Alexandre asked.
“There are people,” said Josaphat.
“Soldiers,” Étienne answered. “The soldiers will surely be down there. Do we fight them?”
“Look at us. Are we going to march into Okap and conquer it?”
“We surrender, then?”
“Surrender, or stay here,” said Pascal.
No one said anything about the Lieutenant, but we all advanced, down to the plains, down to where the enemy waited. He would be a welcome sight.
Anyway what will the status of the North and South's military? And will there be any minor Dominican separatist movements?
