It must be admitted that the cacos do not constitute a dangerous army in the modern sense of the word. Their discipline is less than embryonic, their weapons seldom better than dangerous playthings. One rifle to five men is the average equipment, and many of these are antiquated pieces captured from the French expeditionary force under Leclerc that was driven from the island more than a century ago. Some of them are of no more use than the cocomacaque, or Haitian shillalah, even when their possessors can obtain ammunition. Such cartridges as fall into the hands of the cacos are usually wrapped round and round with paper to make them fit the larger bore of their ancient guns, and the bullet that comes zigzagging down the barrel is seldom deadly beyond two hundred yards. But the possession of a rifle, even one worthless as a firearm, is a sign of leadership that carries with it great personal pride, and an occasional caco owns a high-powered modern carbine. The mass of them are armed with machetes, rusty swords of the olden days, or revolvers even more useless than the rifles.
The lesser military ranks are not in favor among the cacos. Every leader of a band is a general, and usually a major general at that. Most of them have been commissioned by the caco-in-chief—on a slip of paper scrawled with a rusty pen, or even with a pencil, by the one man on his staff who can write a more or less legible hand. These “commissions” all follow the prescribed form which has been stereotyped in Haiti since the days of Dessalines:
“Liberté Egalité Fraternité
République d’Haiti
Informé que vous réunissez les conditions et aptitudes voulues—Informed that you possess the qualifications and aptitude desired, I hereby appoint you general of division operating against the Americans and direct that you proceed with your troops to attack”—this or that hamlet or village in the hills. The expression “Opérant contre les américains” is seldom lacking in these scribbled rags, and some of them raise the holder to higher dignities than were ever reached by mere field marshals on the battle-grounds of Europe. The “commission,” for instance, of the “Chief of Intelligence” of the caco-in-chief reads succinctly, “I name you as chief of the Division of Spies to spy everywhere”—an order that has at least the virtue of leaving the recipient unhampered with that division of responsibility which has been the bane of civilized warfare. Incidentally the intelligence system of the cacos is their strongest point. Like most uncivilized tribes the world over, they have some means of spreading information that makes the telegraph and even the radio seem slow and inefficient by comparison. An uninformed stranger, reading these highfalutin’ “commissions,” might easily picture the caco “generals” as mightier men than Foch and Pershing combined, instead of what they really are, stupid, uneducated negroes dressed in the dirty remnants of an undershirt and cotton trousers, a discard straw or felt hat with a bit of red rag sewed on it as a sign of rank, and armed with a rusty old saber or a revolver that has long since lost its power to revolve.
The cacos have a mortal fear of white soldiers. Scores of times a single marine or gendarme officer has routed bands of a hundred or more, killing as many as his automatic rifle could reach in the short period between their first glimpse of him and the time it takes the ragged “army” to scatter to the four points of the compass through thorny undergrowth or cactus-hedges which no white man could penetrate though all the forces of evil were pursuing him. The natives cannot “savez” this uncanny prowess of les blancs, and commonly attribute it to the sustaining force of some voodoo spirit friendly to the white man. This belief is to a certain extent a boomerang, for the Haitian gendarmes often fancy themselves immune in the presence of a white superior, and more than one of them has bitten the dust because he insisted on calmly standing erect, smoking a cigarette, and placidly handing cartridges to the marine who lay hugging the ground beside him, pumping lead into the fleeing cacos. With a white man along how could he be hurt? Up to date at least three thousand bandits have been killed as against four Americans,—a major and a sergeant who were shot from ambush, and two privates who lost their lives by over-confidence.
Captured correspondence shows what a terrible war is this guerre des cacos:
“The Americans,” reads the report of one général de division to his superior, “attacked us in force on the night of the 13–14th. I found myself with a shortage of ammunition, but I succeeded in borrowing ten carbine cartridges and three revolver bullets and was able to hold the situation in hand.” As a matter of fact the American “force” consisted on this particular occasion of three marines, and the “general” “held the situation in hand” by scurrying away through the mountains so fast that it was a week or more before he got any considerable number of his band together again.
“I write to tell you,” says another great military genius, “that I had a cruel battle before Las Cahobas the other day, with one wounded. I also tell you that I arrested General Ulysses St. Raisin for being drunk and disarmed him and he is under guard in my camp. Also that General Etienne Monbrun Dubuisson had a big battle with the Americans last week and besides having a soldier severely wounded he had one délégué taken by the whites.”
The Americans who are striving to bring internal peace to Haiti have come to the unanimous conclusion that the mere killing of cacos will not wipe out banditism. They have hunted them by every available means, including the use of aëroplanes. The cacos show a wholesome terror for the latter, which they call “God’s wicked angels”; they have suffered “cruel” losses before the machine-guns of the determined American youths who are pursuing them, but they continue their cacoism. All efforts are now being bent to two ends—to kill off the chiefs and to weed the country of firearms. In the early days of the occupation the native caught in possession of a rifle was given five years at hard labor, and many of them are still serving sentence, though the penalty has recently been reduced to six months. Every report of “jumping” a band or a camp of cacos ends now with a regular formula in which only the numbers differ: “Killed 1 general and 2 chiefs; captured 9 rifles, 6 swords, 11 machetes.”