Nov. 2.—Left Bahon 1 A. M. with seven gendarmes. Arrived 200 yards from first outpost of Fort Capois at 5 A. M. Crawled to 150 yards from outpost and remained there until 6:30 A. M., waiting for detachment from Le Trou to attack at daybreak, when six bandits came in our direction. Opened fire, killing three. All bandits in various outposts retreated to main fort. Advanced and captured the first, second, and third outposts. Got within 300 yards of fort when they opened fire from behind a stonewall barricade. They fired a cannon and about 40 rifle shots. Crawled on our stomachs, no cover. Fired the machine gun and ordered the gendarmes to advance 15 yards and open fire. Kept this up until we arrived within 150 yards, when we espied the bandits escaping. Entered fort, burned all huts and outposts. Left Fort Capois at 9 A. M. Arrived in Grande Rivière 2 P. M., very tired.
The most exacting military superior cannot but have excused this last somewhat unmilitary remark. Fatigue does not rest long on Captain Hanneken’s broad shoulders, however, and he soon had his district cleared again of the cacos he had imported for the occasion. The two-thousand-dollar reward was divided between Conzé and his one civilian assistant. Captain Hanneken, Lieutenant Button, and the gendarmes who accompanied them, were ordered to Port au Prince to be personally thanked by the President of Haiti and decorated with the Haitian medaille d’honneur, a ceremony against which the captain protested as a waste of time that he could better employ in hunting cacos. At this writing he is engaged again in his favorite sport in another district. His Marine Corps rank has been raised to that of second lieutenant, while Conzé has been appointed to the same grade in the Gendarmérie d’Haïti, with assignment to plain-clothes duty.
The death of Charlemagne has probably broken the back of cacoism in Haiti, though it has been by no means wiped out. Papillon, with ’Tijacques and several other rascals as chief assistants, is still roaming at large in the north, and the youthful Bénoît is terrorizing the mountainous region in the neighborhood of Mirebalais and Las Cahobas. But the gendarmerie, assisted by the Marine Corps, may be trusted to bring their troublesome careers to a close all in good season. One of the chief problems of the pacifiers at present is to convince the ignorant caco rank and file that the great Charlemagne is dead. His superstitious followers credit him with supernatural powers, and many a captured bandit, when asked who is now his commander-in-chief, still replies with faithful simplicity, “Mais, c’est Charlemagne.” The public display of his body at Grande Rivière and Cap Haïtien produced an effect that will not soon be forgotten by those who witnessed it, but even that has not fully convinced the cacos hidden far away in the mountains. So great was the veneration, or, more exactly, perhaps, the superstition, in which he was held that it was found necessary to give him five fake funerals in as many different places, as a blind, and to bury his body secretly in the out-of-the-way spot, lest his grave become a shrine of pilgrimage for future cacos.
CHAPTER VII
HITHER AND YON IN THE HAITIAN BUSH
Of many journeys about Haiti, usually by automobile and in the company of gendarme officers, the first was to the caco-infested district of Las Cahobas. A marine doctor bound on an inspection trip there had a seat left after his assistant and a native gendarme had been accommodated. Among the four of us there were as many revolvers and three rifles, all ready for instant action. One can, of course, hire private cars for a tour of Haiti, but quite aside from the decided expense, a Haitian chauffeur under military orders is much to be preferred to one who is subject to his own whims; moreover, there is much more to be seen and heard in gendarme company, and, lastly, if one chances to “pop off” a caco, there is not even the trouble of explaining, for one’s companions will do that in their laconic report to headquarters.
There are few roads in the West Indies as crowded as that broad new highway across the plain which is a continuation of the wide main street of Port au Prince. By it all traffic from the north and west enters the capital. The overwhelming majority of travelers are market-women, most of them barefooted and afoot, but a large number are seated sidewise on their donkeys or small mules, balancing on their toes the slippers, which are never known to fall off under any provocation. Pedestrians carry their invariably heavy and cumbersome loads on their heads, the haughtier class in crude saddle-bags, and the sight of this river of jogging humanity, often completely filling the broad highway as far as it can be seen in the heat-hazy distance, is one of which we never tired as often as we rode out through it.
At the time of the outbreak against the French the population roughly was made up of thirty thousand whites, as many “people of color,” and four hundred and fifty thousand blacks. There has been, of course, no census since that time, but signs indicate that Haiti has now two and a half million inhabitants, for however unproductive the semi-savage hordes may be in other ways, they are diligent in the process of multiplication. White people are more rare to-day, even if one counts our forces of occupation, than before the revolt, the mixed race has not greatly increased, so that fully nine tenths of the population are full-blooded Africans. Close observers are convinced that, thanks mainly to the constant revolutions, there are three females to every male, and of the latter a considerable number are now roaming the hills of the interior as cacos. Furthermore, the men take little part in selling the country produce. The result is that the stream of humanity pouring into the capital is almost entirely made up of jet-black women and girls.
The throng was particularly dense on the morning of our journey to Las Cahobas, for it was Friday, and the great weekly market in Port au Prince begins at dawn on Saturday morning. An American once stationed himself at the typical negro arch of triumph, straddling the entrance from the Cul-de-Sac to the capital, and counted thirty thousand travelers in an hour, of whom all but about two hundred were market-women. They were somewhat less multitudinous during our stay in Haiti, for the Americans had recently set a maximum scale of prices for foodstuffs, and many of the women had gone on strike and refused to bring their produce to town. They had another grievance in the requirement to sell most things by weight. For generations they had sold only by the “pile,” consisting of three articles of such things as eggs, plantains, yams, and the like, or of tiny heaps in the case of grains and similar produce; few of them, moreover, could afford to buy scales, and they resented the right given purchasers to appeal to gendarmes stationed in the market-places for the verifying of weights. But only those who had seen it under still more crowded conditions would have realized that the highway was not thronged to its full density on this particular morning.
Through the main street, out past the only modern sugar-mill in Haiti, for miles across the plain, our constantly honking Ford plowed through this endless procession of black humanity, casting it aside in two turbulent furrows of donkeys, mules, women, and multifarious bundles. There is nothing more amusing, and pathetic, too, than the behavior of the primitive masses of Haiti before an automobile. This is scarcely to be wondered at in a country where any wheeled traffic except a very rare ox-cart crawling along on its creaking and wobbling wheels was unknown up to a few years ago, and where the half-dozen automobiles of Port au Prince could not make their way into the country until the Americans had begun the reconstruction of the roads. But it is proof, too, of the close relationship of the Haitians to their savage brethren in central Africa. Just like this, one can easily imagine, the latter would act at the sudden apparition of a strange machine which the great mass of Haitians firmly believe is run by voodoo spirits devoted to the white man.
The highway, like most of those the Americans have built, is of boulevard width, and there is ample room for even such a throng as this to pass an automobile in safety. But the primitive-minded natives are terror-stricken at sight of one bearing down upon them. The mounted women invariably tumble off their animals and fall to beating, pushing, and dragging them to the extreme edge of the road, at the same time shrieking as if the Grim Reaper had suddenly appeared before them with his sickle poised. The pedestrians succumb to a similar panic, so that the journey out the flat highway presents a constant vista of dismounting women and a turmoil of animals and frightened human beings tumbling over one another in their excited eagerness to get well out of reach of the swiftly approaching demon of destruction. Farther on, where the road begins to wind, and the cuts into the hills are often deep, the scene is still more laughter-provoking, for the startled animals invariably bury their noses in the sheer road-banks and will not, for all the cajolery or threats in the world, swing in sidewise along them. If they are donkeys, the women pick up their hind quarters and lift them out of the way by main force; when they are too large for this courageous treatment, the riders put a shoulder to the quivering rumps, abandon those useless tactics to drag at the halters as the machine draws nearer, and finally bury their faces also in the bank, as if to shut out the horrible experience of seeing their precious animals mutilated beyond recognition.