1915, August 4: (Five Wagon Loads of Weapons: The Disarmament, the Ten-Gourde Notes, and the Red Tape of Soldiering): The éminence grise behind these develop…

1915, August 4: (Five Wagon Loads of Weapons: The Disarmament, the Ten-Gourde Notes, and the Red Tape of Soldiering): The éminence grise behind these developments was Captain Beach. While van Orden was disarming the capital — five wagon loads of weapons were the first day’s haul — Beach had been ordered ashore with these words from the admiral: take up your quarters in the legation, give what orders you deem necessary, under no circumstances whatever haul down any Haitian flag, find out where the government money is kept, take any necessary measures to protect it, find out what weapons and ammunition are in the city and where they are. Beach met with the Comité each morning but soon observed that while answering some questions they would dodge others, that he could get nothing explicit about government funds or about the soldiers — the chief interest of the Committee was to convince him that Guillaume Sam had been eliminated for the purpose of having Dr. Bobo made president and the Americans were in honor bound not to interfere. Every afternoon and evening, Beach met with Haitians — all elite to be sure — often with the aid of Dr. Furniss, who had settled in Port-au-Prince with a comfortable villa in Martissant. With Cole’s 2nd Regiment ashore, the first job was to demobilize the Port-au-Prince garrison. On August 4, while Captain Beach blandly presided over a long-winded meeting of the Comité, Marines went to the casernes, arsenal, and other military billets, disarmed everyone in sight, loaded some 3,000 rifles and 4 million rounds of ammunition into mule wagons, and demobilized the soldiers by hiking them out of town and paying off each man with a ten-gourde note. Having been recruited with rope and kokomakak, the soldiers were joyous, tearing from their clothes the red tape that had meant they were soldiers — but when they knew they were to receive the to-them huge sum of ten gourdes, pandemonium broke loose. The Comité howled too: each committeeman jumped to his feet with wild indignant protestations — the ground under them was being torn away, their power had vanished, and there was nothing they could do.