1915, July 28: (Achevez-Moi: The Mob Storms the French Legation and the Death of Guillaume Sam): While Polynice was disposing of Étienne, the French legation…

1915, July 28: (Achevez-Moi: The Mob Storms the French Legation and the Death of Guillaume Sam): While Polynice was disposing of Étienne, the French legation had been surrounded by a mob shouting for Guillaume Sam. Breaking in a side entrance, a hundred armed men — mainly relatives of the massacred victims — tried to rush the two-story verandaed residence but were halted by Minister Girard. Charles Zamor, brandishing a great machete, led a knot of soldiers into the compound where for ten months past he had found asylum — now, with tables turned and demanding the ex-president, he was blocked only by Alice Girard, the minister’s pretty eighteen-year-old daughter, who had cared for and fed Zamor during his stay. Faced down by Mlle. Alice, Zamor lowered his machete and took the soldiers away. Five times before sunset similar sorties were repeated and narrowly repulsed, through the long afternoon and night that followed. The president meanwhile was in a perfect frenzy of fear, creeping about the house like a hunted animal, so terror-stricken that when passing an open window he would crawl on all fours. Early on the morrow, July 28, came the funerals and burials, and with them the eye of the hurricane, an unnatural calm. Then the storm broke: before Girard knew what was afoot, an enraged party of eighty men — the best blood in Port-au-Prince, tout en noir, le melon sur la tête, garbed in black and bowler-hatted — swarmed over a sidewall onto the legation porch and burst inside. Led by Charles Zamor, the intruders fanned through the building, overturning furniture, smashing doors, kicking open chests and closets, and threatening to burn the residence. At bay in the W/C, its doorway camouflaged by the minister’s high-backed bed, Guillaume Sam crouched as he heard the cries and tramp of the searchers — all might have gone well but for the iodoform on his dressing. One of the pack sniffed the aroma and, shoving aside the bedstead, nosed him out. His back to a rack of chamber pots, each immaculately polished, Guillaume Sam mustered all his courage and said simply: Messieurs, achevez-moi. Who struck the first blow will never be known — Sam’s face was already streaming blood when furious captors hustled the president past his wife and children. Elite social leader Paul Gardère stabbed him fiercely with a poniard and was prevented from finishing the job on the stairs only when Rouzier pulled him away. Then, dragging their quarry downstairs by the heels, they flung him off the porch and onto the sharp gravel driveway. As if drowning, Guillaume Sam locked an arm in the spokes of the minister’s carriage and clung for a moment as assailants tugged at his feet — someone whacked the straining wrist with a kokomakak, shattered white bone poked through dark skin, fingers went limp, and the president neared the gate. Hérard Sylvain raised his machete and struck thrice — the third chop split the skull like a piece of firewood and what followed next no longer mattered to Guillaume Sam. Over the wall, across the iron spikes and encrusted glass shards at the top, the mob heaved him, and for a moment, like beef on a meat hook, the carcass dangled by a spike. Then came the turn of le peuple souverain: a man disentangled himself from the crowd and rushed past with a severed hand from which the blood was dripping, the thumb of which he had stuck in his mouth. Behind him came other men with the feet, the other hand, the head and other parts of the body displayed on poles, each one followed by a mob of screaming men and women. During the ensuing hours, Guillaume Sam’s torso, tied to a rope, was hauled about, riddled by shots, hacked, stomped, and defiled. All Port-au-Prince — elite or ignorant, noir or mulâtre — joined in one vast spasm of rage. And that is what Admiral Caperton saw and heard from the bridge of U.S.S. Washington that forenoon when she entered Port-au-Prince bay and dropped anchor a mile offshore.