1918, September 3 – November 10: (Charlemagne Péralte Escapes: The Gwo Nèg of Hinche, the Scarlet Badge of Ogoun, and the First Engagement of the Caco Resist…

1918, September 3 – November 10: (Charlemagne Péralte Escapes: The Gwo Nèg of Hinche, the Scarlet Badge of Ogoun, and the First Engagement of the Caco Resistance): Charlemagne Masséna Péralte of Hinche, brother-in-law of Oreste Zamor and thus sworn foe of the mulâtre Dartiguenave, was a man large in spirit, pride, intelligence, and ambition — in short, a gwo nèg. In early 1918 he had been convicted of complicity in a midnight raid on Gendarmerie headquarters at Hinche, where a $12,000 payroll had just arrived, and caught at Ouanaminthe before he could cross the border, was sentenced to five years’ hard labor in the civil prison at the Cap. Charlemagne was no improvised person, as Dr. Bobo might have phrased it: a graduate of St. Louis de Gonzague, natty in dress, intimate of Cadet Jérémie, a general in the olden time, commandant de la place at Port-de-Paix in 1914 and before that at Léogâne, he described himself — somewhat expansively — as a young man of family belonging to the high society of Haiti, a devotee of progress and civilization. He was therefore no mere Zamorist Caco nor yet the charismatic primitive legend has depicted, but an opponent of Dartiguenave and adherent of Dr. Bobo, who from exile in Kingston was watching affairs closely and keeping regular touch with opponents of the regime and of the Americans. For such a man to be set sweeping the gutters of the Cap under guard was too much. On September 3, 1918, just twenty-seven days before Williams ordered an end to the corvée, Charlemagne induced his gendarme guard to join him in flight into the mountains behind the Plaine-du-Nord. Here he quickly rallied Dr. Bobo’s old Cacos, soon joined by Zamorist bands from Hinche, and exploiting the general grievance of the corvée proclaimed war to drive the invaders into the sea and free Haiti. What he did not proclaim, but most Haitians understood and the Americans hardly at all, was that he was also mounting a traditional rebellion of the North and the Artibonite to topple southern Dartiguenave and make way for Bobo. His initial moves were shrewdly directed against outlying posts manned by small Gendarmerie detachments — as the gendarmes were the visible symbols of the regime and the corvée, these attacks served the common purposes of resistance, discrediting the occupation, and acquiring modern weapons. On the night of October 17, 1918, a hundred Cacos stole down on Hinche, each wearing the scarlet badge of Ogoun, but the Gendarmerie had been warned — as the Cacos swarmed in, the defenders opened fire, and in half an hour it was over with thirty-five Cacos dead and two gendarmes killed. Russell, in a rare moment of misjudgment, commented that the affair had no political or military significance whatsoever. Charlemagne’s next strike was more successful: before dawn on November 10, sixty Cacos hit Maïssade, the next garrison northwest of Hinche, routed the ten-man Gendarmerie detachment, and sacked the town. The scarlet badge of Ogoun — the lwa of iron and war, patron of warriors and all who work with fire — invested Charlemagne’s rebellion with a spiritual authority that the Americans, for whom the badges were merely identifying insignia, could not begin to comprehend: in the Vodou cosmology, to wear Ogoun’s color into battle was to place oneself under the protection of the divine warrior, to transform armed resistance from a political act into a sacred obligation, and to announce that the fight against the occupation was not merely a quarrel between factions but a continuation of the revolution of 1804 — for it was Ogoun, in the Bois Caïman ceremony, who had consecrated the original insurrection.