1919, August–October 26: (Get Charlemagne: Hanneken’s Plan, Conzé’s Deception, and the Red-Ink Wound): Suppression of the Caco Resistance was getting nowhere…

1919, August–October 26: (Get Charlemagne: Hanneken’s Plan, Conzé’s Deception, and the Red-Ink Wound): Suppression of the Caco Resistance was getting nowhere and promised to continue to do so until Charlemagne could be laid by the heels. None knew this better than the new Gendarmerie commandant Colonel Wise, who within days after assuming command sent word to Major J. J. Meade, commanding the Department of the North: get Charlemagne. To get Charlemagne thereupon became the highly secret mission of Gendarmerie Captain H. H. Hanneken, a Marine sergeant in command of that Caco hotbed Grande Rivière — as Wise later wrote, it was a pretty big order, meaning running down one Haitian out of several millions in a country almost entirely sympathetic to him, surrounded by friends, protected by a fanatical bodyguard, never sleeping two nights in the same place, in a tangled maze of mountains and valleys of which there were no accurate maps. In August 1919, soon after Hanneken completed his plan, Jean-Baptiste Conzé, one-time Caco general and lately resident of Grande Rivière, left town in the night after letting it be known he had had enough of the blan and would henceforth be found with the Cacos — a Gendarmerie deserter, Private Jean-Edmond François, went with him. Conzé’s destination was Fort Capois, the same stronghold Major Butler had taken in 1915, and since he was well provided with rum, rations, and money, Cacos quickly rallied to his standard. What none knew save Hanneken, Meade, and Wise was that Conzé was supported with Hanneken’s out-of-pocket funds, and each week — or more often — Private François or even Conzé himself would steal into Grande Rivière for a secret meeting with Hanneken. Charlemagne was suspicious, a trait to which he owed much success and continued survival, and was therefore slow to accept Conzé at face value. However, after a carefully staged, purposely conspicuous failure of a Gendarmerie attack on Fort Capois led by Hanneken himself, Charlemagne sent Conzé warm congratulations and a commission as général de division. Publicly crestfallen, Hanneken nursed a heavily bandaged arm stained with issue red ink, which he reported was a wound inflicted by Conzé. Conzé now urged Charlemagne to join him in capturing Grande Rivière itself — after his rebuff at Port-au-Prince, to take a town would be a great thing. On October 26, accompanied by other generals and 1,200 Cacos, Charlemagne arrived at Fort Capois, with the plan to attack Grande Rivière in the night. The elaborate deception that Hanneken constructed — the fake desertion, the staged military failure, the red-ink wound, the double agent operating under the occupier’s own funds — reproduced in miniature the intelligence tradecraft that colonial powers had deployed against indigenous resistance movements from the Maroon wars of Jamaica to the Philippine insurrection, a methodology in which the colonizer’s greatest weapon was not firepower but the capacity to corrupt the bonds of trust within the resistance itself, transforming the Caco’s own networks of loyalty and kinship into instruments of his destruction.