1919, October 29–31: (The Death of Charlemagne Péralte: Hanneken’s Ambush at Masère, the Blue Shirt, and the Two .45 Slugs Through the Heart): The plan for t…

1919, October 29–31: (The Death of Charlemagne Péralte: Hanneken’s Ambush at Masère, the Blue Shirt, and the Two .45 Slugs Through the Heart): The plan for the night of October 31 called for Conzé to lead the attack on Grande Rivière while Charlemagne would stand by at Masère, a half-hour south of town in the river gorge, to await the result. On October 29, a secret radio message went from the Cap: Charlemagne was at Fort Capois and all plans were made to capture or kill him and break up his forces. The Marine commander directed a chain of blocking positions on all trails across Charlemagne’s line of retreat from St. Raphaël to Vallière, with the order concluding: absolute secrecy and quiet must prevail — Charlemagne wearing blue suit, Panama hat, rides mule. On October 30, while Grande Rivière slept, Major Meade brought in strong gendarme reinforcements with a Marine machine-gun section to lie close inside the caserne. Meanwhile Hanneken briefed and disguised eighteen picked gendarmes and his second-in-command, Garde Lieutenant William R. Button — a corporal U.S.M.C. who like Hanneken spoke fluent Creole — and garbed as Cacos in worn denim, the two blan being blacked with burned cork, the party slipped south after nightfall to Masère and laid an ambush. Some 700 unwitting Cacos filed by along the riverbed, but no Charlemagne — then Jean-Edmond François brought news that Charlemagne had decided not to come down in person but would wait and see what happened, and once Conzé had the town he was to send a detachment to lead Charlemagne in. Hanneken and his men thereupon became that detachment, toiling through pitch-dark mountain trails toward the leader’s camp while from below came the distant sputter of musketry interspersed with the hammer of Meade’s heavy Browning. Six Caco outposts lay in their path, but François had the password — Général Jean, in compliment to Conzé. At the last outpost the leader there tried to examine Button’s nice rifle — a Browning automatic rifle — and Button snapped in Creole: let me go, don’t you see my délégué is getting out of sight, and broke free. By the light of a small fire François pointed out Charlemagne, dressed just as intelligence had reported in a blue shirt. Hanneken drew his pistol and put two .45 caliber slugs through Charlemagne’s torso — the autopsy reported both bullets penetrated the heart. A woman kicked out the fire. In the dark, Hanneken grappled the sticky blood-soaked shirt and stayed beside his quarry during intermittent counterattacks and shooting which continued until dawn. By morning light the gendarmes found Charlemagne’s correspondence, which betrayed numerous secret supporters. Trussed across a captured donkey, all that remained of Charlemagne was brought down to Grande Rivière and then immediately to the Cap, where Abbé Pocreau, who had been his friend and confessor, identified the corpse and performed the last rites. The final word — at least until Charlemagne’s subsequent reburial and state funeral — came from a blan, Major Meade, who almost musingly noted the strong, the powerful, idolatrous hold that Charlemagne had on these people, and that many good Haitians, strong followers of the occupation, were sympathetic to the man. After some mopping up that lasted until November 2, the North entered a time of peace and quiet unmatched since the days of Nord Alexis. The assassination of Charlemagne Péralte — a man shot in the dark by a Marine disguised as a Caco, using intelligence extracted from a double agent funded with American money, his body trussed to a donkey and paraded to the Cap for identification — would become, in the decades that followed, the founding martyrdom of Haitian anti-imperialist memory, the image of his corpse lashed to a door and photographed by the Marines transformed by Haitian artists into an iconography deliberately echoing the crucifixion, the gwo nèg of Hinche transfigured into a national Christ whose death consecrated the resistance and whose resurrection was the nation itself.