1920, April 4: (The Death of Lieutenant Muth: Batraville’s Ambush at Morne Bourougue and the Boko’s Machete): At daybreak on April 4, 1920, Batraville scored…

1920, April 4: (The Death of Lieutenant Muth: Batraville’s Ambush at Morne Bourougue and the Boko’s Machete): At daybreak on April 4, 1920, Batraville scored his last victory. A small patrol of three Marines led by Second Lieutenant Lawrence Muth breasted the slope of Morne Bourougue near Lascahobas. Sighting a few Cacos ahead, they opened fire — seconds later the whole hillside blazed with bullets from a powerful ambush laid by Batraville himself. Shooting their way out while aiding a wounded comrade, the remaining two riflemen left Muth for dead, and then Batraville and his men closed in and dragged Muth into the bush. That afternoon a patrol led by Colonel Little himself made contact with Batraville’s band and after a hot fight recovered all that was left of Lieutenant Muth. According to a Caco taken prisoner, Muth had momentarily revived after being hauled away — too weak to stand, having been shot in head and stomach, he was propped up while Batraville made a speech, and then with his great war machete and with certain ceremonies, Batraville, who was a boko, cut off his head. What next followed was subsequently described on oath by Lieutenant Colonel R. S. Hooker: they cut off his private parts, took out his heart and liver, opened up his stomach and took out his intestines and took two large strips of flesh from his thighs — his heart and liver were eaten. Confirming Hooker, the captured general Méthieus Richard said that bits of brain from Muth’s cleft skull were smeared on each Caco’s cartridges so that when they fired at Marines they would not miss them. The ritual dismemberment of Muth — performed by a boko with ceremonies, the heart and liver consumed, the brain smeared on cartridges — was not the random savagery the Marines perceived but a precise ritual act within the Vodou cosmology: the consumption of the enemy’s organs transferred his power to the consumer, the anointing of cartridges with brain matter was a wanga designed to give the bullets the intelligence to find their targets, and the entire ceremony was an invocation of the spiritual arsenal that the enslaved had deployed since Bois Caïman — the same technology of resistance that Makandal had wielded, now turned against a new occupier.