Crête-à-Pierrot. Evacuated by the garrison at 8 p.m.; the French entered at daybreak and massacred the wounded

On the morning of 24 March an old Black man, lame, deaf and nearly dumb, accompanied by an old Black woman, was seized by the French in the neighborhood of the fort. The European soldiers, taking him for a spy, questioned him; he answered only by bleating, with wild eyes. They took him to General Leclerc, who, seeing that he was an idiot, ordered him sent away. As they led him to the banks of the river they beat him with the flats of their sabers and with sticks; he went down on his knees and bleated. When they let him go he crossed the river with difficulty, disappearing beneath the water, to the loud laughter of the French. As soon as he and his companion had reached the far bank, he stood up straight, ceased to be deaf, lame and dumb, danced the Chica, * reviled the whites, made several leaps with the agility of a goat, and rushed toward the fort through a hail of bullets. The French realized that they had been dealing with a spy, or with one of the most skillful of emissaries. This man was an old African officer sent by Dessalines. He made his way into the great fort and presented a ring to Lamartinière: it was the order to evacuate. The soldiers shed tears of rage when it was decided that they would abandon the Crête-à-Pierrot. But Dessalines’s order was for them a decree to which they had to submit without a murmur. On 24 March, at eight in the evening, they filled in the ditches, left the fort in the deepest silence, and marched against the line of Boudet’s division, which stood between Rochambeau’s division and a reserve under the orders of the aide-de-camp Burke, on the left bank of the Artibonite. An enemy sentry gave the alarm. The French poured a heavy fire upon the Indigenous. The colonel of the 9th colonial, Bodin, and Adjudant-Commandant d’Henin presented a formidable front to them. We lost half our men. The rest, 300 in number, fall back upon Rochambeau’s division, pass over the bodies of a French demi-brigade, open a way through the whites with the bayonet, and throw themselves into the woods. The groans of the wounded whom the Indigenous were forced to abandon wrung cries of anguish from them. Colonel Lefèvre, at the head of the 19th light demi-brigade, rushed in pursuit. Lamartinière turned like a furious lion, awaited him at the foot of the Morne de la Tranquillité, behind Rochambeau’s division, fought a bloody action with him, and drove him headlong into the waters of the Artibonite. Unmolested, he joined General Dessalines on the summit of the Morne du Calvaire. At daybreak the French entered the fort. They found there the musical instruments of the guard of honor and the twelve guns Dessalines had placed there, and they massacred all the wounded. From the neighboring mornes the Indigenous could see mutilated corpses hanging from the branches of the trees around the fort. By this barbarous execution Leclerc had thought to frighten them; but in embittering them he only spurred them to break the last link that bound them to the mother country.