The Iphigenia’s fate was now sealed. Alone against four defenders, she raised her sails, pulled up anchor, and made a break for the mouth of the harbor—better to escape with damage than to meet the same fate as her sister ships—but it was not to be. Captain Bouvet ordered the Minerva and the Bellone to give chase. Not a single Englishman would survive to report the defeat—after all, there were Trafalgar and Aboukir to avenge!
The two noble French frigates, battered as they were, hoisted their sails and followed the Iphigenia. Shouts rose from the island, urging them on. For a time it seemed as if the English vessel might escape; she was too far ahead of her pursuers, and their bullets fell uselessly into the water, far short of their target. But then all of a sudden—three more ships appeared at the mouth of the harbor, the tricolor fluttering atop their masts! It was Captain Hamelin, arrived from Port Louis with the Entreprenant, the Manche, and the Astrée! Needless to say, the Iphigenia was easily, and utterly, obliterated. The French did not take a single prisoner.
Meanwhile the Victor approached the wrecked carcass of the Nereid. Fearing some surprise attack, the French sailors boarded her with great caution—but the silence that prevailed was indeed a deathly one. The decks were strewn with bodies, the blood ankle-deep. One Englishman, mortally wounded, managed to tell them that the command to raise the white flag had been given no less than six times—but every time, French gunfire had killed the men attempting to execute the order. The captain had retreated into his quarters, and no one had seen him after that.
Lieutenant Roussin, entering the cabin, found Captain Willoughby at a table still laid with a bottle of rum and three glasses. One of his arms and one leg had been shot away. His first mate lay near him, dead of a bullet wound to the chest. Willoughby’s nephew William Murray sprawled insensible—but alive—at his uncle’s feet, bleeding from his side.
Captain Willoughby, with his remaining hand, made a feeble attempt to offer Roussin his sword; the lieutenant refused it, and instead saluted the dying Englishman. “Sir,” he said, “when an officer has fought as courageously as you have, he need offer his saber only to God himself.”
Roussin ordered that Willoughby should receive all possible medical attention—but the noble commander of the Nereid died the next day. The French were pleased, however, that William Murray had been taken alive. We will see him again as our story unfolds.
III
THREE CHILDREN
As might be expected, the English did not allow the loss of four warships to put them off their conquest of île de France; instead they now sought to both win a new victory and avenge an old defeat. Barely three months after the events I have just described, a second battle occurred at Port Louis, opposite where the first battle had raged, quite as ferocious as the first one but with a very different result.
Instead of four warships and eighteen hundred men, twelve frigates, eight corvettes, and fifty transports bearing twenty or twenty-five thousand men now landed on the coast and advanced rapidly toward Port Louis, which, as I have said, was then called Port Napoleon. The island’s capital presented an almost indescribable spectacle as it braced itself for the attack. Excited crowds milled in the streets, ignorant of the true danger they faced; even the most outrageous rumors found widespread belief as they passed from ear to ear. An aide-de-camp of the commanding general appeared periodically among the multitudes, carrying orders and scattering pamphlets written specifically to arouse patriotism and anti-English sentiment among the locals. Their fervor increasing by the moment, men thrust their hats onto the points of their bayonets and waved them vigorously, crying “Vive l’empereur!” and vowing to fight to the death if they must. The crowd fairly vibrated with enthusiasm; the rapidity of their transition from uneasy calm to imminent action had incited their hunger for battle.
The real hub of activity was the place d’Armes in the city center. Here thronged caissons drawn by small Timor and Pégu horses in full gallop, cannons painfully dragged by groups of artillerymen, teenage boys with smooth, powder-blackened cheeks. Civil guards in full uniform could be seen hurrying toward the square alongside volunteers in every sort of attire, who had added bayonets to their hunting rifles, and alongside blacks clad in tattered military dress, carrying every type of firearm and saber. This motley crowd shouted and jostled one another, adding to the general hubbub that rattled the city and made it hum like a vast beehive.
Once they had arrived at the place d’Armes the men calmed down a bit. Half of the island’s garrison was already there, composed of enlisted troops: fifteen, perhaps eighteen hundred men, drawn up in ranks and waiting for the order to march against the enemy. Their attitude, at once proud and unworried, seemed to silently reprove the noise and tumult that characterized their brave but untrained civilian comrades who were less familiar with this sort of combat, even while they admired the civilians’ bravery and willingness to go into battle. The blacks crowded to one side of the square, while the national volunteers attempted to imitate the soldiers’ military discipline by drawing near to them and trying unsuccessfully to arrange themselves in identical lines.
The man who appeared—through his own strenuous efforts, truth be told—to be the leader of the volunteers was forty or forty-five years of age and wore a field officer’s epaulets. He was unremarkable in appearance, with impassive features devoid of what an artist might refer to as character. He was coiffed, shaven, and decked out as if for a parade; every few moments he unbuttoned his military coat a bit farther to reveal the brocade vest, ruffled shirt, and embroidered cravat beneath. A comely boy of twelve years of age stood near him, discreetly attended by a black servant and luxuriantly dressed in vest and white trousers, frilled shirt, green jacket with silver buttons, and feathered gray beaver cap. He displayed the arrogant sort of ease that often accompanies wealth; a scabbard hung from his belt, and he clutched a small sword in his right hand, imitating the officer—whom he loudly and pointedly addressed as “Father”—as closely as he could manage. The battalion leader seemed as proud of this appellation as he was of the eminent post to which the trust of his fellow citizens had elevated him in the national militia.
A short distance away from this splendid father and son stood another family group, humbler in appearance but certainly just as notable, made up of a man in his middle forties and two boys, twelve and fourteen years of age. The man was tall, spare, and slightly stooped, not by age, but by the consciousness of his inferior position. His coppery skin and frizzy hair marked him out immediately as a mulatto, one of those unfortunate colonial beings who cannot be forgiven for their color, no matter how much success or wealth—and this is often quite substantial—they may attain. He was dressed with elegant simplicity and armed with a gold-inlaid, short-barreled musket topped by a long, sharp bayonet. A cuirassier’s saber hung easily from one side of his tall frame, and his pouch and pockets bulged with spare cartridges.
The older of the two boys who accompanied this man was a tall youth with skin bronzed more by outdoor sport than by his African blood. He was as sturdy and robust as a lad of eighteen; consequently, his father had allowed him to participate in the action that was about to begin. He was armed with the double-barreled shotgun he normally used for hunting, and he had a reputation for skill with the weapon that was envied by older men. His youth was more evident than usual at the moment: He had placed his gun on the ground and was wrestling playfully with an enormous Malgache dog someone had brought along in case the English were accompanied by bulldogs.
The younger brother was a small, delicate child who seemed an unlikely member of the physically impressive family I am attempting to describe. Unlike Jacques—for so the older brother was named—Georges looked at least two years younger than he really was; he was skinny and fragile, with slender limbs, long black hair, and a melancholy face of a paleness not often found in the colonies. He lacked both the tall stature of his father and the powerful body of his brother, who seemed to have taken all the strength intended for
both boys. On the other hand, his gaze was so penetrating, so troubled, and so deeply intelligent that it, along with the frown that was already ever-present on his forehead, gave him an air so virile and a will so determined that everyone who met him was astonished that such weakness and such power could reside together in the same individual.
Georges was unarmed and kept close to his father’s side, tightly clutching the barrel of the latter’s inlaid musket and watching both his father and the field officer with interest. How was it, he seemed to wonder, that his father—so much richer, braver, stronger than the other man—did not also wear ornate military finery, laden with medals—why had he never been awarded any particular distinction?
A black man, clad in blue linen vest and culottes, stood by like the attendant of the boy in the frilled shirt, waiting for the men to march into battle. He would care for young Georges when his father and brother went off to fight.
The booming of cannons had been audible since early morning, when General Vandermaesen, with half of the garrison, had marched against the enemy to check its progress at Mont Longue and at the confluence of the Pont Rouge and Lataniers rivers. He had held them back bravely since then, but as the day wore on he began to fear that he might lose all of his men at one stroke, and to suspect that he might have been fighting a dummy force and that the main body of the English forces might take another route to the capital, which was now defended only by the remaining half of the garrison and the national volunteers. As it turned out, his courageous band of only eight hundred, bravely holding off four thousand British and two thousand Sepoys, was forced to retreat little by little toward the city, taking note of every detail of the land that might give them an advantage, but always pushed back farther and farther.
The sounds of their approach, the booming of artillery, the shouts of the men, and the rattling noise of musket fire, could be clearly heard in the place d’Armes, growing louder by the moment. Rather than being intimidated, though, the defenders of Port Louis became even more impatient for action. They had been condemned to inaction on the orders of the general and stationed in the square, and it had only served to increase their courage. The regulars bit their lips and muttered curses through their bushy mustaches, while the volunteers fidgeted and exclaimed aloud that if they had to wait much longer, they would be obliged to break ranks and rush to meet the enemy in any manner they could.
Just then they heard the general returning. At the same moment drums pounded a call to arms and a mounted aide-de-camp galloped past the square, waving his hat and crying out, “To your posts, men! The enemy approaches!” He disappeared as suddenly as he had come, and to the rattle and crash of the military tambourine the soldiers fell into line with the speed and precision born of long-standing habit, filing rapidly out of the square. Despite their best efforts at imitation, the volunteers could not match this military efficiency, and it took them several moments to form ranks. A further delay occurred when some of the men began marching on the right foot and some on the left, causing the entire group to halt in confusion. The tall man with the inlaid rifle, seeing an empty place open up in the middle of the third line of volunteers, kissed his younger son, handed the boy over to the blue-clad black servant, and hurried with Jacques to slip into the vacant spot.
As the father and son approached, the men on either side of them drew back so that they found themselves alone at the center of an ever-widening circle, much like the one caused when a falling stone ripples the surface of a pond. The fat man in epaulets, who had finally succeeded in bringing the first line of volunteers to order, noticed the disruption in the third. Raising himself on his toes, he called: “To your ranks, men! To your ranks!”
Despite the officer’s commanding tone, an objection rang out. “We want no mulattoes among us!” The cry was taken up by more voices and repeated like an unrelenting echo by the entire battalion.
The field officer saw the mulatto standing alone at the center of the empty space, and the older boy, red with anger, who had already moved back a few steps to put a bit of distance between himself and the hostile faces surrounding him. The officer pushed through the first two lines of volunteers, who parted to let him pass, and marched straight up to this man of color who’d had the insolence to join a group of white soldiers. He looked the mulatto up and down with flagrant disdain, while the other man stood upright as a post.
“Monsieur Pierre Munier, isn’t it?” the field officer asked at length. “Do I really need to tell you that you’re not wanted here?”
Pierre Munier could have knocked the rotund little man to the ground with one blow, but he remained silent. He met the officer’s gaze and then averted his eyes humbly, increasing both the other man’s arrogance and his anger.
“What are you doing here?” The small man spat out the words, giving the mulatto a shove with the flat of his hand.
Pierre Munier spoke at last. “Monsieur de Malmédie,” he said, “I had hoped that differences in color would not matter on a day as dangerous as this one.”
The fat man sneered. “You had hoped! What gave you reason to hope?”
“My wish to die defending our island, if I must.”
“Our island,” muttered the field officer. “They own plantations as we do, so they think the island is theirs!”
“Of course I realize the island isn’t really ours, any more than it is yours; of course I know that, sir,” Munier said hastily. “But if we argue over semantics instead of marching against the enemy, soon it won’t belong to either of us.”
“Enough!” The field officer cut him off, stamping his foot on the ground. “Is your name listed among the national guards?”
“It is not, sir—as you well know,” Munier replied. “You refused me when I tried to enroll.”
“Well then, what do you want?”
“To fight with you, as a volunteer.”
“Impossible!” said the fat man.
“But why? Monsieur de Malmédie, I implore you—”
“Impossible,” the field officer said again, drawing himself up. “My men want no mulattoes in their company.”
“No mulattoes!” the soldiers cried out again.
Pierre Munier’s shoulders drooped, and he looked on the verge of tears. “You will not let me fight?”
“Gather a corps of colored men and lead them yourself, then. Or join the black detachment,” the little man said dismissively.
“But—”
“I order you to leave this battalion!” Monsieur de Malmédie shouted angrily.
A small voice piped up, trembling with fury. “Come away, Father, from these people who insult you.” A hand pulled forcefully at Pierre Munier.
“Yes, Jacques, I’m coming,” he said absently.
“It isn’t Jacques, Father—it’s Georges.”
Pierre Munier turned in surprise. It was indeed his younger son, who had escaped from the Negro attendant to teach his father this lesson in dignity. Munier bowed his head and sighed deeply. The soldiers resumed their ranks and filed out of the square, de Malmédie at their head. Pierre Munier was left alone between his children, one of whom was red as fire and the other pale as death. He cringed before the double reproach of Jacques’s flushed face and Georges’s white one. “What would you have me do?” he asked his sons. “You see how it is.”
Jacques was a lighthearted, philosophical child at heart, and he hurried to console himself after the initial stab of pain. “Bah!” he exclaimed to his father, snapping his fingers dismissively. “Why should it matter to us if that fat man scorns us? We’re richer than he is, aren’t we?” He threw a glance at the boy in the frilled shirt. “If I catch his brat Henri anywhere near me, I’ll give him a thrashing he won’t soon forget.”
“Dear Jacques!” Pierre Munier, grateful for his older son’s attempt to assuage his father’s shame with insouciance, gazed at his older son fondly, then turned to Georges, hoping that he would be able to shrug off the slight as easily as his brother had. The
boy’s face was stony but for a nearly indiscernible smirk playing around his lips. It was an expression of such disdain, such pity, that Pierre Munier responded to it as if his son had actually spoken. “What would you have me do?” he repeated helplessly. “For heaven’s sake, what would you have me do?”
He waited uneasily for the boy’s reply, dreading the cold accuracy with which he knew Georges had gauged the situation. The child said nothing at first, gazing at the far end of the square. “Father,” he said at last. “Look at those black men over there—they need someone to lead them.”
“You’re right, Georges!” Jacques exclaimed cheerfully, his humiliation already forgotten. Confident in his own strength, he took comfort in Caesar’s maxim: “Better to be commander of these, than to be commanded by those.”
Inspired by the younger boy’s words and the elder’s attitude, Pierre Munier approached the group of mulattoes. They recognized him immediately as one of the most respected men of color on the island—almost a father figure—and crowded around him, asking eagerly for orders and imploring him to lead them into battle.
Almost at once an extraordinary transformation took place in Pierre Munier. The sense of inferiority that he could never quite shake off in the presence of whites vanished, to be replaced by an appreciation of his own worth. He straightened to his full height, and his eyes—which had been kept humbly lowered before M. de Malmédie—flashed with energy. His voice grew firm and commanding where it had trembled a moment before. Slinging his gun gracefully over his shoulder, he drew his saber and, motioning in the direction of the enemy, cried, “Forward!”
Georges Page 4