Chapter LXII: The Dos D'ane

As our time of morning parade in that season, was about the hour of sunrise, our march towards the mountains was a very pleasant one.

The old castle or citadel of Basse Terre, which the valiant Benbow besieged in vain, in 1702, still jutted, with its four great bulwarks, in grim strength into the water. Its walls were mounted by sixty pieces of French ordnance, but now the British flag waved above them; and as we marched on, we heard our band playing in the square,

Between St. Johnstone's and Bonnie Dundee,
I'll gar ye be fain to follow wi' me,

the old quickstep of the regiment.

A portion of this citadel was not more than thirty-five years old, for when the British forces were there in 1759, it was blown up by accident, and with it perished the Governor, Lieutenant-colonel Desbrissay of Watson's Foot, the 38th or old Staffordshire regiment. He was carried into the air, together with Major Trollop, and both being found crushed to death, were buried in the Carmelite church, were I saw their tombs.

Concerning the colonel, I remember Captain Glendonwyn relating an anecdote, as we stood by his monument one day.

"Desbrissay," said he, "was a captain of infantry at the battle of Rocaux, which was fought against Marshal Saxe, near Liege, on the 12th of October, 1746, when Sir John Ligonier, after doing all that a brave general could, posted some British battalions in hollow squares in rear of the _dorpts_ to secure the retreat of the army, which was pressed by the splendid cavalry of Saxe, and which the Butcher of Culloden was blundering by his cowardice and inability. There Desbrissay fell wounded, and while lying on the ground was run through the body by a French officer, whose dastardly example was immediately followed by some Walloon infantry, thirteen of whom planted their bayonets in his body. Yet Desbrissay did not die; he was taken prisoner by the French, and by the skilful treatment of their surgeons he recovered, for there are some men who possess as many lives as a cat.

"One day, not long after his convalescence, being at dinner with Marshal Count de Saxe, who was deemed the mirror of military honor, and was ever kind and gentle to prisoners, the count said,--

"'Pray tell me, sir, if you know the officer who used you so barbarously on the field of Rocaux?'

"'I do, M. le Maréchal.'

"'You do?"

"'Yes--as well as I know you, M. le Comte.'

"'Pray give me his name, that I may make him an example to all France, by tearing the epaulettes from his shoulders, and disgracing him in front of his regiment.'

"'Excuse me, M. le Comte,' replied the brave but gentle Desbrissay, 'I know his corps--I know his name, and I know his rank in the French service, but I beg to decline pointing him out to you, contenting myself with the hope, that one day I may meet him hand to hand on the field of honour, and then, like a true English gentleman, shall I avenge the savage wrong he and his soldiers did me on that fatal day at Rocaux.'

"'Monsieur, you are most generous--I shall press you no further,' said Count Saxe.

"So spoke the gallant Desbrissay, of the old 38th; but the day he longed for never came; he was sent to serve in other lands, and thirteen years after that shameful defeat near Liege, he perished in Guadaloupe, and lies there interred in the church of the Carmelites."

And now, with this anecdote, we have brought the reader to the rising ground which looks down on the town of Basse Terre, the capital of the Isle of _Alto_, Guadaloupe, as it was named by the Spaniards, because its _high_ mountains resembled those of the same name, which rise in all their solemn beauty between the Tagus and the Guadiana in the Estramadura of old Spain.

Many of those hills, towards which we marched, were covered by waving woods, that drew down the clouds, and added to the charms of the scenery; but when the morning sun arose, the shadows fell deep on every rugged pass and wide and fair savannah.

And now if the reader will look back with me, from our line of march, he may see the city of Basse Terre, with its churches of the Carmelites and Jesuits, and its whitewashed houses, clustering round the little bay; on the south, its old mishapen and irregular castle, perched on a rock so lofty, that when viewed from it, our ships of the line seemed no larger than bumboats; on the north, the heavy bastions of Le Morne Rouge; to the eastward, wide fields of sugar, cotton, and indigo, studded with groves, mills, and houses; to the westward the Caribean sea, with its blue waves running merrily on sands of silvery whiteness.

Above this border of sand, there rose green belts of sugarcane, and over these were the hills towards which we were marching, shrouded in the dark foliage of old primeval forests; and higher still, the rarefied clouds that floated like gossamer webs about their peaks.

After a halt during mid-day in the thickets, we pushed on by a circuitous route towards a cleft or gorge in the mountains named the Dos d'Ane, which guarded the passage into Cabesterre, the more level and fertile part of the isle, and there the outpost of Scipio's black band was last seen, as our quadroon guide assured me. The French are said to have given the hill its name from a fancied resemblance to the form of an ass. The ascent was steep and rugged, as the narrow path over which we toiled in heavy marching order, with arms loaded and bayonets fixed--for we knew not the moment we might be attacked--was encumbered by masses of fallen rock; by deep rents and rifts in the cliffs of limestone and basalt, and through these runnels of warm and sulphureous water were trickling under the broad and fibrous leaves of the giant tropical weeds. Thick vapours rose here and there from stagnant pools which were shrouded by dwarf mangroves; but beyond this gorge which was so gloomy, that one might fancy it led to the putrid lake of Avernus, rose mountain slopes covered by velvet-green, and trees of every kind.

A profound and melancholy silence reigned here; at least, we heard only the croak of the huge frogs that squatted in the marshy pools, or the voice of the mocking-bird in a grove of fern-palms; and now as evening began to fall, and we penetrated deeper into the gloomy gorge of the Dos d'Ane, our guide warned me that we were within a short distance of the camp of the black insurgents--less than a mile, he thought.

A few hundred yards further on we found a deep and wooded ravine opening to the right of the narrow path. Therein I concealed the whole company, and so soon as the dusk favoured, went forward to reconnoitre, leaving my men orders to maintain the strictest silence until my return. Guided by the quadroon, I advanced through the cleft in the mountains, and ere long, by the various strange and tumultuous sounds which woke their echoes, I found that we were approaching the camp of Scipio.

Lest the guide might play me false--for we had no great faith in men of colour--I had shown him significantly a pair of loaded pistols, that were stuck somewhat ostentatiously in my waist-belt; but the poor fellow proved every way faithful, and here, for the benefit of the uninitiated, I may mention that a quadroon is the child of a white and a mulatto, who is the child of a pure black and a European; but there are also black as well as white Creoles--the former being the children of slaves, born and reared in degradation and slavery.