nish the country with the first obvious step to advancement, roads, the forces of occupation carried matters with somewhat too energetic a hand. The natives were not particularly fond of the resurrected law of corvée, but they would probably have endured it had it been applied in strict legality, requiring each man to labor a few days a year at road-building in his own locality. When they were driven from their huts at the point of a gendarme rifle, transported, on their own bare feet, to distant parts of the island, and forced to labor for weeks, under armed guards both day and night, it is natural that they should have concluded the white man was planning to reduce them again to the slavery they had thrown off more than a century before. All this has been corrected. The American Chef de la Gendarmerie d'Haiti who countenanced, if he did not sanction, these methods has gone on to new honors in other fields of battle; the young American gendarme officers whose absolute power over their districts made it possible to apply their orders to build roads too sternly have returned to the ranks, and the corvée has been abolished. That forced labor was not the cause of cacoism, which has not yet been entirely wiped out in Haiti, for it is in the Haitian blood to turn caco; but it made a fertile field of ignorant, disgruntled negroes from which the bandit leaders were able to harvest most of their followers, and gave strength to the chief weapon of the rascally chiefs -the assertion that the Americans had come to take possession of Haiti and reestablish slavery. To this day even the foreign companies who have no trouble in recruiting labor for other purposes cannot hire the workmen needed to build roads. The thick-skulled native countrymen see in that particular task the direct route to becoming slaves.

For two years or more courageous young Americans have been chasing cacos through the hills of central and northern Haiti, with no more ulterior motive than that of giving the Black Republic the internal peace it has long lacked and sadly needed. All of them are members of our Marine Corps, though many of them are in addition

officers of the Gendarmerie of Haiti, with increased rank and pay. Take care not to confuse these two divisions of pacifiers, for the gendarmerie has a strong esprit de corps of its own, and a just pride in its own achievements, despite being still marines at heart. Though the world has heard little of it, these caco-hunters have performed feats that compare with anything done by their fellows in France. In fact, their work has often required more sustained courage and individual initiative, and has brought with it greater hardships. In the trenches at their worst the warrior had the support and the sense of companionship of his fellows and a more or less certain commissary at the rear; if his opponents were sometimes brutal, they clung to some of the rules of civilized warfare. In Haiti many a young American gendarme officer has set forth on an expedition of long duration through the mountainous wilderness, often wholly alone, except for three or four native gendarmes, cousins to the cacos themselves, sleeping on the bare ground when he dared to sleep at all, subsisting on the scanty products of the jungle, his life entirely dependent on his own wits, and his nerves always taut with the knowledge that to be wounded or captured means savage torture and mutilation, to be followed by certain death. Bit by bit the native gendarmes have been trained to fight the cacos unassisted, and three or four of them have now reached commissioned rank; but the best of them still require the moral support of a white leader, and the energetic American youths scattered through the "brush" of Haiti have the future peace of the country in their keeping.

It must be admitted that the cacos do not constitute a dangerous army in the modern sense of the word. Their discipline is less than embryonic, their weapons seldom better than dangerous playthings. One rifle to five men is the average equipment, and many of these are antiquated pieces captured from the French expeditionary force under Leclerc that was driven from the island more than a century ago.

The cacos have a mortal fear of white soldiers. Scores of times a single marine or gendarme officer has routed

bands of a hundred or more, killing as many as his automatic rifle can reach in the short period between their first glimpse of him and the time it takes the ragged "army" to scatter to the four points of the compass through thorny undergrowth or cactus-hedges which no white man could penetrate though all the forces of evil were pursuing him. The natives can't "savez" this uncanny prowess of les blancs, and commonly attribute it to the sustaining force of some voodoo spirit friendly to the white man. This belief is to a certain extent a boomerang, for the Haitian gendarmes often fancy themselves immune in the presence of a white superior, and more than one of them has bitten the dust because he insisted on calmly standing erect, smoking a cigarette, and placidly handing cartridges to the marine who lay hugging the ground beside him, pumping lead into the fleeing cacos. With a white man along, how could he be hurt? Up to date at least three thousand bandits have been killed as against four Americans, a major and a sergeant who were shot from ambush, and two privates who lost their lives by over-confidence.

The Americans who are striving to bring internal peace to Haiti have come to the unanimous opinion that the mere killing of cacos will not wipe out banditism. They have hunted them by every available means, including the use of aëroplanes. The cacos show a wholesome terror for the latter, which they call "God's wicked angels"; they have suffered really "cruel" losses before the machine-guns of the determined American youths who are pursuing them, but they continue their cacoism. All efforts are now being bent to two endsto kill off the chiefs and to weed the country of firearms. In the early days of the occupation the native caught in possession of a rifle was given five years at hard labor, and many of them are still serving sentence, though the penalty has recently been reduced to six months. Every report of "jumping" a band or a camp of cacos ends now with a regular formula in which only the numbers differ: "Killed 1 general and 2 chiefs; captured 9 rifles, 6 swords, 11 machetes."

The tendency of the caco to use his rifle chiefly as ballast to be thrown overboard when the appearance of a white soldier gives his black legs their maximum speed has helped this weeding out of weapons, as the time-honored Haitian custom for opposing warriors to mount a prominent hillock and hurl foulmouthed defiance at their foes has raised the scores of American marksmen. Recently an intelligent propaganda has been carried on by the gendarmerie to induce the misled rank and file to come in and surrender their arms, receiving in exchange a small cash equivalent and a card attesting them bons habitants. This offer of amnesty, which has already shown gratifying results, is brought to the attention of the bandits chiefly through the marketwomen, who, swarming all over Haiti, have always been the chief channel of information for the cacos, with whom they are in the main friendly despite having frequently been robbed of their wares by some hungry "army." The chief drawback to this plan, however, is a certain lack of team-work between the two corps of caco-hunters. The marines have orders to shoot on sight any native carrying a rifle a perfectly justifiable command, since there is no other distinguishing mark between a bon habitant and a caco. But the result is that the chief who has determined that surrender to the nearest gendarme officer is the better part of valor, or the caco "volunteer" who has at last succeeded in eluding his own sentries, is forced to wrap his weapon in bananaleaves and sneak up to within a few miles of town, hide his firearm, and apply at the gendarmerie for a native soldier to protect him while he goes to get it.

In most cases the bandits travel in small groups until called together for some projected attack. But more than one permanent camp, some of them veritable towns, has been found tucked away in some mountainous retreat. The latest of these to be destroyed had seventy-five houses, a headquarters building (with two hundred chairs!), a voodoo temple, and a cockpit; for the caco remains a true Haitian for all his cacoism, and will not be separated from

his voodoo rites, his fighting cock, and his women except in case of direst necessity.

Of many courageous feats performed by the American youths in khaki who are roaming the hills of Haiti one stands out as the most spectacular. Indeed, it is fit to rank with any of the stirring warrior tales with which history is seasoned from the days of the Greeks to the recent World War. Hearing it, one might fancy he was listening to a story of the black ages of Haiti when Christophe was ruling his sable brethren with bloody hand, rather than to something accomplished a bare halfyear ago by a persevering young Ameri

can.

Charlemagne Masena Peralte was a member of one of the two families that have long predominated in the village of Hinche. He was what the Haitians call a griff, a three-fourths negro. The French priest with whom he served as choir boy and acolyte remembers him well as "a boy who was not bad, but haughty and quick to take offense." When he had learned what the thatched school-house of Hinche had to offer, Charlemagne was sent to Port-auPrince, where he finished the course given by French ecclesiastics. In other words, he was a man of education by Haitian standards. Like many of the sons of the "best families" in Haiti, he decided to go into politics rather than pursue a more orderly profession. But politicians are thicker than mangos in the Black Republic, and for some reason things did not break right for Charlemagne. Wounded in his pride and denied his expected source of easy income, he followed the long-established Haitian custom in such matters. gathered a band of malcontents and penniless cacos about him and marched against the capital. The Government realized the danger and bought Charlemagne off by appointing him commandant of an important district. A few years later, when a new turn of the political wheel left him again among the "outs," he followed the same route to another official position. It got to be a habit with Charlemagne to force each succeeding government to appoint him to office.

He

Finding himself in disfavor with the American occupation, he set out to work his little scheme once more. It does not seem to have occurred to him that conditions had changed. Captured, and convicted of cacoism in October, 1917, by an American court martial sitting in his native town of Hinche, he was sentenced to five years at hard labor.

A year later, while working on the roads in company with other inmates of the departmental prison at Cap Haitien he eluded his gendarme guards and escaped. Taking to the bush, he set out to organize a new band of cacos. The corvée, then at its height, made his task easier. To turn the scales still more in his favor, the large gang working on the highway at Dignon, near his home town, had not been paid in more than three months, thanks to that stagnation of circulation to which quartermaster departments are frequently subject. "Come along," said Charlemagne, “and I'll get you your money," and some three hundred disgruntled workmen followed him into the mountains.

The

Within a few months he was signing himself "Chief of the Revolutionary Forces against the American nation on the soil of Haiti," and had gathered several thousand cacos about him. magic name of General Charlemagne spread throughout the island. Every leader of a collection of lawless ragamuffins sought to be "commissioned" by him. He appointed more generals than ever did a European sovereign. Every lazy black rascal with nothing to lose and everything to gain joined his growing forces. When the simple countrymen would not follow him by choice, they were recruited by force. He assassinated and punished until his word became law to any one out of reach of gendarme protection. He spread propaganda against the American officers, asserted that they had orders to annex the country, and posed as the savior of Haiti, calling upon the people to help him drive out the white oppressors as their fathers had done more than a century before.

As a matter of fact, the patriotism of Charlemagne, of which he constantly boasted in pompous words, consisted of nothing more or less than an exag

gerated ego and an overwhelming desire to advance his own personal interests. He had that in common with all the yellow politicians of Haiti. But he played the patriotic card with unusual success. Disgruntled politicians and men of wealth who had some personal reason for wishing the occupation abolished gave him secret aid. The simple mountain negroes really believed that they were fighting to free Haiti from the white man, and that under the great General Charlemagne the task would soon be accomplished. The corvée hap

pened to have been abolished soon after the "general's" escape from prison; he quickly took personal credit for the change and promised the simple Haitians to free them in the same manner of all foreign interference. Before the end of 1918 he attacked his native town with several thousand followers and was not easily repulsed. It was decided to put the marines in the field against him, and for eight months they pursued him in vain. If anything, the caco situation was becoming worse instead of better. Despite the "jumping" of many a band

and camp by the marines and the gendarmerie, the central portion of the country was becoming more and more bandit-ridden. It became apparent that the pacification of Haiti depended chiefly on the elimination of Charlemagne.

Herman H. Hanneken was a typical young American who had joined the Marine Corps soon after finishing at the preparatory school on the corner of Cass and Twelfth streets in his native town of St. Louis. After taking part in the Vera Cruz demonstration, he was sent to Haiti with the first forces of occupation, in August, 1915. There he reached the rank of sergeant, and in due time became in addition a captain in the Gendarmerie d'Haiti. It was in the latter rather than the former capacity that he took part in the little episode I am attempting to report, which was strictly an affair of the gendarmerie as distinguished from their brotherly rivals in arms, the marines.

In June, 1919, Captain Hanneken was appointed district commander, with headquarters in the old town of Grande Rivière, famous in Haitian military and political annals. A powerful fellow of more than six feet, who had reached the advanced age of twenty-five, he was ideal material for the making of a successful caco-hunter. Having recently returned from leave in the States, however, and his former stations having been in peaceful regions, he had little field experience in the extermination of bandits. Moreover, his extreme modesty and inability to blow his own horn had never called him particularly to the attention of the higher officials of the gendarmerie. No one expected him to do more than rule his station with the average high efficiency which is taken for granted in any of the hand-picked marines who are detailed as gendarme officers.

Captain Hanneken, however, had higher ambitions. Having familiarized himself in a month with the routine of his district, he found time weighing heavily on his hands. He turned his attention to the then most pressing duty in Haiti, the elimination of Charlemagne, Unfortunately for his plans, there were almost no cacos in the district of Grande Rivière. He could not encroach upon

the territory of his fellow-officers; the only chance of "getting a crack" at the bandits was to import some of them into his own region.

Jean Batiste Conzé, a native of Grande Rivière, was a griff, like Charlemagne; he also belonged to one of the "best families" of his home town. But there his similarity with the chief of the cacos ceased. He had always been a lawabiding citizen by Haitian standards, and had once been chief of police on his native heath. Like all good citizens of Haiti, he realized the damage and suffering which the continued depredations of the bandits were causing the country. Moreover, he was at a low financial ebb; but that is too general a condition in Haiti to call for special comment, beyond stating that a reward of two thousand dollars had been offered for Charlemagne, dead or alive.

One night Captain Hanneken asked Conzé to call upon him at his residence. When he was certain that the walls had been shorn of their ears, he addressed his visitor in the Haitian "creole," which he had learned to speak like a native:

"Conzé, I want you to go and join the cacos."

"'Aiti, capitaine!" cried Conzé. “Moi, toujou' bon habitant, de bonne famille, me faire caco?"

"Exactly," replied Hanneken; "I want you to become a caco chief. I will furnish you whatever is necessary to gather a good band of them about you, and you can take to the hills and establish a camp of your own.”

The conference lasted well into the night, whereupon Conzé consented, and left the captain's residence through the back garden in order to call as little attention as possible to his visit. A few days later, toward the middle of August, he disappeared from town, carrying with him in all secrecy fifteen rifles that had once been captured from the cacos, 150 rounds of ammunition, several swords, and a showy pearl-handled revolver that belonged to Hanneken. He was well furnished, too, with money and rum, the chief sinews of war among the cacos. With him had gone a personal friend and a trusted native gendarme who was forthwith rated a deserter on the captain's roster.