The Savannah Siege

It was Father who suggested that I join the regiment to go fight with the other French troops on the side of the American’s against the British. It was for my own good though, so I didn’t complain. Father has always been kind to me. I guess I should explain a little bit more though, so I will.

Father is one of the grand blanc plantation owners in Haiti where I was born. I was his son with a slave but he gave me everything that a son of a plantation owner should have. I got an education, though I wasn’t sent to France like some, you can probably tell that by the way I write. As I got older my freedom became the most pressing matter though. My Father would have freed me a long time ago except there was a problem, the large tax that is put on freeing slaves in Haiti. That’s why he told me to join a regiment going into foreign service. A slave can be freed without the tax if the slave has served in the army, so I joined the army and was freed.

My training was uneventful; there are a lot of us in Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue. It isn’t the start of my army life that I am going to write about, what I want to write about is what happened after, my first battle I mean. I am too young to be a proper soldier yet; I was made a drummer boy. I don’t always like this life after my comfortable life with Father but the promise of freedom at the end will get me through a lot.

I was with a part of the regiment that was sent to Savannah, the British had a place there that we were supposed to attack. There were five hundred of us or so, I mean people from Haiti. We tend to stick together, the other soldiers like it better that way, and so did we. The camp in Savannah was like no where else I have ever been. No one seemed to speak the same language though at least we didn’t have to deal with that so much. The main language in the camp was English, that’s what the commanders of our force spoke, but it was fine because the people we were with still spoke French. Around us though there were even Polish soldiers, it was a very strange camp for what for me was going to be a very strange experience.

None of us in the Fontages Legion had a lot of experience; we were a pretty new regiment so we knew they weren’t going to count on us a lot. They were going to give the big parts to the soldiers who knew what they were doing. I remember the men sitting around talking about it, I didn’t talk a lot because I was so much younger then most of them.

The battle didn’t start right off; I had never known that war took so long to get sorted out. Like I said, I got an education and in the history books they never mention the waiting around. I was about as far as anyone could get from knowing what was actually in the minds of our commanders, but I could listen to people talking about it. I heard that first we were waiting to give the British a chance to surrender, and from what the men said, a chance to fortify themselves better, the men weren’t happy about that. The British even got reinforcements through our line; the men really didn’t like that. They felt something should have been done when we had had the chance. Then our ships moved into position and started firing on the city but we still weren’t told to move.

The ships weren’t as useful as we had thought. It was great to see them firing on the city. I couldn’t help but think that if I was under that treatment I would be more eager to surrender, but the British didn’t show any sign of it. It was even worse one night because some of the gunners on the ships got drunk, or so I was told, and started firing into our lines. No one I knew got hurt, but people weren’t really pleased about it.

To be continued...