“Damme, but I do despise the bloody French!”

“Understandably, sir,” the First Lieutenant softly agreed.

“Their bloody general, Rochambeau,” Captain Alan Lewrie, RN, further gravelled, “he’d surrender t’that murderous General Dessalines and his Black rebel army, but he’s too damned proud t’strike to us?”

“Well, Dessalines did give them ten days’ truce to make an orderly exit, sir,” Lt. Westcott pointed out. “Else, it would have been a massacre. Another, really.”

“If they don’t come out and surrender to us, soon, it’ll be all ‘Frogs Legs Flambe,’ and Dessalines’ truce be-damned,” Captain Lewrie said with a mirthless laugh as he extended his telescope to its full length for another peek into the harbour of Cap Francois… and at the ships anchored inside, on which the French now huddled, driven from the last fingernail grasp of their West Indies colony.

Evidently, the Black victors of the long, savage insurrection were getting anxious over when the French would depart, too, for those solid stone forts which had guarded the port from sea assault showed thin skeins of smoke, rising not from cook-fires but from forges where iron shot could be heated red-hot, amber-hot, to set afire those ships and all the beaten French survivors aboard them-soldiers, civilians, sailors, women, and children. Root and branch, damn their eyes, Lewrie thought; burn ’em all, root and branch!

He lowered his glass and grimaced as he turned to face his First Officer, Lt. Geoffrey Westcott. “Is it askin’ too much, d’ye imagine, sir, that the Frogs could face facts? Which is the greater failure or shame… admittin’ the rebel slaves beat ’em like a rug, and surrenderin’ t’them… or strikin’ to a civilised foe, like us? They’ve done the first, so… what matters the second?”