Early one morning the camp of the blacks was surprised by one of the columns, which had surmounted all the difficulties in its way. Notwithstanding the previous experience, the French thought this time to enter, and advanced precipitately. Many blacks entered the redoubt, the rest jumped into the ditch, and the same terrible fire vomited forth. Another column advanced to support the attack; but the first one was already crushed and in full retreat. The blacks swarmed to the parapets, threw planks across the ditch, and attacked both columns with drums beating the charge. The French turned, and met just resistance enough to bring them again within range, the same fire broke forth, and the columns gave way, with a loss to the first of four hundred and eighty men, and two or three hundred to the latter. Upon this retreat, the cultivators of the neighborhood exchanged shots with the flanking parties, and displayed great boldness. It was plain to the French that this open redoubt would have to be invested; but before this was done, Dessalines had left the place with all the troops which could not be fed there, and cut his way across a column with the loss of a hundred men. The defence was committed to a quarteroon named Lamartinière. While the French were completing the investment, the morning music of the black band floated the old strains of the Marseillaise within their lines. La Croix declares that it produced a painful sensation. The soldiers looked at each other, and recalled the great marches which carried victory to that music against the tyrants of Europe. "What!" they said, "are our barbarous enemies in the right? Are we no longer the soldiers of the Republic? Have we become the servile instruments of _la politique_?" No doubt of that; these children of the Marseillaise and adorers of Moreau had become _de trop_ in the Old World, and had been sent to leave their bones in the defiles of _Pensez-y-bien_.[33] The investment of Crête-à-Pierrot was regularly made, by Bacheiu, an engineer who had distinguished himself in Egypt. Batteries were established before the head of each division, a single mortar was got into position, and a battery of seven pieces played upon the little redoubt above. This is getting to be vastly more troublesome than the fort of Bard, which held in check these very officers and men upon their road to Marengo. Rochambeau thought he had extinguished the fire of the little redoubt, and would fain storm it. The blacks had protected it by an abatis ten feet deep and three in height, in which our gallant ally of the Revolution entangled himself, and was held there till he had lost three hundred men, and gained nothing. "Thus the Crête-à-Pierrot, in which (and in the small redoubt) there were hardly twelve hundred men,[34] had already cost us more than fifteen hundred in sheer loss. So we fell back upon the method which we should have tried in the beginning, a vigorous blockade and a sustained cannonade."