The Haitian army is disarmed and paid off with ten gourde notes

Captain Beach went ashore with orders from Caperton to lodge in the legation, give whatever orders he judged necessary, haul down no Haitian flag under any circumstances, find where the government money was kept and protect it, and locate every weapon in the city. He met the Comite Revolutionnaire each morning and noticed that it answered some questions and slid past others, particularly about funds and about the soldiers. On 4 August 1915, while Beach kept the Comite talking through a long meeting, marines went to the barracks and the arsenal, disarmed everyone they found, loaded some 3,000 rifles and four million rounds of ammunition into mule wagons, walked the soldiers out of town and handed each man a ten gourde note. These were men recruited with rope and club. They tore off the red tape that marked their clothes as a uniform, and when they understood that they were being paid, the noise was enormous. The Comite was on its feet protesting, and its power was gone.

The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 28 June 1919. John Maynard Keynes named three fatal defects in it that same year. It transferred German coal, iron and steel properties to France and barred German industry from using them, which struck at the organisation of production itself. It stripped Germany of colonies, foreign investments and merchant shipping and limited her control of her own waterways and tariffs. Then it charged this weakened country some thirty three billion dollars in reparations. Article 231 required the Germans to accept sole responsibility for the war. Prince Fumimaro Konoye of Japan, then twenty seven, published an article urging his countrymen to reject a peace built around Britain and the United States which refused to write racial equality into the settlement. Two decades later Konoye was premier and signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

During the first United States occupation of Haiti, which ran from 1915 to 1934, opposition in the countryside was often led by Vodou priests and priestesses. Bellegarde-Smith puts the number of Haitians who died fighting the invading army at perhaps fifty thousand, and describes the religion as the popular vehicle of a wider culture of refusal. He reads the missionary side of the occupation as policy. Detaching Haitians from Roman Catholicism and from the French hold on the Haitian elite was expected to turn enemies into friends, and the written record of the period carries the argument openly. Washington had tried the same approach in Puerto Rico after 1898, where replacing Spanish and Catholicism with English and Protestantism was supposed to pacify the island. The French bishops who ran the Haitian church were nervous accordingly. Decades later Francois Duvalier replaced every French bishop with a Haitian of his own choosing and brought American fundamentalist Protestants in against Rome.

Three Marine companies climbed to the crest through the night of 17 November 1915 and attacked on Butler's whistle. Under the walls the twenty four men of the storming party found the entrance bricked over. The only way in was a masonry drain four feet high and fifteen feet long with a Caco sentry firing down it. Three men, Butler among them, crawled through and came out unhurt into about seventy defenders. They fought at the drain mouth long enough for the rest of the party to get inside. The Cacos had machetes, sticks and stones. Their leader, known as General Josephette, was killed in his usual black frock coat, top hat and brass watch chain. Fifty of his men lay dead within a quarter of an hour, and the northern Caco movement died with them. A ton of dynamite brought the fort down afterwards. Pierre-Paul, one of the fiercest Haitian critics of the Americans, later wrote that the Cacos had made an industry of insurrection, raising and wrecking one government after another, and that the wreckage gave the invaders of 1915 their pretext.