Sixty percent forest in 1920 and under two percent by 2000

In 1920 something near sixty percent of Haiti's territory carried forest. When Columbus arrived in 1492 the island was wooded throughout and held more than six thousand species of plant. Through the twentieth century the population grew and the trees were cut for charcoal, the only cooking fuel most families could afford. By 1980 under twenty-five percent of the country was forested. By the twenty-first century the figure was below two percent. What follows from that is soil running off the slopes into the sea, falling yields on the land that remains, hurricanes and heavy rain doing more damage than they would otherwise do, mudslides that have killed hundreds at a time, and silt cutting the output of the Peligre dam. After 1990 projects paid for by USAID planted more than sixty million trees, and most were cut for charcoal. The cycle runs until somebody supplies another fuel, and no Haitian government has had the money or the standing to do it. Fly from Port-au-Prince to Santo Domingo and look down. The Haitian side of the border is brown. The Dominican side is green.

Amir Faysal, driven out of Syria by the French in the summer of 1920, was proclaimed king of Iraq on 23 August 1921. General Gouraud had already proclaimed the state of Greater Lebanon with Beirut as its capital on 1 September 1920, and on 24 July 1922 the League of Nations Council gave its approval to the mandates covering Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine together with Transjordan. In the British sphere Egypt was the first to be granted formal independence, by a declaration of 21 February 1922 that ended the protectorate while reserving a list of British rights, and a constitution of 19 April 1923 made it a hereditary monarchy under King Fuad. Zeine treats the years from 1918 to 1920 as the decisive ones. Arab nationalism took its modern shape in them, living on resentment of Anglo French domination and on opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine.

In November 1919 American forces reached Charlemagne Péralte in his camp and killed him during a raid. Nicholls records that he was betrayed by a member of his own family. His body was then tied to a door and displayed publicly in the town square to discourage anyone from carrying on the fight. The occupation had spent more than a year unable to find him in country that was almost entirely on his side, and took him in the end through information supplied by someone close to him. That is worth saying plainly, because the display of the body was meant to communicate something else, that American arms had beaten Haitian resistance in a fair contest. What ended the rebellion in the North was money and access, applied to the network of kinship and obligation that had kept Péralte alive for fourteen months. The display then handed his movement the one thing his living command had lacked, which was an image every Haitian would recognise on sight.

Colonel Wise told Major Meade in the North to get Péralte, and the job went to Gendarmerie Captain Herman Hanneken, a marine sergeant commanding at Grande Rivière. Finding one man in a country that was on his side, guarded by people who moved him every night through mountains nobody had mapped accurately, was the assignment. In August 1919 Jean-Baptiste Conzé, a former Caco general living at Grande Rivière, left town after letting everyone know he had finished with the blan. A Gendarmerie deserter, Private Jean-Edmond François, went with him. Conzé occupied Fort Capois with rum, rations and money, and Cacos joined him. The money came out of Hanneken's own pocket, and every week François or Conzé slipped back into town to report. Péralte was suspicious, which was why he was still alive. Hanneken then led an attack on Fort Capois that failed as conspicuously as he could arrange, and went about afterwards with his arm bandaged and stained with issue red ink. Péralte sent Conzé congratulations and a commission as général de division. On 26 October he brought twelve hundred men to Fort Capois.