Leclerc, through illness or bitterness, never wrote this news to his brother-in-law or to the Minister. He sent to beg Christophe to come back, promising him honours and riches. Christophe replied that he was rich and honoured enough in possessing liberty himself and in securing the liberty of his colour. On the night of November 2nd Leclerc died. But before he died he knew that he had failed, and that San Domingo was lost to France. Of 34,000 French soldiers who had landed, 24,000 were dead, 8,000 were in hospital, and 2,000 exhausted men remained. Thousands of brave black soldiers were dead for no other crime than that of refusing to be slaves once more. The colony was devastated, and blacks and whites were murdering each other with a growing ferocity, in what was called a race war, but whose origin was not in their different colours but in the greed of the French bourgeoisie. Leclerc knew that, whatever reinforcements were sent, all was over. Before he died he confessed his grief over an enterprise undertaken on men and by men worthy of a better fate, on account of the services they had rendered and still would have been able to render to France. We owe him no thanks for the admission. It did not in any way mitigate the blood that would yet be shed and the suffering still to be borne before the people of San Domingo freed themselves from this abomination of murder, greed, cruelty, sadism, inhumanity, let loose upon them by Napoleon and his government, in the name of a superior civilization.