then how did the French lose "more than 50,000 soldiers, including 18 generals" from an expeditionary force that numbered "20,000 men under the command of his {Napoleon's} brother-in-law?"

...Never mind, that's my bad idea of History Geek humor. (I had a reply downthread, somewhere in the 40's.) In all those Very Important Discussions about History, someone's always putting the numbers into one contentious dispute or another...

Really, I just wanted to reply to say thanks for taking the time to cut and paste the history. I never knew the story about the Poles who stayed to fight with the locals. There were maybe a couple of hundred, total (I just looked it up) -- again, numbers, who knows? -- but the story's been passed down by appreciative Haitians, for centuries now, and ethnographers and anthropologists have been kept busy looking for blue-eyed, flaxen-haired Jamaicans.

Which is kind of like finding out that that fictional, "Lieutenant Dunbar" character, in that movie with Kevin Costner and all those nice Native American folks, had a real-life historical antecedant. Or maybe 100, 150, or 200 of them.

If they made a movie of that story, it'd be called, "CHAR-dosh with Maroons." Or some kind of play on words trading off "polka" and "different drumbeat" references. Or something like that.