When they lacked weapons, as they often did, the insurgents used startling “ruse and ingenuity.” “They camouflaged traps, fabricated poisoned arrows, feigned cease-fires to lure the enemy into ambush, disguised treetrunks as cannons, and threw obstructions of one kind or another into the roads to hamper advancing troops.” Some insurgents advancing on Le Cap stood firmly up to three volleys of shot, each of them “wearing a kind of light mattress stuffed with cotton as a vest to prevent the bullets from penetrating.”

Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ …, loc. 161