Commander of the Faithful

THE TRIBES HAD TO DECIDE who was stronger, who could best protect them from punishment by the other. Bugeaud’s “columns from hell” were in constant pursuit, yet the emir still could evade, elude, strike back when and where he wanted.

“We want to protect our allies, but the great distances make protection very difficult against an enemy that has better horses, is lighter and more mobile and can cover twenty leagues at night to fall upon their prey,” Saint-Arnaud wrote. “By the time we are warned something will happen, they have already come and gone; the harm is done and very difficult to mend. The victims want only one thing: security. ‘ Protect us. They took our wives, our children, our animals.’ The ghost of Abd el-Kader is always there, whispering, ‘I have your women, your children and your livestock; abandon the French, return to me and I will forgive and give back everything.’ Each side gets more fanatical and the war becomes a war of extermination.”

Saint-Arnaud was not quite right. Abd el-Kader continued to discriminate between deliberate treason and exhaustion. If a tribe had actively colluded and connived with the French, heads fell. The Koran was clear about the treatment of traitors to the faith. However, the emir was more lenient with tribes like the Beni Ouragh, which simply couldn’t bear the pain anymore. Their caid, Mohammed Ben Haj, had lost six of eight sons fighting for Abd el-Kader. “I served the emir with all my strength,” he told Bugeaud at the end of 1842, “but he can’t protect us any longer. If you are humane, I will serve you loyally until I die. The word of a Beni Ouragh is sacred.” Hardly had Mohammed Ben Haj submitted to France when Abd el-Kader returned to punish him for his weakness. Unlike those the emir considered traitors, the war-weary caid was merely arrested.

Abd el-Kader no longer had any fixed bases. Tagdempt, Saida, Boghar, Taza were all abandoned. The emir was again a pure Bedouin, a child of the wind. His crumbling federation had become a migratory city of goat and camel skins: the smala.

Necessity was its mother. The families of his loyal followers, refugees who had abandoned their douars to the French or been pillaged by them, prisoners, hostages of the tribes he had punished, tribal factions unwilling to submit to French sovereignty, merchants and artisans as well as deserters from the French army — they all needed a secure place to go. Abd el-Kader needed a center from which to govern. The emir’s troops sent to the smala their families and their livestock. Sixty, perhaps seventy thousand souls, inhabited this enormous tent city by the beginning of 1843, each in their douar, according to their tribe.

The smala was a place of internal exile. It was also an umbilical cord for keeping tribes attached to his cause — having the flesh and blood of their families under his guard dampened the temptation of troops in the field to defect. The shear massiveness of the smala with its schools, bazaars and workshops was also a reminder to tribes whose loyalty was wobbling of the emir’s continued power.

Abd el-Kader was rarely at the smala, yet he thought often about his responsibility, and when he did, he thought about moving the whole agglomeration to Mecca. What a spectacle it would be! Tens of thousands of Arabs, remnants of those who had conquered North Africa eight centuries earlier, returning to the cradle of their faith because they were unwilling to live under Christians. When he raised the idea, his chiefs and marabouts were not opposed.

But the time had not yet come. He had his divinely ordained duty to persevere in the struggle. The smell of defeat was in the air, yet Abd el-Kader had known adversity before and recovered. He would outlast the infidels. There was still money in the treasury to buy grain, money that was dispensed by the emir’s mother, Lalla Zohra and guarded by 400 regular infantry commanded by Mustafa Ben Thami. And the emir’s Jews were providing money to help the destitute.

Women and children, servants, old people, adventurers, deserters, renegades, prisoners, cadis, tolbas, marabouts, saddlers, farriers, tailors, musicians and artisans of all kinds mixed with groaning, bleating, neighing herds of goats, sheep, horses, camels and mules numbering in the tens of thousands. This sprawling mass of organized life had to be capable of folding up and moving quickly, then replanting itself in the identical order elsewhere. A hidden geometry provided order amid seeming chaos.

Four concentric circles formed the smala. In the first were the emir’s most important lieutenants and their families, among whom was his principal secretary, Sidi el-Haj Mohammed el-Kharroubi; his brother-in-law, the former caliph of Mascara, Ben Thami; his foreign minister, Miloud Ben Arrach and Bou Klika, ex-caid of the Zdama tribe. In the center of this first circle was the emir’s douar. It contained the tents of his mother, his three wives,20 four children, his money boxes and, most valuable of all, his intellectual treasure: the manuscripts covering law, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy and sacred writings he had painstakenly acquired over the years for the library that he had once imagined building in his capital of Tagdempt.

The second circle included the douars of Ben Allal, Ben Yahia, agha of the cavalry known to his opponents as “the Devil”, and his former consul of Oran, Haj el-Habib. The third ring was formed by the douars of the emir’s own Hachem tribe, charged with protecting the smala as a whole. The fourth circle was reserved for the rest, many of them douars belonging to nomadic tribes from the south and refugees of all stripes, including chiefs who had submitted to France and later changed their minds. Between the second and third circles were the camps of the regular infantry, the hostages and the military orderlies, or camp police.

“Complete order prevailed,” Abd el-Kader told his friend Daumas years later. “The cadis administered justice, exactly as in the towns. Markets were held. There was no stealing or immorality. When we set camp, the education of our children continued. Prayers were observed five times a day. Families carried their own provisions depending on their capabilities. The poorest had enough for at least two weeks, the wealthy for two or three months.”

Each of its three hundred and fifty plus douars was composed of fifteen to twenty tents arranged in still smaller circles, like beads on bracelets, along the circumferences of the four big circles, positioned according to the importance and trustworthiness of the inhabitants. The douars were autonomous. Each was responsible for its own property, livestock, provisions and family members, who, if separated in this sea of ordered chaos, could be lost for days.

Even Arabs allied with the French came to the smala to sell products in its markets. But this huge mass of humanity that covered hillsides and valleys also needed pasture and water. Wherever they camped, wells and springs dried up. Special police were needed to prevent water from being wasted or polluted by animals, yet with all these precautions, people died of thirst.

By the spring of 1843, the smala couldn’t leisurely remain in one place even when water was plentiful. The burial stones that marked the smala’s movements bore witness to the toll taken on the old and the sick, pregnant women and small children.

Bugeaud’s columns were moving farther south as he pushed new bases into the high plateaus from where he deployed his newly trained lighter, faster columns to track down the emir. He had created three large bases — at Tiaret in the Ouarensis, Boghar on the edge of the high plateaus and Miliana in the Chlef. From these outposts, his mobile columns radiated continuously, returning to recuperate as new columns were sent out to replace them at three-week intervals.

But where was the smala? Since February, the French had been obsessed with finding the emir’s mobile capital. They assumed it would be moving farther south, but in which direction? The distances were great and the water scarce. Information from the tribes, even their allies, was unreliable. However, many eyes followed the French army for the emir. Particularly useful were the marabouts from French allied tribes who had refused to submit for religious reasons and joined the smala. These men still maintained contacts with their former tribesmen and kept the emir informed of French movements.

Among the tribes whose loyalties were divided was Abd el-Kader’s own Hachem. Nevertheless, the emir’s personal magnetism and aura of saintly authority was still strong — strong enough that his mere presence could rally the sheiks and caids back to his cause. In April, after being pursued for weeks along the Moroccan border, Abd el-Kader returned unexpectedly to Lamoricière’s base of operations at Mascara. Crisscrossing the Plain of Ghriss, wavering Hachem tribesmen were shamed by his oratory into returning with him to his smala.

The smala moved from Goudjilah south toward Ain Taguin on the edge of the Djebel Amour. A report came to the emir that two French columns were setting out to destroy his roving capital — one led by Lamoricière and another by the king’s young twenty-one-year-old son, the Duke of Aumale. The general was coming from Tiaret, while the duke was heading south from Boghar with a force of 1500 infantry and 600 cavalry.

In the emir’s mind, Lamoricière was the more dangerous threat. Once he had delivered the repentant Hachem to his smala, the emir rode back to Tiaret with 250 men to keep an eye on the Frenchman’s movements from a well-hidden campsite. Bugeaud, however, had detached from Lamoricière’s division the experienced Colonel Yusuf to advise the duke.

Colonel Yusuf had become a legend in his own time. Born Guiseppi Vantini on Corsica in 1808, the same year as Abd el-Kader, Yusuf was one of the French army’s most remarkable soldiers. Like the emir, he was a learned scholar and outstanding cavalryman, although his career began not in a zawiya, but as a slave.

Captured at sea by Barbary pirates, he was sold to the bey of Tunis, who took a liking to the quick-witted young man. Vantini ended up serving in the bey’s Mameluke corps, converted to Islam, changed his name to Yusuf and became a respected scholar of Islamic law. Bold in love as well as war, Vantini had to flee Tunis when the bey learned of his romantic escapades with his own daughter. With the help of the French consul, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Yusuf escaped from the palace by stowing away on a French warship that took him to Sidi Ferruch in 1830, just as Bourmont was invading Africa. Yusuf ’s natural intelligence, resourcefulness and knowledge of French, Italian, Arabic and Turkish won him a career in the French army — first as an interpreter, later as a much-decorated cavalryman and commander of the spahis, where we find him in May of 1843 hunting down Abd el-Kader with the crown prince. Yusuf ’s famed boldness would augment the knowledge of Ameur Ben Ferhat, the agha of the Beni Ayads, auxilaries who were acting as local scouts to the French.

Bugeaud had a fatherly concern for the fourth and youngest son of King Louis-Philippe. The handsome blond was a neophyte with a peach-fuzz, spade mustache who had performed only two short tours of duty in the colony. He and the Duke of Orleans had been the king’s only sons to show an interest in the military life, but his older brother had died a year earlier in a carriage mishap. Eager to learn, yet also aggressive and insistent that he be treated no differently than other officers, the Duke of Aumale had gained enough respect to be given command of a column to hunt for the smala.

The inhabitants of Goudjilah agreed that the smala was moving toward the Djebel Amour. The prince divided his force: his cavalry and a battalion of fast marching Zouaves, unburdened of their gear, would march at a forced pace to catch the smala, while a second column of two infantry battalions would stay behind to protect the supply train.

After twenty-nine hours of marching, the prince was worried. His men were near exhaustion and needed to stop. Yet, the trail they were following was freshly tramped down. From the breadth and variety of the animal tracks, Yusuf knew they were following an immense migration of men and animals, not simply a band of cavalry.

“We must continue,” Colonel Yusuf objected. “We may never get another chance. The exhausted Negroes we found along the way all agreed the smala was headed for the Djebel Amour.”

“We have marched all night. Human beings have a limit. I have already pushed them about as far as they can go. The men and horses are dying of thirst. I don’t want a disaster,” the duke protested.

“Ben Ferhat says there is water nearby, at Ain Taguin. ”

“In that case, take us to Taguin, but send some guides back to the infantry to help them find our new course.”

In the early twilight, two cavalry squadrons scouted ahead, led by Yusuf. Suddenly, his scouts were galloping back, shouting, “the smala, the smala.” They had seen it, or part of it, on the other side of a rise.

The duke wanted to be sure his exhausted men’s bodies were not playing tricks with their imaginations. Two officers of the Arab Bureau went back with Ameur Ferhat and Yusuf to look. They returned to confirm the news, but the duke was still skeptical. He sent his personal aide to verify the presence of the smala with his own eyes. The aide returned to report that he saw only a “few wretched tents” pitched on the other side of the hill. He even doubted whether they were Arabs. Some of the tents were white and could belong to a French encampment.

“You didn’t look properly, or you can’t see,” Yusuf angrily interrupted. “I assure you, it is the smala. I will even go look once more myself.” Lieutenant Barail, who described the scene later, accompanied Yusuf. “They were setting up camp. Women, children, regular askars in their brown uniforms, muleteers, animals of every kind mingled together. We could hear in this immense mass the yelling of the women, the bleating of the sheep...There were a few white tents for the wives of the emir. The place was like a beehive. Everyone was working at something. Thousands of camels and mules waiting to be unloaded, while those that had been relieved of their burdens were drinking dry the small sinews of water flowing through this chaos…”

Yusuf estimated some 18,000 people camped on the other side. Perhaps 3000 were armed. More were coming.

Faced with Yusuf’s certainty, the prince gathered his officers. If they waited for the Zouaves still two hours away, they would likely be discovered. Surprise was their only chance. If they retreated, they would be without water and the men were already near the end of their endurance.

“We can’t retreat. It is too late,” Yusuf insisted.

“My ancestors never retreated, and I will not be the first,” the duke retorted. “We will attack now.”

May 19, 1843. Still with his eyes on Lamoricière, Abd el-Kader was inside his tent when the flap was opened to a grim-faced messenger. He came forward silently and fell on his knees to grasp the emir’s outstretched hands.

“They have attacked your smala,” the man finally blurted out. “The king’s son has taken your douar.”

The emir was speechless for a moment, then recovered enough to issue orders summoning his regular cavalry. He then withdrew to his private corner at the back of the tent. An hour later, he reemerged to speak to his anxious men.

“Praise be to God!” he said quietly. “All those things which I prized so much and were dear to me only impeded my movements and distracted me. Now I shall be able to fight the infidel free and unencumbered.” Seeing some of his men with tears in their eyes, the emir added: “Why should we mourn? Are not the ones we have lost in paradise?”

Abd el-Kader rode south to rescue those who had fled during the attack on the smala three days earlier, news of which had been delayed by the difficulty the messenger had finding his camp. Following the tracks of the French who had already returned to Tiaret with their booty, the emir saw thousands of pages from his precious manuscripts fluttering about the barren, flinty landscape like wounded butterflies. From refugees, the emir learned that his family had escaped capture thanks to the heroic efforts of Ben Fakha. They were somewhere in the Djebel Amour. At Taguin, he found the remnants of his library. Heaps of ashes. The French had burned everything they couldn’t take away.

The emir stared disbelievingly. The destruction of his books was a sacreligous act. What is more valuable than knowledge? How could this be the act of a higher civilization, as the franci claimed to be? The pain of his loss was offset, in part, by the discovery of his family. His mother, wives and children were safe among other refugees from whom he learned details of what had happened.

In the early morning light, people in the smala had mistaken the spahis galloping over the dunes in their red burnooses for Abd el-Kader’s returning regulars. The women shouted out their shrill yous yous of joy that became screams of terror when the first shots were fired. In the chaos and hysteria, there was no organized defense. Panicked animals got snarled in tent ropes, pulling tents down on whole families trying to escape. Several hundred Hachem sacrificed themselves defending the emir’s douar, allowing his family to escape on mules with Ben Fakha amid the madness.

Within two hours, the French had seized the emir’s tent given him by Desmichels, his standards and even his richly embroidered caftan that the Moroccan sultan had sent him to ratify his authority as commander of the faithful. Gone too was his treasury worth millions of francs. The French rounded up 3000 prisoners and tens of thousands of sheep and other livestock.

An officer wrote afterward: “To do as the prince did, to attack such a huge mass of people with only five hundred men, one must be twenty-one years old, not know what danger is, or have the devil in him. The women alone could have defeated us if each had simply drawn a tent cord across the path of our horses as they charged through the camp and then knocked us on the head with their slippers.”

“When we saw the small numbers of the victors, our faces were red with shame. If every man in the smala had fought, even with a stick, they would have been beaten. But the decree of God had been fulfilled,” a refugee declared.

Another decree had also been fulfilled, but it gave the emir no consolation. A few days later, some members of the Flitta tribe brought a gift for the emir. They knelt before him and unwrapped an object covered in a red cloth.

Abd el-Kader looked at it in horror, then closed his eyes. In front of him was the familiar white-haired, hawk-nosed face of Mustafa Ben Ismail, as well as his scarred right hand. But Abd el-Kader didn’t see a haughty, devious enemy, but a fearless warrior who had respected his father and saved Muhi al-Din’s life from Bey Hussan’s paranoia. “Why didn’t you listen to the voice of God and our holy Prophet? Why didn’t you fight with me to serve a just cause?” the emir murmured.

As the grisly remains of the seventy-eight-year-old makhzen were respectfully buried, Abd el-Kader declared: “With the death of Mustafa Ben Ismail a great fighting spirit has departed, but also a terrifying spirit of personal hatred.”

Arrogance, lust and greed had each played its part in the death of this remarkable septuagarian. When Lamoricière had received the news of the prince’s great coup at Taguin, he headed southeast to intercept remnants of the Hachem fleeing west. Riding with him was Ben Ismail and several hundred of his Douairs and Smelas happy to have been given the job of killing and plundering the remaining members of the Hachem loyal to the emir.

The Hachem were hated not only because they were the emir’s tribal family, but because they were effete marabouts who needed to be taught a lesson once and for all — men of the book were not true fighters. Ben Ismail’s cavalry headed back to Tiaret loaded with the wages of war. Their booty was so immense, he asked Lamoricière for permission to continue on to Oran, where his men could divide up the hundreds of camels and sheep, personal belongings and provisions they had captured from the demoralized Hachem.

Lamoricière advised the old makhzen to go north through the Mina Valley, a longer but safer route. The more direct path to Oran would take him through Flitta territory. Though they had formally submitted, the Flittas were known to be still sympathetic to the emir, whose very presence could unravel French alliances with the tribes. Lamoricière offered Ben Ismail a battalion of infantry as an escort, but the proud warrior would have none of it. He had other things on his mind.

Ben Ismail was obsessed. A young girl was waiting for him in Oran, a new flower to be added to an already rich bouquet of concubines. Infantry would only slow his return. Nor did the Flittas worry him. He had 600 battle-hardened horsemen with him, though now their swift horses were sagging under the weight of plunder.

The returning Douairs and Smelas were attacked in Flitta territory, just as Lamoricière had feared. Ben Ismail was shot in the chest as he rode back to help his men in the rear. His men were not so brave. When they saw that their leader had fallen, they panicked and abandoned their chief ’s body in favor of saving their plunder. So ashamed were they afterward by their cowardice, that the survivors did not approach their wives for forty days. The truth of an old Arab proverb had been demonstrated: “Fear enters the heart of a lion through the door of greed.”

The French had to buy the remains of their makhzen from the Flittas. Ben Ismail’s mutilated corpse was buried in Oran with full honors due an ally who had already been awarded the Legion of Honor, been made a brigadier general of native spahis and again, in 1842, made a commander of the Legion of Honor. Few Muslims came to his funeral, however. Ben Ismail’s nephew forbade his tribesmen to be present. They didn’t deserve the honor.

“So ended the life of this man whose base jealousy of Abd el-Kader threw him into our ranks,” wrote Pellissier de Reynaud. “He showed astonishing bravery in battle, but his character was hard and greedy.” Pellissier knew something about Ben Ismail. He had succeeded Lamoricière as head of the Arab Bureau.

Six months later, the emir suffered another blow. Abd el-Kader had regrouped along the Moroccan frontier after the capture of his smala and left Mohammed Ben Allal in command of the remnants of his regular army. In November, the emir learned that Ben Allal’s head had been on display throughout much of Oran and Tittery.

His caliph of Miliana had lost his whole family on May 16. He too had been absent when his mother, his wives, children and brothers were taken prisoner; yet, their capture had only made him more determined to fight. The chief of the Arab Bureau, and thirty native troops composed of guides, translators and informers tracked him down west of Tlemcen, near the Rio Salado, where he and the last of his men died fighting. The French ordered their native troops to deliver the famous caliph’s head to General Lamoricière. This was a great victory for France.

Ben Allal’s aggressive tactics, influence among the tribes in central Algeria and fierce loyalty to the emir’s cause had won the admiration of French officers. Only a year earlier, Bugeaud had tried to pry him away from the emir with massives bribes: a down payment of 500,000 francs, restitution of his family’s ancestral lands and annuity of 50,000 francs in return for submitting to French authority. His contemptuous response was recorded in Gen. Changarnier’s Memoirs:

“From Djebel Dakhla to the River Fodda, I command, I fight, I forgive. In exchange for this power that I exercise for the glory of God and the service of my sultan, Abd el-Kader, what do you propose? My lands, which my guns will get back in the same way they were taken, money, and the title of traitor.”

When rumors and disinformation are the currency of the realm, indisputable facts become gold doubloons. Lamoricière had Ben Allal’s head salted, sacked and taken to Algiers. The famous one-eyed head was shown along the route to the locals as irrefutable proof that the emir’s much-feared lieutenant really was dead. The grisly displays contained a simple message: further resistance was futile. Miliana, once the seat of his caliphate, was honored with a three-day exhibition of Ben Allal’s remains. Bugeaud then ordered that the twenty-seven-year-old warrior be given a burial worthy of a respected senior officer.

To Bugeaud, it seemed now the war was virtually over. At a banquet in Algiers at the end of November, the general congratulated himself.

“After the spring campaign, I might have proclaimed that Algeria was conquered and subdued. I preferred to state less than the truth. Today, after the splendid victory of November 11, when the remnants of the emir’s infantry were annihilated and his first and most distinguished caliph killed, I will boldly declare that all serious fighting is over. With a handful of cavalry that remains to him, he might execute a coup de main against former tribes who have submitted to us, but he can do nothing on a large scale. He has lost all power of raising taxes and recruiting men. The country is organized by us and for us. Everywhere taxes are paid to France and our orders obeyed.”

There was an ominous calm as the year 1843 drew to its close.

When despair seeped into his camp, the emir often spread false rumors: France was at war with England and was going to withdraw most of its troops; Bugeaud had been dismissed; Paris was seeking peace once again.

Like all good rumors, these had a kernal of truth attached to them. Criticism of Bugeaud was real. The liberal press in France despised him. Impatience with Bugeaud’s inability to capture the emir was growing in Paris. The British popular press was very anti-French and its government was concerned about French designs on Morocco. Tribal loyalty to France had been weakened by the “Tafna effect,” or fear that the French would leave them in the lurch. Word had to be put out that there would be no more negotiations with the emir. France wasn’t leaving Algeria.