Commander of the Faithful

“WHY DON’T YOU WRITE? The sight of your seal alone will revive our hopes.” Ben Salem’s couriers had ridden for weeks to deliver his desperate plea to the emir, who had taken asylum in Morocco with his much shrunken smala. “The French are saying you are dead and that your mother writes in your name…They are threatening to march on me and I don’t know what to tell my Kabyles…Please respond in your own hand.”

“I received your letter telling me of the news of my death,” Abd el-Kader replied to his loyal caliph in the east. “…My time has not yet come and I will never regret serving a cause for which you have given everything…Be patient in adversity,” Abd el-Kader counseled, “for patience is the mark of superior spirits. Encourage your subordinates — help them, tolerate their errors of judgment. Be charitable in your assessment of their capabilities ...I hope to be with you soon so we can come to an agreement about the best path to follow. In the meantime, please accept this horse. It is a gift I received from Sultan Moulay Abderrahman. Maybe it will bring you good fortune...”

The Moroccan sultan’s position as leader of the faithful required at least a pro forma support for the emir, though Moulay Abderrahman also saw him as a dangerous rival for his people’s affections. Abd el-Kader also had politics on his mind — international politics was his last hope. If he could draw the French into Moroccan territory, he might provoke an intervention by Great Britain, whose foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, was known to be watchful of France’s actions in the Mediterranean.

Abd el-Kader succeeded all too well at getting Bugeaud to violate Moroccan sovereignty. When the Sultan didn’t respond to Bugeaud’s ultimatums to hand over the emir, Papa Bugeaud occupied Oujda with 6,500 men, dismissing fears of the diplomatic fallout expressed by some of his more cautious officers. He would teach Abderrahman a lesson. “They may have 100,000 men, but it is a mob. We have an army,” Bugeaud bluffly told his vastly outnumbered troops the night before the engagement. The general’s instincts were right. Following his crushing victory at Oued Isly in September of 1844, no British intervention occurred.

Bugeaud’s rout of the Sultan’s army at Isly made him the man of the hour in Paris. For a short while, the general the French press called “the ogre” and “the monster,” was undeniably a hero. King Louis-Philippe honored his victory by conferring upon the general the title Duke of Isly, and Marshal of France. Not since Napoleon had a French general been so celebrated.

An admiring Saint-Arnaud was pleased that his chief had been finally recognized properly: “The Marshal is quite indescribable,” he noted in his journal. “He is interested in everything and talks about everything in a lively, cleverly sensible way. Yet, he is quite illiterate, not able to translate a word of Latin, but capable of everything, and carved out of a block of granite.”

The Treaty of Tangier imposed by France was not vindictive and reassured a skeptical Lord Palmerston that France’s aims were not territorial. France wanted only to end its “war without end” in Algeria by forcing the Sultan to deny Abd el-Kader asylum. The Sultan agreed to declare the emir an outlaw and to prevent him from getting aid — conditions difficult to enforce when frontiers were vague and tribes independent-minded.

In January 1845, the “block of granite” defended his Algerian strategy before the Chamber of Deputies. The framework of Abd el-Kader’s federation, Bugeaud explained, had been dismantled piece by piece. One by one the tribes that had been loyal to the emir had submitted to France. The emir had been forced to hide in Morocco where he was now persona non grata.

“This does not mean he will not come back. However, he will no longer be dangerous though he will make mischief. That is why we must remain strong and on our guard… We are in a position to make the Arabs repent of any insurrection, but they must be made to feel the use of force as little as possible. It is by means of a government that is strong, paternal and just that we can obtain the submission of the Arabs. Not absolute submission; there will be occasional uprisings, but they will be rare.”

Every Arab, he went on, was a fighting man. Warfare between tribes was the normal state of affairs. From childhood, they were taught to ride and use weapons. Stealing from one’s enemies was a form of virtue as it accustomed them to danger. Though civil colonization might work in the towns, military colonization was essential in the interior. “Our colonists must never let their muskets rust, and be always ready to grab them. They must be disciplined, for discipline alone can give strength to the few. I strongly insist on this idea of military colonization…it seems to me fundamental.”

But Bugeaud would not conceal his admiration for the emir, in particular his method of organizing the country. “He is a genius,” said the Marshal, “and we did not think we could in any way improve upon his system of administration. We have changed the men but left the system untouched.”

Bugeaud forgot to mention some important differences. Under Abd el-Kader, taxes, even when paid under duress, were for the benefit of a common cause. And Abd el-Kader was known to take nothing for himself or his family. Under the French, tax money went overwhelmingly to benefit the conquerors. Further, their supercilious attitude and contemptuous display of superiority infuriated the Arabs.

Bugeaud was more foresighted than he may have imagined. Not only was Abd el-Kader capable of causing “mischief,” so were others. In September 1845, Bugeaud had returned to France to do some politicking in the Dordogne, to promote his ideas for military colonization and explain to Paris why 80,000 troops still could not capture the emir. A month later, the “mischief-makers” had forced the Marshal to rush back from France to put out brush fires that threatened to become a conflagration. He was given another 26,000 troops to stamp out the flames, bringing the total to 106,000 men, one-third of the French army.

What had happened during the nine months since his January speech? At first, the phenomenon was not taken seriously. In the Dahra, a mountainous region honeycombed with caves between the Chlef River and the Mediterranean, lived a young man who went by the name Mohammed Ben Abdallah. He shared his rare meals with his pet goat and, it was said, received prophetic inspiration from it. He was also young, handsome, pious, wore ragged clothes typical of a holy man and lived with a wealthy elderly widow who had been seduced by his saintly aura.

The twenty-year-old spoke of Abd el-Kader dismissively. A Muslim legend foretold that a man named Mohammed Ben Abdallah would come from God in the hour of need and drive Christians into the sea. One evening at dinner, Ben Abdallah suddenly announced to the widow that he was the one foretold by the prophecies, the Destined One who would appear at the hour of deliverance. He promised she would hear more of him.

Before long, Mohammed Ben Abdallah was being hailed as Bou Maza, Father of the Goat. His claim to have been called by God to exterminate the French and to create a new monarchy based on Islam had aroused followers. Many of the Arabs who had half-heartedly submitted to the French joined his movement after Bou Maza executed two pro-French caids.

In the summer and autumn of 1845, the French were facing a Bou Maza hydra. Dozens of imitators were cropping up in the Chlef Valley, calling themselves Mohammed Ben Abdallah. Many also adopted the name Bou Maza, causing enormous confusion before they were caught. Another Mohammed Ben Abdallah rose up in Tittery where he also decapitated two “French” caids and unleashed new rebellions around Algiers. A force of 3000 men was needed to hunt him down. There was Mohammed Ben Abdallah of the Beni Menacer, but he was quickly abandoned by his own tribe as an ineffectual imposter and handed over to the French. Another Mohammed Ben Abdallah El-Fadel claimed he was the resurrected Jesus. He invited his followers to go unarmed into battle, assuring them he would strike down the enemy by supernatural means. To General Cavaignac, El-Fadel wrote, “Cease to do injustice and wrong. God loves it not…I am the likeness of him who issued from the breath of God. I am the likeness of our Lord Jesus. I am Jesus restored to life, as all know who believe in God and His Prophet…”

Then there was Bou Maza of the Beni Zaqzooq who claimed to be the brother of the original Bou Maza. An officer of the Arab Bureau remembered parts of the interrogation following his capture.

“What do you accuse the French of? Theft, exaction, injustice? Don’t be afraid to speak the truth.”

“None of that. The Arabs hate you because you are foreigners, you are not of their faith, and now you come to take their country. Tomorrow you will want their virgins.”

“Despite what you say, a great many Arabs like us and are loyal to our cause.”

“I will be frank with you. Every day you will meet Arabs who say they love you and are your faithful servants. Do not believe them; they lie to you out of fear or self-interest. But whenever a leader arises who they think can conquer you, they will follow him.”

“How can Arabs hope to conquer us when they are led by chiefs who have no army, no cannon, and no money?”

“Victory comes from God. When He chooses, He makes the weak to triumph and casts down the strong.”

The dream of every French officer was to be the one who captured Abd el-Kader. In September 1845, when Bugeaud had left for Paris to promote his ideas of military colonization, the champion of all mischief-makers profited from the difficulties Bou Maza was creating in the Chlef valley. Abd el-Kader, with 6000 horsemen, reentered Algerian territory to unite the brushfires burning in the Dahra region. In the emir’s path was a small garrison at the port of Djemaa Ghazaouet, a sliver of sand surrounded by cliffs. This boring supply depot for troops in the Tlemcen area, renamed Nemours, had an overly energetic and ambitious commander.

Lieutenant Colonel Montagnac was born to fight. He first made a name for himself in 1832, when he refused a Legion of Honor cross from King Louis-Philippe for his display of bravery while crushing bloody street riots in Paris. His principles, he explained, would not allow him to take a medal for killing Frenchmen. In Algeria, under the command of Lamoricière, he had found happiness and scope for his ambition. “My blood is up, I have a well tempered body, two horses and a love of warfare — that is all I need to gallop boldly into the future,” he wrote his brother.

Since coming to Africa in 1837, Montagnac had impressed his superiors with his intelligence, hard work and desire to understand the native cultures. He advocated using the Arab system of justice, not sentimental French mores. He had only contempt for General Cavaignac who had put him in the brig for four days, merely because he had summarily executed a Kabyle who had assassinated a fellow officer, and following Arab custom, planted the culprit’s head on a stake as a message to others. “If they know you will use the saber when needed, they become as supple as gloves on your hand. Strike them justly, and they never complain, but hit them hard and promptly.”

His thin, powerful physique was always in training to hit hard. Few officers were his equal in fencing, horsemanship and shooting. He had a remarkable talent for drawing and painting as well. “He could have earned his living with his paint brush,” his commanding officer noted, adding: “He was adored and feared by his subordinates, always solicitous of his men but known also for dispensing severe discipline and being unforgiving when his code of honor was violated — the art of war was a cult for him.”

Which was why he was bored that September. Montagnac had been ordered not to leave Djemaa Ghazaouet. “I love this austere life,” he wrote his uncle. “I eat twice a day. Three eggs and coffee is my breakfast. In the evening I have rice or potatoes, a glass of water and a cup of coffee. That is my diet and I feel healthy and vigorous.” Montagnac was overflowing with energy, but inactivity was killing him. “I feel like a bullock pulling a plow. My plodding life is putting me to sleep.”

Montagnac learned that Abd el-Kader was in the area, possibly trying to link up with Bou Maza in the Chlef Valley. Tribes recently submitted to the French were in danger of being punished by him. Crazy for action and a chance to measure himself against the emir, Montagnac threw caution to the wind on the night of September 21. Ignoring his orders to stay put, he led a force of 425 light cavalry of the recently arrived Chasseurs d’ Orléans to hunt the emir.

The impetuous Montagnac foolishly allowed his small force to be drawn into an ambush. Trapped in a ravine and attacked on all sides, he died as he wished — on the battlefield, sword in hand and a bullet in his chest. The remaining chasseurs scrambled to a nearby marabout named Sidi Brahim, and took cover behind its white, stubby walls while the Arabs were rifling through the belongings of the dead Frenchmen. Some figs, a few rolls of bread, a couple of handfuls of potatoes and a bottle of absinthe was all the eighty-two soldiers had to survive a siege. In his rush for glory, Montagnac had not even seen that his men had brought extra water.

Abd el-Kader had qualms about attacking a marabout, qualms that were sharpened by the prospect of losing many men in a frontal assault. Four times Abd el-Kader tried to get the trapped soldiers to surrender. The first message was honey coated. If the men surrendered, they would be honorably treated; if not, they would all die. The second reminded them that the emir held eighty of their comrades. If they did not surrender, the prisoners would be executed. “They are in the hands of God. We have plenty of food and ammunition,” the chasseurs bravely shouted back.

Abd el-Kader’s third message was written in French by one of his prisoners, threatening to starve them to death.

“Shit on Abd el-Kader!” was all the chasseurs had to say.

Finally, the emir ordered a captured officer to go out and reason with his compatriots. If he failed, he was told he would be killed. Instead, he shouted: “Hold out against these butchers. Fight to the death.” The captain was immediately shot in the back.

The emir withdrew his main force, leaving behind Bou Hamidi’s men to watch the trapped soldiers, who were soon reduced to drinking their urine and sucking moisture from the grass. When the chasseurs finally understood that they weren’t going to be rescued, they decided it was better to die fighting than “to be cooked in a pan.” Shortly before dawn on the third night the men slipped over the walls of the marabout to get back to Ghazaouet.

Bou Hamidi’s cavalry followed the pitifully formed defensive square at a respectful distance as the chasseurs gamely dragged themselves the twelve miles back to their base, while singing the “Marseillaise.” One thousand meters from the gates of their fort, the delirious men saw a small creek. At the sight of water, the demons of thirst overwhelmed the last shreds of discipline holding together the ragged little force. That was when the Arabs descended.

The chasseurs were still fighting when three shots from the fort’s cannons scattered Bou Hamidi’s men. But that day, Arab fear of cannon fire was matched by a Frenchman’s fear of treachery. So convinced was the fort’s commander of the reliability of a report he had received, indicating that Montagnac’s detachment had been completely annihilated, he wouldn’t open the gates to send out a rescue party. Until the men were virtually at the threshold, he had imagined the pitiful figures in front of him were Arabs wearing the uniforms of the dead soldiers.

Seventeen soldiers of the original four hundred and twenty-five who left Nemours made it back alive to the fort, four of whom died of exhaustion soon after. Ninety-seven prisoners had been taken. The rest were dead.

A few days later, another disaster landed on the French. Bou Hamidi’s men surprised a convoy loaded with food, ammunition and convalescents. The outnumbered guards assigned to protect it had simply fled. Two hundred more prisoners fell into the emir’s hands.

The two events had a predictable effect. Paris was in a tizzy. Lamoricière wrote a somber report about the situation, worried that the emir would join forces with Bou Maza farther east and that recently submitted tribes would have a change of heart. Bugeaud cut short his politicking to hurry back to deal with the crisis. Abd el-Kader was again the man of destiny. A tremor of hope fluttered through tribal councils.

The emir continued to weave and evade his way east to consult with his loyal caliph of the Kabyles, Ben Salem. Abd el-Kader knew that confronting French forces directly was folly, but he clung to the hope that by his mere presence he could rekindle enthusiasm for jihad and get submitted tribes to defect. From the fall of 1845 through the spring of 1846, the emir seemed to be everywhere, miraculously avoiding capture by the eighteen columns Bugeaud had set in motion to find him. In England, where Bugeaud was known to the public as “The Butcher of the Bedouins,” the press wallowed gleefully in the reports of his difficulties. Punch Magazine mockingly suggested that no such person as Abd el-Kader actually existed.

He was seen near Tiaret in December, but had vanished to the south by the time more troops arrived. Then he was north in the Ouarsenis Massif after evading Lamoricière; Saint-Arnaud was looking for him in the south. In February, the emir suddenly appeared in Kabylia while Bugeaud was hunting him in the Chlef. In Kabylia, Abd el-Kader joined forces with Ben Salem. Algiers was in a state of panic. French military prisoners were taken out of jails and formed into two battalions of militia to defend the city.

Three generals died of exhaustion that winter, along with thousands of horses that simply dropped dead. Two hundred and thirty French soldiers froze to death near Setif. “What a war,” wrote Saint-Arnaud. “Four days ago it was 20 degrees, today it is three degrees frost. There is no wood, no fodder, not a shack. Everything has to be brought. The Arab carries nothing but his rifle, his cartridges and a knife to cut off your head… They flee and they attack with equal speed and fury. We are always at a disadvantage. We wage a war that brings us no glory.”

In early March 1846, Abd el-Kader held a meeting with leaders of tribes who had come from all over the mountainous Kabylia. He employed all his oratorical talent to convince them to unite and fight harder. Some of the chiefs were ready to reenlist in the struggle. Others were hesitant.

When word came that Bugeaud was advancing into the region, the voices of doubt prevailed. The imbalance of forces was all too apparent.

Abd el-Kader returned to Morocco in July. He had narrow escapes, been continuously hunted, yet saved many times by the support of a population that kept him informed of French whereabouts. If people wouldn’t fight for him, they were sympathetic and admired his tenacity. But even in the Sahara, the French had made their presence felt. Among his most reliable supporters — the Ouled Sidi Sheikh, the Beni Nail, the Beni Hassan — he found only weariness and discouragement. “You are like a fly that torments a bull,” the chiefs told the emir. “After you have angered it, you disappear, and we are the ones who are gored.” He had covered 2,100 miles. It had been a Herculean effort to rekindle the dwindling fires of rebellion. The emir began to think that God must have another plan for him.

The emir would face a different crisis when he returned to camp. A moral one.

The prisoners captured during the fighting at Sidi Brahim the previous September had been taken to Morocco. The wounded were put on mules that did double duty carrying baskets full of heads coated with honey whose antibacterial properties, the Arabs had learned, preserved the grisly evidence of their laurels won in battle. Able-bodied prisoners walked for three days on empty stomachs until dusk when they received some biscuits and, if they were near a village, could trade the buttons on their uniforms for some figs.

The once impressive smala had become a mere camp, a deira in Arab parlance, whose inhabitants of mostly women and children were spread along the Moulouya River. In the center of the deira were the green and white banners that marked the tents of the emir’s mother, Lalla Zohra, and his wives. His alter ego, Ben Fakha, received the prisoners, made coffee for the officers and bound up the wounds of one whose life had been saved by Bou Hamidi. The enlisted men, however, were marched around the camp to satisfy the curiosity of the women.

Bedouin notions of natural aristocracy, evident in horses and men, could also save lives. Worthy opponents should be treated respectfully in defeat. And officers were more worthy than ordinary soldiers. One officer who benefited from these chivalrous notions was Cpt. Courby de Cognord, a chasseur who fought courageously while wounded in the head. Bou Hamidi had noticed his officer’s epaulettes and had checked the hand of an Arab who was about to cut the Frenchmen’s throat.

After Sidi Brahim, the emir continued east toward Algiers and beyond, leaving Bou Hamidi in command of the deira. His old friend and schoolmate from the zawiya had scrupulously followed the emir’s instructions for treating prisoners from October through April 1846. As commander, de Cognord had been allowed to write letters to Algiers on behalf of all the prisoners. Money, medicines and linens had, indeed, been sent and received — money to buy things from the Moroccan tradesmen peddling their wares at the deira, and linens to mummify themselves at night from scorpions, tarantulas and snakes.

The treatment of the prisoners had been consistently humane, even if they were paraded around the camp during certain religious celebrations. One day, Bou Hamidi rebuked his Arabs who taunted them, telling them, “you insult these Frenchmen because they are few and unarmed. If they had weapons, they would show you how to deal with a couple hundred men like you.”

The prisoners suffered, though not alone. The heat by day, the cold by night and the vermin did not discriminate between Frenchman and Arab. Neither did hunger, as the prisoners received the same rations as the Arabs. Moroccan merchants would no longer accept the emir’s currency, even those willing to defy the Sultan. The capture of the convoy the preceding October had added 200 more prisoners to the ninety-seven from Sidi Brahim. Feeding them became a heavy burden for the Arabs.

On April 6, 1846, Mustafa Ben Thami arrived at the deira with the sick and wounded from the emir’s long campaign. He had been with the emir since the previous September, and had been ordered to take command of the deira. Bou Hamidi was to rejoin the emir with any troops not essential for guarding the prisoners. But few tribal contingents wanted to fight anymore. Only 500 regulars were available, but they were needed to guard the prisoners and the camp.

Ben Thami and Bou Hamidi spent their nights discussing the problems caused by having so many French prisoners. French and Moroccan troops were constantly searching for them, as Bugeaud had refused to consider a prisoner exchange. The prisoners required a heavy guard. There wasn’t enough food for their own people, much less the Frenchmen. Morale was low and their tribal allies were melting away. However, the two men were opposite spirits and couldn’t agree on a solution.

Ben Thami had just experienced a long hard campaign with the emir. He was known to be severe in dealing with the Christians and Muslims alike. Ben Thami could conceive of only one solution — to kill them and gain a double benefit. They would not have to feed the Frenchmen anymore and their blood would make tribes considering defection think again about the kind of welcome they would receive from the French side. Bou Hamidi thought that murdering them would go against everything the emir believed. He argued for taking the prisoners near some French post and simply releasing them, as the emir had done after the visit of Abbé Suchet five years earlier. However, Ben Thami was officially in command of the camp, and he disagreed.

By April, the prisoners were being held at a separate location, twelve miles away from the deira. On April 23rd, a courier brought a message from the emir to warn Ben Thami of possible razzias by the French and Moroccans. It urged him to do everything possible to save the prisoners lives. Only if they were in imminent danger of falling into the hands of either the Sultan or the French, they should be killed.

The next day, Ben Thami invited the officers to eat couscous with him in the deira that evening. Though suspicious, the officers were not allowed to decline the honor. The remaining prisoners were divided into groups of five and ordered to sleep in separate tents for the night. By morning, 170 prisoners had either been shot or had their throats cut. Two men had escaped during the madness. The night of the massacre, Abd el-Kader had been far away in the Sahara with the Beni Nail, who were explaining why they could no longer support his jihad.

The government was angrily questioned by deputies outraged by news of the slaughter. Some wanted revenge. Other wanted to know why the emir’s offers to exchange prisoners had been ignored. The president of the council of ministers, Guizot, explained that Marshal Bugeaud was against any further prisoner exchanges. The governor-general was convinced that any exchange would be exploited by the emir as evidence that France was seeking peace, which, in turn, he would use to discourage tribes from submitting to France.

The killing of the prisoners was a gift that Bugeaud immediately used to undermine the emir’s moral authority. He spread far and wide news of the outrage. “Every Arab endowed with good sense and religion will know that this was an act of desperation which proves that the son of Muhi al-Din has been abandoned by both men and God,” read the governor-general’s announcement.

A year earlier, Bugeaud had been before the Chamber to face deputies apoplectic over atrocities two of his own commanders had organized, each condemned for “the cold-blooded murder of a defenseless enemy,” and for “staining the honor of France.” During the Bou Maza uprisings in the summer of 1845, Pellissier de Reynaud and Saint-Arnaud had each separately suffocated thousands of men, women and children who had taken refuge in caves and refused to surrender. Whereas Bugeaud stood by his offending officers, Abd el-Kader had no one to argue his case.

Bugeaud and others knew the truth, but it wasn’t useful. After the massacre, the French consul in Fez had been informed by defectors from the emir’s camp of what had occurred. Ben Thami had ordered the killing, of that there was no doubt, and he had misused the emir’s instructions to do so. There had been no immediate danger of an attack by Moroccan or French forces, but Ben Thami exploited the conditional clause in the emir’s instructions and exaggerated the threat to justify the slaughter. But the French consul, de Chasteau, advised the government that it was useful to hide the truth. “Our politics requires us to maintain that the emir is the sole author of this crime because it has done him great harm, even among his closest allies.”

The emir didn’t learn all these details until July18, the day he returned to his deira, three months after the fact. Lalla Zohra was in mourning and still had not spoken to Ben Thami. Abd el-Kader was furious with his brother-in-law. His letters proposing to Lamoricière and Bugeaud an exchange had gone unanswered. But what to do with the survivors?

De Cognord was allowed to send letters to Bugeaud, Cavaignac and the French consul in Morocco, informing them that the emir was going to have eleven men taken to the Spanish port of Melilla. A private transaction had been arranged, the details of which the emir chose to remain ignorant.

Four of his chiefs had colluded with the prisoners to have them formally appeal to the emir to be returned home via Spanish intermediaries, a request that the chiefs would support. But the same four men had independently offered their help to the French consul to liberate the prisoners in return for 6,000 piasters, about 33,000 francs. The planned transaction was never acknowledged by the French command, but on November 24, 1846, two Arabs presented themselves to the authorities in Melilla to explain the procedures for consummating the business. The next day, the eleven tired and happy men disembarked at Djemaa Gazaouet where they were treated to raucous celebration by the garrison.

Letters from the emir were forwarded by Captain de Cognord to Louis-Philippe, War Minister Soult and Bugeaud. Out of loyalty, he would not disavow his brother-in-law’s action. He also couldn’t leave the impression that his authority was disregarded by his caliphs. The Commander of the Faithful publicly would always take responsibility for the crime. Yet, the emir wanted to shift the blame. “…Recently, when we had a certain number of prisoners in our hands, we wrote more than once to your representatives to propose an exchange,” the emir wrote to Louis-Philippe. “We never received a response and all our couriers were thrown in prison. This was a violation of French customs, more so because a messenger between two hostile sides is always considered as a neutral…” He ended by making an appeal to the king to release certain prisoners captured at his smala. The letters were never answered.

Before being ransomed, de Cognord was summoned to have coffee with the emir. The two talked at length, and when the painful subject of the killing came up, Abd el-Kader told the Frenchman: “If I had been in my deira, your men would never have died. Moulay Abderrahman would never have tried to rescue your men,” Abd el-Kader told him, defending his brother-in-law. “This war is a scourge.”

On the eve of the prisoners’ departure for Melilla, Abd el-Kader expressed before all his chiefs his deep regret at what happened. On November 23, 1846, fourteen months after being captured, Courby de Cognord left the camp at Äin Zohra on a beautiful stallion the emir had given him for his ride to the coast. When de Cognord reached Melilla, he sent back the tainted gift to its owner.

Later, an indignant Bugeaud told an emissary from the emir: “Tell your master that if you had returned the prisoners without ransom, I would have freed three Arabs for each Frenchman; because he made us pay for their liberty and had the others killed, I owe him nothing but my indignation for his barbarity.”

“You forget that the circumstances of life change,” a wounded Abd el-Kader wrote back. “We never step in the same river twice. I know this better than you. From the birth of Adam until the human race dies out, nothing can be durable on this earth.”