Free A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 by Alistair Horne Page B

encountered the least barriers to advancement.
     
    [ 9 ] Baraka , hard to translate, is a special grace or good fortune accorded from on high.
     

CHAPTER TWO
Ici, c’est la France
     
Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.
Edmund Burke, On Conciliation with America , 1775
    The country
    SETTING the scene for the quite irrational murder of the anonymous Arab by his pied noir anti-hero, “The Outsider”, that great native-born writer of Algeria, Albert Camus, paints in words that scorch the mind:
There was the same red glare as far as the eye could reach, and small waves were lapping the hot sand in little, flurried gasps. As I slowly walked towards the boulders at the end of the beach I could feel my temples swelling under the impact of the light. It pressed upon me, trying to check my progress. And each time I felt a hot blast strike my forehead, I gritted my teeth, I clenched my fists in my trouser-pockets and keyed up every nerve to fend off the sun and the dark befuddlement it was pouring into me … all I had to do was to turn, walk away, and think no more about it. But the whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back.
     
    He goes on, kills, and accepts — inarticulately and impassively — the penalty of the guillotine.
    Environment shapes men, and none more so than the vast skies of Algeria — generally blazing down without pity or moderation, but capable of unpredictable, fierce change. Immense, beautiful, sudden, savage and harsh; one gropes inadequately for the right adjectives to describe the country. Distance never ceases to amaze; from Algiers to Tamanrasset in the barren, lunar mountains of the Hoggar is 1,300 miles, or roughly the same as from Newcastle to Algiers; from Algiers to Oran, a flea’s hop on the map of North Africa, is little short of 300 miles by road. Four times as big as metropolitan France, with its land area unchanged since the colonial era, present-day Algeria is the tenth largest country in the world. Nine-tenths of it are comprised by the endless Saharan under-belly that sags below the Atlas mountains, the endless wasteland of blistering rock and shifting sand. Sparsely inhabited by troops of wandering nomads, or exotic tribes like the Ouled-Nail, whose comely dancing daughters traditionally used to offer themselves as courtesans in other regions, then returned with rich dowries to transmute themselves into honoured wives, dotted with mysterious M’zabite cities such as Ghardaia, and policed by isolated Foreign Legion forts, the Sahara once formed the average Englishman’s romantic Beau Geste image of all Algeria. It is a world of seizing visual beauty, of shimmering whites and yellows that shift to glowing apricot, pink and violet with the sinking of the saturant sun. “A magnificently constructed Cubist painting,” was how an enraptured Simone de Beauvoir saw Ghardaia: “white and ochre rectangles, brushed with blue by the bright light, were piled on each other to form a pyramid.…” Few French soldiers remained impervious to its dangerous allures, yet this great backyard seemed real estate without value — until, during the Algerian war itself, discovery was made of the vast reserves of natural gas and oil that were to provide the basis of the wealth of independent Algeria.
    For all its immense scale, the Algerian scene shifts with unexpected rapidity. Within a few hours’ drive northward from the desert oasis of Bou-Saada, you are up in the 7,000-foot Atlas range of the Djurdjura, where (as I once discovered to my cost) even as late as mid-May roads can be blocked or swept away by avalanches and landslides. Beyond the mountains lies a totally other world. The hundreds of miles of rugged, indented coastline where the Barbary pirates had their lairs is the true Mediterranean; but a Mediterranean where secret, sandy bays are often pounded by seas of Atlantic force. Parts of it, like the aptly