They gallop without any order, and singly, to within eighty or a hundred paces of our sharp shooters, and discharge their rifles at full speed. The horse then turns of his own accord, and the rider loads his piece as he retreats; and this is repeated again and again all day long.
The Bedouins never wait for a close encounter hand to hand when charged by our cavalry; they disperse in all directions, but instantly return. The only difference between them and the Numidians, of whom Sallust says, “They fight flying, and retreat, only to return more numerous than before,” is, that the Numidians of old fought with bows and the Bedouins have rifles.
This kind of fighting is equally dangerous and fatiguing to us. It is no joke to be firing in all directions from sunrise till sunset, and to march at the same time, for we seldom halt to fight at our ease. The General only orders a halt when the rear-guard is so fiercely attacked as to require reinforcement. Any soldier of the rear-guard who is wounded or tired has the pleasant prospect of falling into the hands of the Bedouins and having his head cut off by them. One comfort is, that this operation is speedily performed: two or three strokes with the yataghan are a lasting cure for all pains and sorrows.
There are, it is true, a certain number of mules and litters to carry the sick and wounded; but on so long an expedition as this the number of the sick increases to such a degree that in the end every means of conveyance is overloaded. The only resource, then, is to unload the provision mules, and to distribute rations for eight or ten days more among the soldiers. In the end, however, both men and mules are dead beat, and every one must shift for himself. It requires long habit, and much suffering, before a man can bear to see his comrades butchered before his eyes without being able to help them.
For several successive days we were attacked with such pertinacity by the Bedouins, and their allies the Kabyles, that we supposed we must be coming upon their den, and so indeed it turned out. One evening, after a hot forced march, we saw on a mountain top, which formed a plateau, a great heap of stones which we knew to be a town. In two hours we were close upon it. Our battalion and several others climbed the steep hill, in order to enter the town from above, while the rest of the column attacked it from below. We were driving the Bedouins before us all the time. At length we reached the walls, which were low and battlemented, but to our astonishment no one appeared to defend them, and the gates stood wide open. Suspecting a stratagem, some of us climbed to the top of the walls to look into the town. The nest was empty, and the birds flown; as usual we had come just too late. The whole column poured into the town, which was I think called Callah, and the soldiers eagerly ransacked the houses. The owners could not have been gone long, for the kuskussu on the hearth was still hot. A few fowls, cats, and lambs, which the Kabyles had left behind in their hurry, and two rusty cannons, were all the spoil. A far greater god-send was a fine spring of water near the city gates. Here we made up for the thirst we had endured all day.
After taking as much wood as was wanted to cook our supper, we set fire to the town. We then bivouacked on an eminence at a distance, where we slept as soundly as if we had performed some glorious action.
The soldiers began to grow impatient; we were now close to the lesser desert, without apparently being a bit the nearer to Abd-el-Kader’s castle, which was the object of the expedition. They began as usual to invent the most extraordinary theories, some asserting that the General had sold us to Abd-el-Kader, others that we were in a few days to fight a battle against the Emperor of Morocco, although we were then further from Morocco than from Algiers.
The Lesser Desert.
One morning before leaving our bivouac, we were ordered to fill our kettles with water, and to carry some wood upon our knapsacks, as we should have to pass the night in the desert. After two hours’ march the desert lay before us, and a most cheerless prospect did it afford. To the south nothing was to be seen but an undulating surface of shifting sand: on the east and west alone, the Atlas range was still visible.