The English would have made him a peer, and put up statues in his honour; the ignorance of the French, I will not use a harsher word, drove him to commit suicide.
The example is certainly not encouraging to us later explorers.
I should have been more likely to win applause if I had pictured the Tuaregs as irreclaimable savages, relating a thousand entanglements with them, such as imaginary conflicts with their armed bands, where my own presence of mind and the courage of my party saved the expedition from massacre.
I have preferred in the interests of my country to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Even as I write these words, I hear of the death of two young officers and their men, who were killed near Timbuktu in a fight with a Hoggar razzi. The Hoggars again!
This does but confirm what I insisted on when I was at Timbuktu, that we shall never succeed in getting en rapport with the nomad tribes except with the aid of those tribes themselves.
We must first subjugate certain tribes, and then form from amongst them auxiliary levies, or, as the natives call them, maghzen, which will aid us, at a minimum cost to ourselves, to establish French influence over the Tuaregs.
Amongst the tribes who would best lend themselves to this purpose, I place the Awellimiden in the very first rank, and they are the hereditary enemies of the Hoggars. Or perhaps I should rather have said, if we wish to bring about a complete pacification of the country, and at the same time win the friendship of the Awellimiden chief, we ought to strengthen his hands.
With this idea in my mind I make the following suggestions. We should arm the Awellimiden with a hundred or a couple of hundreds of percussion rifles, with very large nipples, which would only admit of the use of special caps turned out in French manufactories.
With one hundred such guns the Awellimiden would be invincible, and could soon butcher all their enemies, whether Kel Gheres or Hoggars.