Commander of the Faithful by John W. Kiser

Author:John W. Kiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Published: 2013-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Mischief Makers, 1844-1847

“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

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