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But the guerrillas had a very real advantage over their more lavishly equipped targets. Ancient though their firelock smoothbores were, they had learned, over many generations, how to maximize their effective range by simply gauging the elevation of their barrels and the range to the targeted columns. Their first volley always caused a sprinkle of French casualties; their second always fell with more telling effect as they adjusted their elevation.

The French always reacted as their Prussian drill manuals had instructed - they threw out a screen of skirmishers and sought to locate the ambushers by advancing in the direction of their fire. But even the best-trained skirmishers moved slowly and falteringly on the rough, rocky ground, for they were burdened with leather knapsacks and were dressed in uniforms and footgear tailored for the climate and terrain of central Europe. By the time the skirmishers spotted their antagonists, the Arabs had usually maneuvered small but highly effective bands of cavalry into their flanks. Moving uphill and already winded, the French skirmish lines were exceedingly vulnerable to sudden, slashing attacks by bands of wild horsemen, each one wielding a razor-sharp yataghan, a curved blade longer than a bayonet but shorter and more easily handled at close quarters than a bulky saber or a lance. Although these hit-and-run sorties did cause casualties, their main purpose was to ignite panic and thereby break up the French skirmish formation, scattering its personnel into small, frightened groups, too widely separated and too preoccupied with self-preservation for any officer, no matter how energetic or loud-voiced, to regain control and cohesion. Once this was accomplished, the initiative shifted entirely to the Moorish side, for as soon as the French began to scatter, the attacking horsemen would vanish into nearby wadis, caves and copses of brush, where attendants had been guarding their matchlocks, and would now exchange those muskets for the reins of their horses. The riders then scurried swiftly back to the fray on foot, where, with the skill borne of long practice, they would split into appropriate-sized teams and proceed systematically to bushwhack disorganized and usually leaderless knots of French infantry. If the main French column peeled off a large detachment to bale the skirmishers out of trouble, it too would be ambushed if the opportunity presented itself, spreading the confusion and terror among ever larger numbers of French infantry, increasing the scope and deadliness of the ambush as-a-whole. Once the French had unlimbered, repositioned, and loaded their escorting field artillery, however, the tribesmen knew better than to press the engagement. One final ragged volley, perhaps, and their entire force would quickly and bafflingly vanish, seemingly into the very earth itself. Even if the French column was escorted by a large body of cavalry, pursuit was not usually attempted, as the tribesmen sometimes kept yet a third ambush party in reserve to fire at horsemen. The ambushers usually didn't get away without losing a few men to French canister or lucky shots from the volley-fire delivered by the main escort formations, but almost always, they inflicted more losses, by a factor of about three-to-one, than they sustained. The pacification of Algeria became a slow but steady drain of French blood and French money.

After a decade of more or less constant frustration, with only Algeria’s major cities and a relatively small portion of the major roads considered “pacified”, the French began to get their act together. The Kayble were not the only major tribe in Algeria, nor were they universally beloved by their fellow-Muslims. Slowly at first, and by using every inducement from flattery to open bribery, the French began to recruit native levies who were at least nominally loyal to the Tri-Color, and took care to publicly praise and reward those soldiers whenever they performed smartly in battle. The brighter officers among the French also cast aside overt signs of racial prejudice and sought to learn from their native recruits – collectively called “Zouaves” -- the North African style of making war.

During the last years of the 1830s and all through the 1840s, the French regiments destined for North African service underwent a radical transformation. The first things to go were those heavy, chafing, virtually useless European uniforms. They were replaced by colorful and distinctive outfits not only adapted to the climate, but so operatic and swashbuckling in appearance that ordinary French soldiers were envious of their comrades who got to dress up in those operatic outfits– being posted to North African duty slowly became actually popular, instead of a fate to be dreaded.

The Zouave costume was both rakish and practical, and was adopted from the uniform of some native Berber contingents (traditional enemies of the Bedouin and Kaybles). Instead of the stiff, hot, chafing woolen uniforms required for European service, the Zouave dress in light, loose-fitting, balloon-cuffed pantaloons (white on campaign to help reflect the sun; red for dress parades and barracks duty), which allowed his legs to “breathe” in the hot desert air. Atop these, the Zouaves wore a short, well-ventilated jacket decorated with Berber-style rose-colored braid; over this was a lightweight blue vest, also made jaunty-looking by gold and silver decorative stitching – in point of fact, it was the Zouaves who first codified this decoration into officially recognized gallons, or braided patterns of swirls along the forearms and cuffs, each of which denoted a specific rank (the Confederacy adopted this convention on a large scale, while the Union Army did not, perhaps feeling it was somewhat effeminate) . A light cotton sash, sometimes reinforced with suspenders, depending on the individual soldier’s taste, kept pants and jacket together and served to anchor his bayonet frog, canteen, and cartridge pouch. Headgear was also both colorful and practical, a red fez cap perched atop a loose-fitting but secure cotton turban that kept the sun off as effectively as a heavier conventional hat, but did not grow heavy with sweat as the men marched. The reason why is unclear, but all Zouaves who could, tried to grow more or less identical van-dyke beards and long, raffish, moustaches that curved upwards symmetrically to waxed needle point. The final touch was high-topped, light weight footgear that facilitated long marches across arid, sandy landscapes; these “Arabian Nights” booties may have looked a little bit gay to non-Zouave soldiers, but they were entirely more practical and far less fatiguing to wear than the conventional Prussian-style boots, which were heavy in part so they could keep the infantrymen’s feet dry during inclement weather. Given the annual amount of rainfall along the Algerian massif, “trench foot” was not a problem that came up very often.

To off-set the natives’ expertise in long-range musketry, the Zouave regiments’ commanders demanded that their units be the first in the French Army to be armed entirely with rifles. The new uniforms and modernized weaponry were a good start, but to complete the transformation of conventional infantry into what the French dubbed Chasseurs-a-Pied, it was necessary to throw away the old Prussian drill manuals and re-think the fundamentals of training.

Campaigning in North Africa required, above all else, a degree of sheer physical toughness not required even in the most protracted Napoleonic campaigns. “Tradition” went into the scrap-heap, and the veterans of the early North African campaigns were combed to select young non-coms and lieutenants who had tried unconventional ideas and enjoyed localized success with them. The first traditional maneuver to be cast aside was the old requirement that infantry deploy for rifle-combat in strict rigid lines, firing by volleys on command, to maximize the dicey probabilities of hitting the enemy. Although the Chasseurs could form and fight in-line, if the situation seemed to call for it, a much greater emphasis was now placed on individual marksmanship and initiative, and great care was taken to train them, as their enemies had been trained, on the largely instinctive skill of judging range and adjusting weapons’ elevation accordingly. After several months of such training, the Chasseurs became reliably skilled at placing heavy fire on enemy combatants at ranges up to 500 yards, which was farther than the Arab match-locks could shoot with any significant chance of hitting a man.

Gone, too, was the conventional spiked bayonet; instead, the Chasseurs d’Afrique were issued longer, better balanced “sword-bayonets”, curved mini-sabers complete with hand-guards, which in effect turned their rifled carbines into pruning hooks. In a pinch, the Chasseur could detach his bayonet and fight hand-to-hand with some degree of confidence, since all of the recruits for these new formations were required to learn the basics of fencing and to put in long hours of practice. Where their hapless predecessors had prepared to “receive cavalry” mainly by standing, in the classic “square” formation, in rigid lines with their bayonets thrust out (a formation many Arab horsemen could simply leap over, administering a lethal back-stroke as their mounts cleared the French line), the new training taught an infantryman how to roll under or away from a charging horse, and how to efficiently ham-string or gut the animal with one swipe of his elongated bayonet. The men griped at the long, exhausting hours of practice required to master these new skills, but having mastered them, they went into combat in Algeria with a degree of confidence that enabled them to stand up to attacks that had scattered their comrades in earlier days. The new French practicality surprised and dismayed the enemy tribesmen, too, for it resulted in the kind of heavy casualties their whole hit-and-run strategy was designed to avoid.

For skirmishing, or melee-ing, the Chasseurs de Afrique were taught to forget about forming a line and firing by-the-numbers, and to take advantage, as their attackers had always done, of every possible source of cover and concealment; they became as adept at shooting accurately from a kneeling, or even a prone position, as they were from a standing formation. And they learned that with a rifled carbine, it was just as fast and just as efficient to reload while rolling on your back as by firing-and-loading in conventional double or triple ranks.

But the primary factor that finally made the Zouaves equal to their native adversaries, was a no-nonsense regime of physical conditioning that enabled them not only to withstand the rigors of climate and terrain, but to maneuver under fire with unprecedented swiftness. Precision, and economy-of-effort. Most conventional infantry maneuvers were executed at a tempo of 90 paces per minute; for brief periods of time, this could be accelerated to “double-quick”, but that pace no only winded the soldiers quickly, it also caused their formations to lose cohesion and made their officers’ job of command-and-control much more difficult.

In the Zouaves, however, “double-quick” was the normal pace for field drill! At first, this took a brutal toll on new recruits, but as the trainees toughened-up to it and accepted it as normal, they gained new-found pride and confidence in their own physical prowess; long marches became less fatiguing, they were less bothered by thirst and hunger, and as they acquired a lean, hard-bodied athleticism, they carried themselves – even when off-duty – with a tightly-coiled, almost pantherish grace that was the envy of less-well-trained troops and invariably attracted flattering glances from the female civilians who happened to pass them in the streets of Algiers. This conditioning enabled them to deploy for battle, and to utilize their new tactical skills, with a speed and elan the Arabs had not yet seen among any French soldiery. When caught by surprise in an ambush, or when attempting to seize a fleeting tactical advantage, the Zouaves were even capable of sustaining a mode of maneuver dubbed “the athletic rate”, which amounted to a blistering, foot-cavalry tempo of 180 paces per minute (try it sometime when you’ree at the beach and see how long you can keep it up!). This kind of performance, at least in a dismounted situation, the Arab guerrillas could not match, and time after time, it enabled to Zouaves to break through an encirclement, or avoid a trap, with almost contemptible ease.

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