Soon the tide of chanting, flag-waving Muslims began to debouch from their own quarters, sweeping aside the thin cover of local gendarmes whose main force was occupied elsewhere in the turbulent city. Behind this ever-growing mass of Muslims there arose the blood-curdling you-you-you ululations from a myriad of invisible women. A terrible atavistic fear ran through the adjacent pied noir quarters with a passing of the word: "They are coming!" As the crowd surged into the narrow streets of Belcourt, shots cracked out from tenements inhabited by poor whites, and one or two marchers fell. The word ran through the Muslim ranks, and a blind mob-madness took over. A pied noir caught up in the street had his throat slit; another was burnt to death in his car. Armed with iron bars and wooden staves the Muslim mob smashed up and pillaged European shops and villas, devastating everything in their path like a horde of soldier ants.

XREF: Connects to the broader Algerian War of Independence narrative and pied noir-settler history the reader is studying.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1307