Among other butchery, at Ain-Abid an entire pied noir family called Mello perished atrociously: a seventy-three-year-old grandmother and eleven-year-old daughter, the father killed in his bed, with his arms and legs hacked off. The mother had been disembowelled, her five-day-old baby slashed to death and replaced in her opened womb. There were similar scenes of such revolting savagery in attacks elsewhere that day, and what heightened the horror (particularly at El-Halia) was the carefully premeditated planning which clearly lay behind them, with the wanton participation of so many deemed “friendly” Muslims or fellow-workers. The details sicken the stomach, but they need to be recounted for no other reason than to explain the potent and profound effect that the “Philippeville massacre” was to have on the pieds noirs, on Jacques Soustelle, and indeed on the whole subsequent history of the Algerian war.

XREF: Links to how terrorist atrocities often galvanize rather than demoralize settler populations in colonial conflicts.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 377