C’etait la guerre draws upon two novelistic memoirs, Commander Azzedine’s We Were Called Fellaghas (1974) and Jean-Claude Carrière’s Peace of the Brave (1989), in confronting the Algerian War of Independence. “Burlesque, unreal, or bloody, the images that I kept of that time in Algeria are the strongest of my life,” Jean-Claude Carrière would recall of his service in the French...