The Dreyfus Tragedy page 2

Lebrun-Renault next asked Dreyfus if he was going to speak during his degradation. "Yes," Dreyfus answered, "I will make a public declaration of my innocence." The Colonel wrote this statement down and had it conveyed to General Darras, who was in charge of the ceremony. Darras accordingly arranged for a roll of drums to be sounded whenever it was seen that Dreyfus was about to speak.

Dreyfus was led out in front of the troops. Outside the Champ de Mars, behind the palings, a huge hostile mob had collected. But for the iron rails between it would have rent the "traitor" to pieces.

But there was dead silence when General Darras issued his brief decree:

"Dreyfus, you are unworthy to wear your sword; in the name of the French people we degrade you."

Dreyfus raised both hands above his head, and cried out in his grating voice, "I am innocent! I swear I am innocent! Vive la France!"

"Down with him!" came the answering shriek from behind the palings.

A senior warrant officer began to tear off from Dreyfus's uniform badges, buttons, trouser stripes; roughly, leaving great rents, making a tatterdemalion out of the former officer. Again Dreyfus cried: "On the life of my wife and children, I swear that I am guiltless! Vive la France!"

"Down with him."

The warrant officer took Dreyfus's sword, broke it.

"You are degrading an innocent man!" Dreyfus persisted loudly, harshly.

A squad of four men conducted the degraded officer through the ranks of his former comrades-in-arms. Dreyfus marched proudly, almost as if he were leading the men. The drummers got ready. The crowd got ready, and, as Dreyfus neared the palings, let out a blood-curdling yell. Between the roar of the populace on one side and a thunderous tattoo of drums on the other, Dreyfus walked along, his mouth still framing the words that were drowned in the hurricane of hatred, the rumble of the drums. "I am innocent. Vive la France!"

At last, the panoply of organised force, the naked hysteria of mass fear, made the prisoner's step falter. But automatically he kept up the cry, "I am innocent - Vive la France!"

Dreyfus was shipped off to Devil's Island, one of the three penal islands in French Guiana. He would have been sent normally to the Ducos Peninsulain New Caledonia. A special Act relegated him to Du Paty de Clam's threated "hell." No fate was too bad for Dreyfus, and, once on Devil's Island, he became a cherished victim of organised misery. He was put in a cell four metres square, rationed on meat three times a week and a sufficiency of bread every day. He cooked for himself. There was no one to talk to. Warders guarded his threshold day and night, peering in at the grille, never speaking.

At first Dreyfus struggled for his sanity, read books his wife sent him, learnt English, pursued his studies in mathematics, wrote a journal, reaffirming his innocence in it day after day. He was allowed a tether of three hundred yards to exercise. The sea solaced him. It, too, voiced its wrongs, endlessly, monotonously.

But after eighteen months on Devil's Island Dreyfus's meagre liberties, representing the bare margin of human over brute, were taken away from him. Those three hundred yards that meant so much were taken away. A double stockade was erected round his hut, and, while the outer circle was preparing, for fear this miserable convict should escape, his feet were clamped in iron rings during the tropical nights of that fever-infected settlement. A report had got about in the Paris press - a report inspired by Dreyfus's brother Mathieu, with the best of intentions, trying to draw attention to Dreyfus - that the prisoner had escaped. Result - torture squared.

Dreyfus, in that feverish period of confinement within confinement, passed the shadow line. He lost the power of speech, became apathetic, a mind rotting in an abomination of desolation. Walled in, gyved, without his sad confidant, the sea, Dreyfus became a vegetable. He had reeled through hell to insentience.

Nearly three years of this. Then, on the fifth of June, 1899, the door of his cell is flung open and the chief warder gives him a telegram. The numbed brain picks out phrases that mean something to it - even now. "Court... annuls verdict... against Alfred Dreyfus... re-trial.... Cruiser... transport... from Devil's Island."

What had happened in the years between that had caused the message of recall to flash out and the machinery of French law to prepare to receive its victim a second time? A revolution had been going on in France. The name Dreyfus, forgotten by its owner, had rung over Europe like a battle-cry - it meant Honour, Justice, Humanity. While the piece of human offal on Devil's Island had forgotten its identity, in France there was being prepared for this self-forgotten man a halo and a shrine. But the process of sanctification was slow. There had first to be the vilification of Dreyfus and all he was made to represent - dishonour, semitism, left-wing tendencies. His enemies had their hour - Mercier stood for the presidency of the Republic - Lebrun-Renault, in his humbler way, took the plaudits of the crowd during a visit to the Moulin-Rouge. Mercier failed for the Presidency - he got only three votes; but Lebrun-Renault goes down to history as the man who in his cups at a cabaret went near to causing a European war. Either because he had misunderstood or because he was hopelessly drunk, Lebrun-Renault blabbed it about at the Moulin-Rouge that Dreyfus had told him before the degradation that he (Dreyfus) had communicated military secrets to Germany. Next day the news was in the Paris press. Berlin, after receiving assurance from their Paris Embassy that it had never even heard of Dreyfus before the trial, demanded an official dementi. The Agency Havas complied, but not in a way that satisfied the Kaiser, who threatened to withdraw his ambassador, Count von Minister. It came to the unusual step of direct negotiations between the German Ambassador in Paris and the president of the Republic, Casimir-Perier. Germany was calmed down, but the indirect result of the affair was that Casimir-Perier resigned - he had not been kept informed of the Dreyfus case, and felt his dignity had suffered. A war scare, the resignation of the French President - these were the first results of a verdict on a formerly very insignificant French citizen. It was only the beginning. These reverberations were political. After a time the affair was to sink deeper than that.

The long struggle for rehabilitation of Dreyfus, a struggle that amounted to the rehabilitation of a great nation's self-respect, really began with the appointment of Colonel Picquart - the man who had received Dreyfus on the occasion of his fatal visit to the War Office, the man who had watched at the Court-Martial - to be Chief of the Intelligence Section. Picquart had come away from that Court-Martial with the feeling that Dreyfus, on the evidence submitted to the Court, should not have been convicted. But the apparent injustice did not worry him overmuch at the time. He was a soldier, with a loyal belief in the Command. Even the hints given him by his former chief, Sandherr, and the Commandant Henry of what had happened behind those closed doors when the Court withdrew, were not enough to shake Picquart's faith - rather, they confirmed it.

But what military authorities could not do, what the rise and fall of presidents was impotent to prevent, the ministrations of a very humble person, who went on working oblivious of governments, brought about quite naturally in the exercise of her duties. Madame Bastian, charwoman at the German Embassy, continued to empty wastepaper baskets - into the French Intelligence Bureau. "Emptying wastepaper baskets" may have been an euphemism, it may have included picking pockets, but at all events, a piece of thin paper came the way of Colonel Picquart that in the end quite upset that straightforward official's ideas of good and fair. When he had assembled the fifty different pieces that composed the message, a startling document lay before his eyes. The handwriting was beyond doubt that of the German Military Attache in Paris, Major von Schwartzkoppen. The note ran:

"Dear Sir, - Regarding the matter in question, I would first like to have fuller details. Will you please let me have them in writing? I will then decide whether I can continue my relations with the firm of R. or not."

It was addressed to a Commandant Esterhazy. At first Picquart did not connect the Dreyfus affair with this note. Why should he? But it so happened that just at this time a certain spy, Cuers by name, who had worked on and off for Germany, became discontented with his usual employers, and, according to his custom, began flirting with the other side. It leaked out through him that the German authorities had really been bewildered by the arrest of Dreyfus. They had had no information from a man of that name, but there was a source - Cuers became mysterious - who was a Chef de Bataillon, a man between forty and fifty years old....

Picquart was interested. He arranged for Commandant Henry to meet Cuers and get his information. Henry reported after the interview that the spy had nothing of any importance to communicate. Picquart was not satisfied; it seemed to him Henry did not wish to get information from Cuers. Picquart's inhibitions began to weaken. He turned once more to Madame Bastian's first historic find, the bordereau., put it beside a specimen of Commandant Easterhazy's writing. It seemed to the Chief of the Intelligence Section that both notes came from the same hand. Picquart recalled the trial and his surprise at the conviction. He had long known of a secret file, containing documents relative to the Dreyfus trial; it was kept in Commandant Henry's safe. Picquart had this safe opened in his subordinate's absence. He knew that Dreyfus had actually been condemned on some evidence that was shown to the court when it withdrew to consider judgment. He had never doubted that this evidence was kept secret because of possible international repercussions. Now, with the file before him, he knew the evidence had been withheld because it was false. For Picquart found in the Dreyfus file yet another pieced-together fragment from Schwartzkoppen's wastepaper basket - one glance told him it could not conceivably have concerned Dreyfus. The letter was from the German military attaché to his Italian counterpart in Paris, and it ran:

"My Dear Friend, - I am sorry that I was unable to sec you again before going away. But I will be back again in a week. I enclose twelve Defence Schemes of Nice which that scoundrel D. gave me for you. I told him that you did not wish to have anything more to do with him. He talks about a misunderstanding and says that he will do anything he can to satisfy you. That he was determined to sec it through, but that you had a grudge against him. I told him that he was a fool and that it was very unlikely that you would have anything more to do with him."

Picquart knew that plans such as that referred to in the letter sold at about sixpence apiece, and that Dreyfus, a wealthy man, would certainly not trade in such trivial bits of information as this.

Then there were two versions of a decoded message sent by the Italian military attache, Panizzardi, to Rome. The telegram in cipher had evidently been dispatched when the attache saw Dreyfus's name in the Paris press for the first time. One, incorrect, version ran:

"Dreyfus arrested. Agents informed, precautions taken."

The second, correct, interpretation was quite different:

"If Captain Dreyfus had no relations with you, advise you refute press comments by directing Legation to give official dementi"

Picquart wondered if only the first, incorrect and damning version had been put before the judges. Picquart need not have wondered.

Picquart, routing with increased interest in the file, found a telegram from Schwartzkoppen to the General Staff in Berlin; it had to do with some French officer who had proposed to sell a patent to Schwartzkoppen. The relevance to the Court-Martial had been a supposed connection with the accused. What Picquart found interesting was a reference to the spy's connection with the French Intelligence Section. Dreyfus had not been connected with that. For that matter, Esterhazy was not - ostensibly.

Picquart's suspicions, awakened at last, sped swiftly and alighted on Henry. Why had Henry choked off Cuer, who had seemed ready to impart information about Esterhazy, or some one corresponding very closely to Esterhazy?

While Picquart was prodding tentatively at the truth from an official angle, Dreyfus's brother Mathieu, already convinced of the injustice, was accumulating his own evidence. Information leaked through to him of "that scoundrel D. letter" that has been produced secretly at the Court-Martial; but Mathieu, who seems to have been more zealous than fortunate throughout the whole affair, was sent on a wrong-track. He supposed "that scoundrel D." was one and the same as the author of the bordereau, and went labouring through army lists to find another culprit whose name began with D.

In the darkness surrounding the Dreyfus case at this time (1896) the spotlight of impartial, scientific inquiry had rested momentarily on an officer in the French army called Ester. hazy. The antecedents and circumstances of this officer stand out starkly, as the Intelligence Section examines the records. Commandant Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy was revealed as a gallant, unscrupulous soldier of fortune, who had fought in various armies for various causes. He had been in the Roman Legion and the French Foreign Legion, whence he had transferred to the French regular army during the Franco-Prussian War. In 1881 he was in the Intelligence Section at the French Ministry of War. At that time he was intimate with Commandant Henry. Then he went on foreign service and was at one time suspected of espionage. Photos showed him to be a tall, lean, rather fantastic-looking man, melodramatically military and aristocratic, a huge moustache, fierce eyes and a great beaked nose. An old type of intelligent adventurer - too intelligent, perhaps to make a good soldier.