The Dreyfus Tragedy page 3

Picquart communicated his findings to the French General Staff. Rather naively, he told them that the secret file did not contain enough evidence to convict Dreyfus. He enclosed the petit bleu and a specimen of Esterhazy's writing. The General staff testily told Picquart not to pry into a case that was over and done with. Picquart, still trusting implicitly in his superiors, would have complied. But just then it became apparent that the Dreyfus family were about to launch a fresh offensive. A newspaper, the Éclair, suddenly published the text of "that scoundrel D." letter; a deputy announced an interpellation in the Chamber about the Dreyfus affair; a pamphlet was advertised with revelations in it supplied by Mathieu Dreyfus.

Picquart, fearing loss of prestige to the army if the Dreyfus family succeeded in forcing a retrial, went to see the Deputy Chief of Staff, General Gonse. The following conversation took place:

"What does it matter if the Jew stays on Devil's Island?"

"But he has done no wrong."

"The affair must not be stirred up again; it can't be done."

"But what will be our position if the Dreyfus family manage to unmask the real culprit on their own initiative?"

"Oh, no one will know anything about it if you say nothing." At this, Picquart, the fretted links of his allegiance snapped at last, sprang to attention.

"Mon General, I don't know yet what I shall do; but I will not take this secret into the grave with me."

Picquart had declared for the truth. Very well, Picquart must go. A pretext soon offered itself. The Paris Matin gave to the public for the first time a facsimile of the bordereau. The Military Command said, falsely, that Picquart had communicated the document and had accordingly committed a grave breach of trust. Picquart was sent on foreign service, into remote parts.

Then, to patch up the dangerous rent that had been made in the fabric of Dreyfus's guilt, Commandant Henry, now in virtual charge of the Intelligence Section, "discovered" a document that would damn Dreyfus, so the conspirators hoped, everlastingly. It was a letter purporting to have been written by the Italian military attache, Panizzardi, to his friend Schwartzkoppen:

"Dear Friend, - I hear that a Deputy is going to put a question in the Chamber on behalf of Dreyfus. If Rome asks me for particulars again, I will say that I never had anything to do with the Jew. If you are questioned, you say the same. No one mustn't know (sic) what happened with him."

That ought to do the trick. The anti-Dreyfusards hailed it with delight, called it le document liberateur - all except one anti-Dreyfusard, who was also, in his cynical freedom of spirit, an anti-anti-Dreyfusard. This man, detecting an Alsatian turn to the phrasing of the note, called it le document Vercingetorix, in reference to the antique Alsatian hero, racial forebear both of Dreyfus and Commandant Henry. The man who made the bon mot was Henry's old crony, Ferdinand Esterhazy.

Unfortunately for the military men, the counter to this move of theirs came promptly and effectively. Picquart now feared a Court-Martial and a fate similar to Dreyfus's, because Commandant Henry had put it about that his former chief in the Intelligence Section had forged the famous petit bleu (Schwartzkoppen's note to Esterhazy). Picquart managed to get leave of absence from his station at Tunis and make flying contact with his lawyer, Maitre Lebois, to whom he gave all materials for his defence; but he told the barrister on no account to join forces with the Dreyfus family. Picquart, though he had ceased to be an anti-Dreyfusard, seems to the end to have retained an anti-semitic feeling. In the interests of justice he fought to have Dreyfus cleared, but he did not wish the Jews to have the triumph.

But there could be no artificial divisions like that, and the circle closed. Leblois got into communication with an elderly statesman, Scheurer-Kestner, at that time Vice-President of the Senate, whom he told that Esterhazy was the probable culprit. At the same time Mathieu, who knew nothing of Esterhazy, had been circulating leaflets with a facsimile reproduction of the bordereau. One of these got into the hands of a banker, Castro, who recognised the writing as that of a former client, Esterhazy. He told Mathieu this, and Dreyfus's brother, knowing Scheurer-Kestner had a name up his sleeve, asked the statesman point blank if Esterhazy was the man. Scheurer-Kestner answered, "Yes."

The state of affairs was now decidedly awkward for the military men. It was awkward for Esterhazy himself. But the soldier of fortune was in his element. If he couldn't get out of a corner like that his name was not Esterhazy. He went along to the German Embassy and saw Von Schwartzkoppen. The German military attache - and for that matter, his confident, the Italian attache - had been on tenterhooks ever since the Dreyfus trial. He knew that an innocent man had been sent to living death on Devil's Island. But he could not clear him without revealing the name of the real informer - for a mere denial that he knew Dreyfus carried no weight at all. On the other hand, if he revealed the real culprit, he would not only be breaking confidence, but he would bring the German Embassy into disrepute by admitting it trafficked with spies. Moreover, the embassy would be unable to procure further informants. Now that a trial was brewing up against the real man, Esterhazy, Paris seemed no place for Schwartzkoppen.

Esterhazy came before the German diplomat in a state of acute depression. He implored the attache to save him; and this could be done, he said, if Schwartzkoppen would only go to Mme. Dreyfus and solemnly assure her that her husband was guilty. Schwartzkoppen, who, given his continuous dilemma, came very well out of the whole affair, refused. Esterhazy's threats about suicide did not worry him at all.

But Schwartzkoppen was a little surprised when shortly afterwards he received another visit from Esterhazy in quite a different mood. The spy was spruced up, with a flower in his buttonhole, the old gay, devil-may-care manner very much to the fore. He told Schwartzkoppen all was in order - the French General Staff had tucked him firmly under its wing.

And so it was, for in the two hours interval between Esterhazy's visits to the German Embassy, he had had a dramatic interview, well-suiting his colourful personality. Du Paty de Clam, through an emissary disguised in blue spectacles and a false beard, had made an appointment with Esterhazy in the park of Montsouris. Here, with the well-tried accomplice, Henry, standing guard, the two intriguers paced and plotted - for all the world like the wicked uncles in the Babes in the Wood. And the tenor of their talk was: all would be well - Du Paty de Clam and his men would defend Esterhazy - if Esterhazy would do nothing on his own initiative.

But though in this way, and with the help of a blackmailing document or two, threatening international complications, Esterhazy could prevent a government inquiry, he had still to reckon with separate action by the Dreyfus family. Possibly Esterhazy would have escaped this too. But he was cleverer than that - in fact Esterhazy shows up as by far the ablest tactician in the whole business. He decided that all the suspicion and intrigue was irksome and might positively get him into trouble. The thing to do was to have the trial - and, of course, the acquittal - and have done with the whole business.

So Esterhazy courteously, with the consent of his protector, de Clam, left the way open for the enemy to proceed. Then it was that the conscientious, but singularly blundering brother, Mathieu, made yet another false move - to the annoyance of Dreyfus's other, and as it were, parallel champion, Picquart, who had now been recalled to Paris. Mathieu charged Esterhazy with the treason imputed to Dreyfus, whereas he should have accused him of writing the bordereau. As it was, he subordinated the revision of the court-martial's judgment of 1894 to the preliminary condemnation of Ester hazy for treason.

With five-sixths of the country convinced of Dreyfus's guilt, with even fair-minded deputies impotent before the feeling of the electorate, with the accused primed beforehand in question and answer, with the show evidence given in public and the vital - and damning - evidence given in private - with all this, the result of the trial was never in doubt. Picquart was in the curious three-fold position of accused, prosecutor and witness. With the acquittal of the prisoner, Picquart was sentenced to sixty days fortress arrest, pending an inquiry into his conduct. Scheurer-Kestner, Dreyfus's political champion, lost the Vice-Presidency of the Senate. Esterhazy became a national hero, and chauvinism triumphed all along the line.

The real culprit was cleared for ever of the charge of having written the bordereau. Esterhazy was not abject, and the worst that can be said against him is that he was an opportunist. A letter to a former mistress produced in evidence against him at the trial, a letter he airily dismissed as a forgery, has something bracing about it.

"If any one came to me to-morrow and told me that I should fall at the head of a squadron of Uhlans, cutting down Frenchmen, God knows how happy I should be. Paris taken by storm and plundered by 100,000 drunken soldiers - that is a feast that I dream of..."

The expression of a passing rancour, probably - still, heartily felt and lustily expressed.

To the end of his days Esterhazy must have chuckled evilly when he thought of the Dreyfus case; and he lived on it ever afterwards, for when he was in dishonoured exile at the Hertford village of Harpendon, Esterhazy still managed to squeeze dregs of the episode into the Sunday papers.

Though the chauvinist camarilla had triumphed once more, the Esterhazy trial had an important result. For the first time the attention of French intellectuals was drawn to the case - or rather, the trial helped the cleverer men in the country to regain their senses. There is no need to list all the writers who took up the cause of Dreyfus, for one author stole their thunder. This was the novelist Zola. Whatever one may think of his painstaking literary saga about the Rougon-Macquarts, with its mixture of dull realism and crude melodrama, Zola certainly showed an intuitive grasp of the details of the Dreyfus intrigue. His reconstruction of the whole mad, sad story was correct in every essential. Zola, literary hero of the cause, takes his place with the barrister, Labori, the soldier Picquart, Scheurer-Kestner, the statesman, and Dreyfus's brother, Mathieu.

The novelist's world-famous letter, "J'Accuse," appeared, two days after Esterhazy's acquittal, in the Aurore a new paper sponsered by the brothers George and Albert Clemenceau. In it Zola, with scarcely a proved fact to work on, but with unerring judgment, picked out all the schemers, Mercier, the former War Minister, Boisdeffre and Gonse, Staff chiefs, Du Paty de Clam, Esterhazy; he sketched the motives and described the collusion between parties. There was a case for criminal libel a hundred times over in this letter. And a trial was just what Zola wanted. He got it. But the "Jesuits' Den," as he called the Ministry for War, managed to head off the belligerent novelist. The Minister for War declared himself and his colleagues above the abuse Zola had flung at them, and he arranged that the prosecution should be held only in defence of the members of the Esterhazy Court-Martial Zola had attacked. These members were for the most part innocent; they had been bamboozled like so many other people in this affair

The Zola trial, besides bringing forward all the old characters in the case once more - Picquart, Henry, Boisdeffre - and introducing some new ones - the brothers Clemenceau, Maitre Labori, Jaures - brought forth on the one side a crop of fresh lies, on the other some swiftly and shrewdly introduced blows for truth. Henry trotted out a new, "ultra-secret" document that turned out to be no less than the real, hallmarked, genuine original bordereau, never before published in any paper, because it had on it a marginal note by the Kaiser himself, in which the German Emperor mentioned Dreyfus by name. Following close on this revelation came another from General Pellieux, for the prosecution. He was stupid enough to make public the contents of the famous document liberateur. This, it will be remembered, contained an injunction from the Italian to the German military attache that both their governments should be kept in the dark about the embassies' traffic with Dreyfus.

Wild applause from the chauvinist-packed gallery greeted this communication, and no one asked how, if this document were genuine, the Kaiser came to know of Dreyfus at all at the time of the bordereau.

The defence struck back. Jaures told about the blackmailing letters with which Esterhazy and Du Paty de Clam had intimidated the government into withholding a prosecution. Picquart expatiated on his discovery of the petit bleu and gave a telling character sketch of Esterhazy. All this made little effect at the time and in a place crammed with people pathologically afraid of the Jews - but, ultimately, it all went into the balance against that fantastically-weighted side of the anti-Dreyfusards.

But for the popular press and for popular feeling the real sensation, the knock-out blow, was that annotation on the bordereau, written in the Kaiser's well-known hand. Photographs of this "original" text were secretly circulated among the less intelligent members of the populace. It was the more convincing because, just at that time, everybody in France was well acquainted with Wilhelm II.'s handwriting. It was the time when the Emperor, to explain Germany's imposing preparations for war, had pointed the world's eyes to the Far East and the menace to western civilisation represented by the Chinese. A booklet inspired by this conception was prominent on all Parisian bookstalls in 1898. Here, under the Kaiser's picture, was a facsimile reproduction of Wilhelm's message to the people of the west: "Volker Europas, wahret cure heiligsten Giiter. Wilhelm." (Peoples of Europe, defend your holy heritage). The wording of the Kaiser's alleged annotation to the bordereau ran, "Euer V... kerl Dreyfus soil es etwas eilig machen. Wilhelm," (your Dreyfus brute had better hurry up). The vulgar mind must have been all the more impressed because, letter for letter, the Kaiser's message in the Mongolian Menace booklet and his "annotation to the bordereau" almost coincided.