The Dreyfus Affair (15 page)

The best du Paty could come up with in his search for a motive was the admission by Lucie Dreyfus, when questioned further, that ‘Dreyfus had been made ill by his disappointment at being marked down on graduating from the École de Guerre’; that he had had nightmares, and had said over and over again: ‘What is the point of serving in this army when, however hard one tries, one’s merit will not be rewarded?’ When confronted with this, Dreyfus admitted that ‘perhaps on leaving the École, I had a moment of discontent which I shared with my wife. There is nothing more natural than that.’
10
It was no doubt natural, but the idea of taking revenge on an army that had spurned him was not just the most plausible but the only motive du Paty could suggest.

Du Paty remained certain that Alfred Dreyfus was the traitor who had written the
bordereau
, but his failure to get him to admit his guilt after interminable interrogation made him see that there was insufficient evidence to gain a conviction. On 27 October the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, at a meeting in his office with Sandherr, Henry and du Paty, chastised his cousin for his failure to build a case against Dreyfus. ‘You’ve got nowhere with your Dreyfus. You’ve got nothing. You must surely realise that all your moral certainties, all your deductions, your expertise in handwriting, don’t make up for the lack of a clear confession. That’s what you must get and, if you can come up with nothing more than that scrap of paper, General Saussier is quite capable of refusing to sign an order to proceed.’

According to his own account of this meeting, du Paty replied with an equal vehemence, ‘Allow me to say,
mon général
, that the man you call “my Dreyfus” is also yours; and what you call “my scrap of paper” is the basis of the inquiries which you told me to pursue, and is the only material proof which you have shown me . . . I am unable to say that I have found any others in Dreyfus’s home: I am unable to say that he has confessed. So, if the moral certainty is judged insufficient, if the material evidence is too weak, the solution is simple: we must let him go.’
11

Two days later, du Paty wrote a formal letter to General de Boisdeffre confirming what he had said at the meeting. On 31 October, he wrote to the same effect to the Minister of War, General Mercier. He told him that he remained convinced of the guilt of Dreyfus but there was not enough proof to convict him. He recommended that he be released.

2: The Secret File

General Mercier faced a dilemma. He had recently been defeated in the Chamber of Deputies on a number of issues; politically his position was precarious.
12
The charge that he had been soft on the Jewish doctor, Schulmann, was repeated over and over again in the right-wing press. He had exceeded his powers in ordering the arrest of Dreyfus without the authorisation of General Saussier. Mercier had enemies both within the army and in the Chamber who were ready to pounce on any mistake he might make. It was already clear that the Prime Minister, Dupuy, would ask for his resignation if the premature arrest of a French officer was exposed by the release of Dreyfus.

But Dreyfus’s arrest could not be kept secret. On the very day that Mercier received du Paty’s letter, 31 October, the Havas news agency reported the arrest of ‘an officer suspected of having communicated to a foreign power some unimportant but nevertheless confidential documents’. The next day, 1 November, the story was picked up by
La Libre Parole
and published under the headline ‘High Treason. Arrest of a Jewish officer A. Dreyfus’. The acting editor, Adrien Papillaud, had received an anonymous letter on 28 October which read as follows:

My dear friend. You see, what I told you is quite correct. The man arrested on the 15th on a charge of espionage, and who has been imprisoned in the Cherche-Midi, is Captain Dreyfus, living at 6, avenue du Trocadéro. It has been put about that he has gone on a journey, but that is a lie to hush up the affair. All Israel is in a state of ferment.
13

The die was cast. If Mercier were now to free Dreyfus, he would be accused, as in the case of Schulmann, of being in the pay of the Jews. He would also lose face with his cabinet colleagues, particularly the Foreign Minister Hanotaux, who had advised him to drop the case against Dreyfus. On 3 November, at Mercier’s instigation, General Saussier finally signed the order to proceed against Captain Alfred Dreyfus and appointed a Commandant Besson d’Ormescheville as the examining magistrate.

Saussier’s acquiescence in Mercier’s plans is puzzling. He had rebuked Forzinetti for imprisoning Dreyfus without his authorisation. ‘If you weren’t my friend,’ Saussier had said, ‘I’d send you to prison for two months for having accepted a prisoner without my orders.’
14
Could Saussier have intervened because of the irregularity of the process leading to Dreyfus’s arrest? At a shooting party at Marly, he had told the French President, Jean Casimir-Perier: ‘Dreyfus is not guilty. That fool Mercier has put his finger in his own eye again.’ Quite possibly Saussier, frequently attacked in
La Libre Parole
for protecting the Jewish officer Maurice Weil, did not want to make things more difficult for himself by intervening in the case of another Jew, Alfred Dreyfus; or, more probably, as he suggested to Casimir-Perier, he was confident that if he let the thing run, it would lead to the fall of his adversary, General Mercier.

The military investigating magistrate, Commandant Besson d’Ormescheville, held twelve sessions between 7 and 23 November 1894. Although appointed by the sceptical Saussier, d’Ormescheville appears to have accepted from the start the view of the Statistical Section and the General Staff that Dreyfus was guilty and so saw it as his duty to draw up an irrefutable case against him. Perhaps, like so many officers in the French Army, he believed that espionage by a Jewish officer was an accident waiting to happen; or he had been influenced by reading a trashy novel set in the War Ministry that had been serialised in
Le Petit Journal
during the summer and featured spies, artillery officers, former Polytechniciens, bellicose journalists and devious Jewish gamblers.
15
Or perhaps he was intimidated. ‘I know’, wrote a correspondent in
La Libre Parole
, ‘that someone has dared to offer a million francs to the investigating magistrate if he agrees, not necessarily to conclude that Dreyfus is innocent, but simply to cast doubt on his culpability.’
16

For whatever reason, d’Ormescheville certainly did not work on the case with an open mind. He went through the police reports, interviewed witnesses and interrogated the accused, putting the same questions, often word for word, as du Paty de Clam. He looked into information gathered by Guénée about Dreyfus’s life in the
demi-monde
– some of it accurate but much of it untrue. Dreyfus’s accounts were examined in detail and revealed nothing irregular. A police report that Dreyfus was not known in gambling cirles was ‘lost’ in the Prefecture and so was never submitted to d’Ormescheville. D’Ormescheville accepted du Paty’s view that Gobert, the handwriting expert of the Banque de France, could not be trusted because of the bank’s links with Jewish financiers, and judged his opinion no more authoritative than that of Colonels Fabre and d’Aboville.
17

D’Ormescheville looked into Dreyfus’s two years at the École de Guerre. His failure to make friends among his fellow students was considered sinister: his companions remembered him as awkward, obsequious, indiscreet and inordinately pleased with himself. Everything for which Dreyfus was once commended by his teachers was now used against him. His eagerness to learn became an incriminating curiosity; it was remembered that he hung around in offices and asked to see documents which often went missing: ‘wherever he passed, documents disappeared’.
18
His remarkable memory was a tool for espionage; so too his knowledge of German and Italian.

This same inversion was applied to the failure of the investigators to find anything incriminating among Dreyfus’s private possessions.

The search of his residence yielded more or less the results that he claimed it would. But it is legitimate to suspect that if no letter, even from family members . . . and no bill, even from tradesmen, was found in the search, it was because anything that might have been in any way compromising had been hidden or already destroyed.

Assisted by du Paty in preparing his report, d’Ormescheville accepted his Alice in Wonderland logic that the absence of evidence was a sign of guilt. He also suggested that, because Dreyfus had the character and temperament that you might expect to find in a spy, he was a spy.

He is . . . of a rather supple – even obsequious – character, quite suited for relations of espionage with foreign agents. He was thus the perfect choice for the miserable and shameful mission that he either inspired or accepted and to which – quite luckily for France, perhaps – the discovery of his intrigues has put an end.

On 3 December, Commandant d’Ormescheville presented his report (
acte d’accusation
) to General Saussier, who the next day signed the order for Dreyfus’s court martial.

Throughout November 1894, when d’Ormescheville was conducting his investigations, the right-wing press had been feasting on the leaks emanating from the War Ministry, and hounding its chief, General Mercier. On 4 November,
La Libre Parole
published a long list of Mercier’s failings as Minister of War, leading up to the uncovering of a Jewish spy on the General Staff. ‘We have, nevertheless, a consolation: it was not a true Frenchman who committed the crime.’
19
On 9 November the same paper published a statement from General de Bonnefond, the officer who had marked Dreyfus down at the École de Guerre: ‘You know . . . we buy our information about foreign armies [from] Italian Jews, German Jews, Rumanian Jews . . . Why would a French Jew behave any differently from the others?’
20
Also on the 9th,
La Patrie
linked Dreyfus to Schwartzkoppen, the German military attaché, which led to a letter in
Le Figaro
the following day from the German Ambassador, Graf Münster von Derneburg, stating that ‘Never has Lieutenant-Colonel von Schwartzkoppen received letters from Dreyfus. Never has he had any relations, either direct or indirect, with him. If this officer is found guilty of the crime of which he is accused, the German Embassy is not mixed up in the afffair.’

On 22 November,
La Libre Parole
laid into Mercier once again:

The Dreyfus affair has taken a nasty turn for the government. We have spoken to several senior officers, all of whom have replied by presenting the following dilemma: either General Mercier has arrested Captain Dreyfus without proof, in which case his superficiality is a crime; or he has allowed evidence of his treason to be lost, in which case his negligence is a crime. In both cases, General Mercier is unworthy of the post he holds. In such a situation, one can be guilty of stupidity as well as of a crime.
21

Mercier was well aware of this dilemma, and on 28 November he gave an interview to a journalist on
Le Figaro
,
Charles Leser. ‘It is said that Captain Dreyfus offered documents to the Italian government. This is wrong. It is impossible for me to say anything more because of the current investigation. All that I can say is that his guilt is absolute, it is certain.’
22

By this highly irregular intervention in the judicial process, Mercier had laid down his marker and so, when it came to the court martial, nothing could be left to chance. It was now that this ‘republican’ general favoured by the left decided to compile a secret dossier of dubious evidence that would strengthen the case against Dreyfus.
23
Colonel Sandherr was happy to co-operate. He too feared for his position and for the reputation of the Statistical Section, if it was shown that it had jumped to the wrong conclusion in a precipitate way: its methods had recently been attacked in the conservative journal,
France Militaire
.
24

Sandherr also felt that he possessed corroborative evidence that seemed to implicate Dreyfus directly. A French agent, Richard Cuers, working in the German counter-intelligence agency, the Nachrichtenbureau, had informed the head of his network in Brussels, Laboux, that a decorated officer was paying visits to Colonel von Schwartzkoppen in Paris and was in in his pay. Laboux passed the information back to Sandherr. Who else could this refer to but Dreyfus?

Sandherr was no fool. He knew as well as du Paty that there was no irrefutable evidence against Dreyfus. If he had not been under pressure from Mercier to nail Dreyfus, would he have dropped the case? Probably not. There was a spy in the officer corps of the French Army; information from Cuers and Val Carlos, the agent in the Spanish Embassy, warned of this, and the
bordereau
confirmed it. It also suggested that the spy had access to secrets from the different
bureaux
of the General Staff. The interns had such access. Dreyfus was therefore a suspect, and those suspicions were confirmed by the opinion of three out of the five expert graphologists who had by now been consulted that his handwriting and that of the
bordereau
were the same.