The Dreyfus Affair (30 page)

Esterhazy’s interest in ingratiating himself through Weil with Saussier was not to extract money but to further his career. A promotion to battalion commander meant a posting to Dunkirk, but he found life so far from Paris intolerable. After approaching the deputy Joseph Reinach and the Minister of War himself, Charles de Freycinet, he was transferred to the 74th Infantry Regiment in Rouen. But though Rouen was closer to Paris, he was bored there too, found garrison life insufferable and asked for a post at military headquarters on the rue Saint-Dominique in Paris. His request was refused.

With his career in the doldrums, Esterhazy’s financial plight remained acute. The only solution seemed to be a successful punt on the stock market. There was such political turbulence in the summer of 1894 that a fall in stocks seemed certain: President Carnot had been assassinated, France was poised to invade Madagascar, there was cholera in St Petersburg and war was likely between the Chinese and Japanese. Esterhazy bet heavily on a fall in Russian bonds and in the shares of the Ottoman Bank. But the shares in the Ottoman Bank remained static and the Russian bonds rose in value. As the settlement date at the end of July 1894 approached, it looked as if finally, for Esterhazy, the game was up.

2: Schwartzkoppen

Between three and four in the afternoon of 20 July 1894, Colonel Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the military attaché of the German Embassy at 78, rue de Lille, was told that a Frenchman had come to ask for his help in obtaining a visa to visit Alsace-Lorraine. Schwartzkoppen agreed to see him:

there entered a gentleman whom I recognized at once as a French officer in mufti. He seemed some 42 to 45 years old, and was of medium height and slightly built; he had drawn features, deep-set black eyes, a good head of greyish hair, and a strong moustache with streaks of grey in it. He had on a black overcoat, and was wearing the red stripe of the Legion of Honour in its buttonhole. As he came in he showed some embarrassment and nervousness; he looked gloomily around the room to make sure I was alone.

I asked him what he wanted, and he represented himself to me as a French staff officer on active service, compelled by necessity to take a step which, he said, would make him contemptible in my eyes, but which he had carefully considered and had simply got to take, in order to save his wife and children from certain downfall and destruction. He had been unfortunate, had made some unlucky speculations, and had been reduced to financial difficulties through his wife’s illness. He had a small property near Châlons, and if he was to be able to keep this for his family he had to get money in some way. He had tried every possible way to do this by straightforward and honourable means, but without success, and he had no resource left but to offer his services to the German General Staff, in the hope that in this way he would before long be put in a position to meet his manifold obligations. He had given careful thought to it, and this was absolutely the only way left to him; if it failed he must blow his brains out. The thought of his wife and children had kept him so far from doing this, although he could see perfectly well that it was really the right thing to do. He was in a very good position to render valuable service, as he had been for a considerable time in Algiers and was thoroughly familiar with military conditions there; he had also been stationed for a considerable time on the Italian frontier and had an exact knowledge of the frontier defences; in 1881 and 1882 he had served in the Intelligence Department at the Ministry of War. He was a friend of Colonel Sandherr, Head of the Intelligence Department, and had been at school with President Casimir-Perier. He was also a friend of the Deputy Jules Roche, who had promised to make him an Assistant Chief of Staff if he, Roche, became Minister of War. At the moment he was on regimental service outside Paris, but he would soon be returning to Paris and would then resume his many connections with the Ministry of War. In a few days he would be attending an important military exercise in camp at Châlons.
11

Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, in the memoir written eight years after the event and only published after his death, said that he was both astonished and shocked by Esterhazy’s offer. ‘A French staff officer on the active list unashamedly proposing to betray his country, and coolly asking a brother officer to arrange it for him!’ To establish his credentials, Esterhazy took from his breast-pocket a document which Schwartzkoppen claims to have returned to him unread saying it was out of the question that he should be party to treason, and advising him to leave and forget the whole thing.

Schwartzkoppen’s description of his disgust at Esterhazy’s proposition may be an accurate description of his true feelings, or it may have been a precaution in case Esterhazy had been sent to entrap him. It should also be seen in the light of his assurances to his Ambassador, Graf Münster von Derneburg, that he would not indulge in anything as dishonourable as espionage. However, Schwartzkoppen had a direct line to German Army intelligence and he reported Esterhazy’s offer to Major Müller, chief of the Nachrichtenbureau in Berlin. Müller told him to open negotiations with the officer who, on a subsequent unannounced visit on 27 July, introduced himself as Major the Comte Walsin-Esterhazy, battalion commander of the 74th Infantry Regiment stationed in Rouen. On 3 August, Schwartzkoppen went to Germany to see Major Müller, then on holiday at Michelstadt in the Odenwald, who suggested that he treat with Esterhazy, see what information was to be got from him and pay him according to results.

Schwartzkoppen returned to Paris on 6 August and saw Esterhazy at the Embassy on 13 and 15 August. On the first of these two visits, Schwartzkoppen returned the mobilisation instructions that Esterhazy had left with him, saying that they were valueless, but on the second visit Esterhazy produced a document outlining the General Instructions for the artillery on mobilisation which Schwartzkoppen realised would be of considerable interest to the German General Staff, and so he made his first payment to Esterhazy of 1,000 francs.

In his memoirs, Schwartzkoppen wanted to convey both the extreme reluctance with which he, a Prussian officer, took advantage of the treason of a French officer and the danger this posed, should the transaction be exposed, not just to his honour but to his position as military attaché in Paris. He also wanted to exculpate himself from the charge of negligence and so insisted that he had never received the list of documents offered by Esterhazy, the infamous
bordereau
. In his view it had been filched from the porter’s lodge at the German Embassy, presumably by Mme Bastian. He claimed that he learned of its existence only when he saw it reproduced in
Le Matin
in 1896.

Qui s’excuse, s’accuse
.
It is difficult to understand why Mme Bastian, as Schwartzkoppen suggested, should have torn up the
bordereau
‘to make it appear that it had come out of my waste-paper basket’.
12
Schwartzkoppen was an able and intelligent officer but, with his complex love-life involving the Italian military attaché Panizzardi and the wife of the Dutch Counsellor, Hermance de Weede, it seems probable that he did indeed throw the compromising document into his waste-paper basket, and that both the
bordereau
and the
petit bleu
did reach the Statistical Section by the ‘ordinary route’.

In his memoirs, Schwartzkoppen acknowledged that the final sentence of the
bordereau
– ‘I am off on manoeuvres’
–
which the Statistical Section had such difficulty in linking to Dreyfus, referred to Esterhazy’s leaving for artillery exercise in Châlons. The documents listed in the
bordereau
were indeed provided by Esterhazy, and from 13 October onwards he made fortnightly visits to the German Embassy, bringing secret documents, some with commentaries, including one which revealed the contempt Esterhazy felt for the French Army – ‘a fine bit of stage scenery, charming and deceptive; one imagines that there is something behind; one pricks it; there is nothing!’
13

Reassured that Esterhazy was what he seemed, and not a French agent sent to entrap him, Schwartzkoppen still had to guard against being duped. Esterhazy had initially asked for a monthly retainer of 2,000 francs but Schwartzkoppen, on Müller’s instructions, paid only what he thought a particular item was worth. It was difficult to see how the battalion commander of an infantry regiment stationed in Rouen, even if sent on training sessions to the French military base at Châlons, could have access to any particularly valuable information; yet it was precisely because of the secret nature of the documents itemised in the
bordereau
that Colonel Sandherr and his colleagues at the Statistical Section felt sure that its author must be on the General Staff. What they failed to appreciate was just how much of this supposedly secret information was in fact in the public domain. As Marcel Thomas has established, the documents promised by the
bordereau
‘were not of capital importance’ and Esterhazy could have had access to them without belonging to the General Staff.
14

There was, then, an element of double bluff in the traffic of secret documents between Esterhazy and Schwartzkoppen. As Thomas points out, Esterhazy’s real talent was as a journalist, and the material he supplied to Schwartzkoppen was much the same as he provided for Commandant Biot, the military correspondent of
La Libre Parole
. Esterhazy’s talent lay not in furnishing secret documents which he was in fact in no position to obtain, but in collating details gleaned from technical journals and matching them with stories he had picked up from other journalists or fellow officers whom he met through Weil, or who belonged to the circle around
L’Épée et la Plume
,
on proposed reforms to the army, plans for changes in the military hierarchy and the founding of a separate army in North Africa.

No doubt Esterhazy would have been quite prepared to sell vital secrets to the Germans, but, in Thomas’s view, because he had no access to these vital secrets, ‘it is less certain that he was a traitor in the juridical sense of the term’.
15
It is therefore possible that, when he came to be named as a traitor, his outrage was not wholly feigned.

Nor, it would seem, was Schwartzkoppen duped by Esterhazy because it was clear from the start – despite Esterhazy’s boast of useful contacts in the High Command – that he was not himself in a position to get hold of secret documents of major importance. However, the information he did provide was useful to Schwartzkoppen as pieces of a jigsaw which, when pieced together with what he learned from other sources – from other agents; from studying specialist military magazines or articles in the press for which he employed a secretary to assist him; from the weekly briefings of Colonel de Sancy, the War Ministry’s liaison officer with foreign military attachés; and even from snatches of conversation with friends and acquaintances among French officers such as Major du Paty de Clam – formed a comprehensive picture of France’s military capability.
16

When Dreyfus was arrested in October 1894 and subsequently tried, condemned, degraded and deported, it does not seem to have occurred to Schwartzkoppen that it was a case of mistaken identity, and that Dreyfus was paying for Esterhazy’s crime. The court martial was held
in camera
and so, though there were stories in the press that the evidence against Dreyfus emanated from the German Embassy, no one outside the court saw the
bordereau
. Schwartzkoppen was therefore able to assure his Ambassador, Graf Münster von Derneburg, with complete sincerity, that he had never had any contact with any Captain Dreyfus and that the allegations made against the German Embassy in the French press were false.

On 25 December 1894, Münster had issued a statement to that effect: ‘The German Embassy has never had the slightest dealing, whether direct or indirect, with Captain Dreyfus. No document originating with him has been stolen from the Embassy, and no demand was made for the trial to be held behind closed doors.’ Schwartzkoppen had gone to Berlin and on 27 December was summoned to a meeting with the Imperial Chancellor, Prince Hohenlohe, the Chief of the Army’s General Staff, and the Kaiser himself at which he repeated how baffled he was by the whole affair. However, the attacks on Germany in the French press increased in virulence and on 6 January Münster held a meeting at his request with the French President, Casimir-Perier, at which they arrived at a formula for a joint statement which, if it did not deny the fact that evidence of treason had emanated from the German Embassy, exonerated that Embassy from any responsibility for what may have arrived through the post (see p. 116–7 above).

Nor does it seem to have occurred to Esterhazy that Dreyfus had been mistaken for him. Throughout the period when the French were being driven to hysteria by the nationalist press as a result of the discovery of a spy in the French officer corps, Esterhazy continued his delivery of secret information to Schwartzkoppen. He cashed in on the hysteria, writing an article for
La Libre Parole
, in July 1895, denouncing German espionage.
17
The material he provided for Schwartzkoppen was often just gossip he had picked up in military circles – for example, that the new Minister of War, Godefroy Cavaignac, intended to replace General Saussier, and was planning to form an autonomous army in Algeria with its own High Command.