Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

Henry looked at him with contempt. ‘It’s obvious you know nothing about intelligence, Mâitre Demange!’ He waved his cap at him. ‘There are some secrets an officer carries in his head that even his cap isn’t allowed to know!’

That brought Dreyfus to his feet again — ‘This is outrageous!’ — and once again Maurel gavelled for order.

‘Major Henry,’ said Maurel, ‘we will not demand the name, but do you affirm on your honour that the treasonous officer referred to was Captain Dreyfus?’

Henry slowly raised a fat and stubby forefinger and pointed to the picture of Christ above the judges’ heads. In a voice as fervent as a priest’s he proclaimed: ‘I swear it!’

I described the exchange to Mercier that evening.

He said, ‘You make it sound highly dramatic.’

‘I think one may safely say that if Major Henry ever leaves the army, the Comédie-Française will stand ready to receive him.’

‘But will his evidence have the desired effect?’

‘In terms of theatre it was first class. Whether it carries much weight legally is another question.’

The minister sat back low in his chair and made a steeple of his fingers. He brooded. ‘Who are the witnesses tomorrow?’

‘In the morning, the handwriting expert, Bertillon; in the afternoon, the defence is producing witnesses to Dreyfus’s good character.’

‘Who?’

‘Family friends — a businessman, a doctor, the Chief Rabbi of Paris-’

‘Oh, good God!’ cried Mercier. It was the first time I had seen him display emotion. ‘How absurd is this? Do you imagine the Germans would permit such a circus? The Kaiser would simply have a traitor in his army put against a wall and shot!’ He propelled himself out of his chair and went over to the fireplace. ‘This is one of the reasons why we lost in ’70 — we completely lack their ruthlessness .’ He picked up the poker and stabbed viciously at the coals, sending a spray of orange sparks whirling up the chimney. I was unsure how to respond, so I stayed silent. I confess I had some sympathy for his predicament. He was fighting a life-or-death battle, but without being able to deploy his best troops. After a while, still staring into the flames, he said quietly, ‘Colonel Sandherr has put together a file for the court martial. I’ve seen it. So has Boisdeffre. It proves the extent of Dreyfus’s crimes beyond any doubt. What do you think I should do with it?’

I replied without hesitation, ‘Show it to the court.’

‘We can’t — that would mean showing it to Dreyfus. We could, perhaps, show it to the judges, in confidence, so that they can see what we’re dealing with.’

‘Then I would do it.’

He glanced at me over his shoulder. ‘Even though it breaks all the rules of legal procedure?’

‘I can only say that if you don’t, there’s a chance he may be acquitted. Under the circumstances, some would say it is your duty.’

I was telling him what he wanted to hear. Not that it would have made any difference. He would have done it anyway. I left him still poking at his fire.

The following morning Bertillon gave his evidence. He came in laden with various charts and handwriting samples which he passed out to the judges, and to the defence and the prosecution. He set up an easel with a complicated diagram involving arrows. ‘Two handwriting experts,’ he said, ‘have maintained that Dreyfus wrote the bordereau ; two have pointed out discrepancies and concluded he did not. I, Monsieur President, shall reconcile these different opinions.’

He paced up and down the confined space, dark and hirsute, like a small ape in a cage. He talked very rapidly. Occasionally he pointed at the chart.

‘Gentlemen, you will see that I have taken the bordereau and ruled vertical and horizontal lines over it at a distance of five millimetres. What do we find? We find that the words that occur twice — manoeuvres, modifications, disposal, copy — all begin, within a millimetre, in exactly the same part of one of the squares I have ruled. There is a one-in-five chance that this might happen in any single case. The odds of it happening in all these cases are sixteen in ten thousand. The odds of it occurring with all the other words I have analysed are one hundred million to one! Conclusion: this could not happen with a naturally written document. Conclusion: the bordereau is forged.

‘Question: who forged it, and why? Answer: look again at the polysyllables repeated within the bordereau — manoeuvres, modifications . When you place one over the other, you find that the beginnings coincide while the ends do not. But shift the word that comes earliest a millimetre and a quarter to the right, and the ends coincide also. Gentlemen, the writing of Alfred Dreyfus supplied to me by the Ministry of War exhibits exactly the same peculiarities! And as for the differences between the culprit’s hand and the bordereau — the “o” and the double “s”, most obviously — imagine my astonishment when I found exactly these letter formulations in correspondence seized from the culprit’s wife and brother! Five millimetres reticulation, twelve point five centimetres gabarit and a millimetre and a quarter imbrication! Always you find it — always — always! Final conclusion: Dreyfus forged his own handwriting to avoid detection, by modifying it with formulations taken from his family!’

Dreyfus interrupted: ‘So the bordereau must have been written by me, both because it resembles my handwriting and because it doesn’t?’

‘Exactly!’

‘Then how can you ever be refuted?’

A good point. I had to suppress a smile. But although Bertillon may have seemed to Dreyfus and indeed to me an impostor, I could see he had impressed the judges. They were soldiers. They liked facts and diagrams and ruled squares and words like ‘reticulation’. One hundred million to one! Here was a statistic they could grasp.

At the lunchtime adjournment, du Paty approached me in the corridor. He was rubbing his hands. ‘I gather from several of the judges that Bertillon did well this morning. I do believe we have the scoundrel where we want him at last. What will you tell the minister?’

‘That Bertillon appears unhinged, and that I’m still not sure I would put the odds of a conviction at better than fifty-fifty.’

‘The minister told me of your pessimism. Of course it’s always easy to complain from the sidelines.’ Tucked beneath his arm he had a large manila envelope. He gave it to me. ‘This is from General Mercier for you.’

It wasn’t heavy. It felt as if it might contain perhaps a dozen sheets of paper. In the top right-hand corner was written in blue pencil a large letter ‘D’.

I said, ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

‘You are to give it to the president of the court before the end of the day, as discreetly as possible.’

‘What is it?’

‘You don’t need to know what it is. Just give it to him, Picquart, that’s all. And do try to be less defeatist.’

I took the envelope in with me to the afternoon session. I didn’t know where to put it. Under my seat? Beside it? In the end, I sat with it awkwardly on my lap as the defence called their character witnesses — a handful of officers, an industrialist, a physician, the Chief Rabbi of Paris in his Hebrew garb. Colonel Maurel, plainly feeling the effects of his piles, dealt with them briskly, especially the rabbi.

‘Your name?’

‘Dreyfuss-’

‘Dreyfus? You are a relative?’

‘No, a different family. We are Dreyfuss with two “s”s. I am the Chief Rabbi of Paris.’

‘Fascinating. What do you know about this case?’

‘Nothing. But I have known the family of the accused for a long time and I consider it to be an honest family. .’