An Officer and a Spy

stink of his latrine and the eye-watering clinging pale smoke of the cooking fire built from wet green wood; above all I am hollowed by his loneliness. Devil’s Island is twelve hundred metres long by four hundred wide at its maximum point; it has a surface area of just one sixth of a square kilometre. It wouldn’t take long to map it. I wonder if he remembers what I taught him.
    After I have finished reading the file, I take up my pen and write a note to the Colonial Minister informing him that I have no comments to make.
    I place it in my out-tray. I sink back in my chair and think about Dreyfus.
    I became professor of topography at the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris when I was thirty-five. Some friends thought I was mad to take the post – I was already a battalion commander in Besançon – but I saw the opportunity: Paris is Paris, after all, and topography is the fundamental science of war. Could a battery at A bring fire to bear on N? Would the churchyard, village Z, be under fire of a battery at G? Could a picket be posted in the fields immediately east of N, unseen by an enemy’s vedette at G? I instructed my students in how to measure distances by counting their paces (the more rapid, the more accurate); how to survey terrain using a plane table or a prismatic compass; how to sketch the contours of a hill in red pencil using a Watkins clinometer or Monsieur Fortin’s mercurial barometer; how to bring the sketch alive by mixing in green or blue chalk scraped from a pencil in imitation of a flat wash of watercolour; how to use a pocket sextant, a theodolite, a sketching protractor; how to make an accurate representation from the saddle under fire. Among the students to whom I taught these skills was Dreyfus.
    However hard I try, I cannot recall our first meeting. I looked down from the lecture podium week after week at the same eighty faces and only gradually did I learn to distinguish his from the others: thin, pale, solemn, myopic in his pince-nez. He was barely thirty but his lifestyle and appearance made him seem much older than his contemporaries. He was a husband among bachelors, a man of means among the perennially hard-up. In the evenings when his comrades went out drinking he returned home to his smart apartment and his wealthy wife. He was what my mother would have called ‘a regular Jew’, by which she meant such things as ‘new money’, pushiness, social climbing and a fondness for expensive ostentation.
    Twice Dreyfus tried to invite me to social functions: on the first occasion to dinner at his apartment on the avenue du Trocadéro and on the second to what he called ‘some top-class shooting’ he had rented out near Fontainebleau; on both occasions I declined. I didn’t much care for him, even less so when I discovered that the rest of his family had elected to remain in occupied Alsace, and that Germany was where his money came from: blood money, I thought it. At the end of one term, when I failed to award him the high marks for cartography he believed he deserved, he actually confronted me.
    ‘Have I done something to offend you?’ His voice was his least attractive feature: nasal and mechanical, with a grating trace of Mulhouse German.
    ‘Not at all,’ I replied. ‘I can show you my marking scheme if you like.’
    ‘The point is, you are the only one of my tutors who has given me a low mark.’
    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps I don’t share your high opinion of your own abilities.’
    ‘So it’s not because I’m a Jew?’
    The bluntness of the accusation took me aback. ‘I am scrupulous not to let any personal prejudices affect my judgement.’
    ‘Your use of the word “scrupulous” suggests it might be a factor.’ He was tougher than he looked. He stood his ground.
    I replied coldly, ‘If you are asking, Captain, whether I like Jews particularly, the honest answer I suppose would be no. But if you are implying that because of that I might discriminate against you in a professional matter, I can assure you – never!’
    That concluded the conversation. There were no more private approaches after that; no further invitations to dinner or to shooting, top-class or otherwise.
    At the end of three years’ teaching, my gamble paid off and I was transferred from the École to the General Staff. There was talk even then of sending me to the Statistical Section: the skills of topography are a useful grounding for secret intelligence. But I fought hard to avoid