An Officer and a Spy

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