An Officer and a Spy

and Italian military attachés. I asked for the name of this officer, but he could not tell me. He said: ‘I am sure of what I say but I do not know the officer’s name.’ Following my report of this conversation to Colonel Sandherr, new orders were issued for a much more rigorous surveillance. It was during this period, on 25 September, that the bordereau that forms the basis of the Dreyfus case came into our possession.
(Signed)
Henry, Hubert-Joseph (Major)
    The next three documents are original, glued-together papers purloined from Schwartzkoppen’s waste-paper basket: raw intelligence presumably included to buttress Henry’s statement. The first is written in German, in Schwartzkoppen’s own hand, and appears to be a draft memorandum, either for his own use or for his superiors in Berlin, jotted down after he was first approached by the would-be traitor. He has torn it into extra fine pieces; there are tantalising gaps:
Doubt . . . Proof . . . Letter of service . . . A dangerous situation for myself with a French officer . . . Must not conduct negotiations personally . . . Bring what he has . . . Absolute . . . Intelligence Bureau . . . no relation . . . Regiment . . . only importance . . . Leaving the ministry . . . Already elsewhere . . .
    The second reassembled document is a letter to Schwartzkoppen from the Italian military attaché, Major Alessandro Panizzardi. It is written in French, dated January 1894, and begins My dear Bugger .
I have written to Colonel Davignon again, and that is why, if you have the opportunity to broach this question with your friend, I ask you to do so in such a way that Davignon doesn’t come to hear of it . . . for it must never be revealed that one has dealings with another.
Goodbye my good little dog,
Your A
    Davignon is the deputy head of the Second Department – the officer responsible for briefing the various foreign military attachés and arranging their invitations to manoeuvres, receptions, lectures and so forth. I know him well. His integrity is, as they say, above reproach.
    The third reconstituted letter is a note from Schwartzkoppen to Panizzardi:
P 16.4.94
My dear friend,
I am truly sorry not to have seen you before I left. Anyway, I will be back in eight days. I am enclosing twelve master plans of Nice which that lowlife D gave me for you. I told him that you did not intend to resume relations. He claims there was a misunderstanding and that he would do his utmost to satisfy you. He says that he had insisted you would not hold it against him. I replied that he was crazy and that I did not think you would resume relations with him. Do as you wish! I am in a hurry.
Alexandrine
Don’t bugger too much!!!
    The final document, again handwritten, is a commentary on Dreyfus’s alleged career as a spy signed by du Paty. It attempts to draw together all these various scraps of evidence into a coherent story:
Captain Dreyfus began his espionage activities for the German General Staff in 1890, aged thirty, while undergoing instruction at the École Centrale de Pyrotechnie Militaire in Bourges, where he purloined a document describing the process for filling shells with melinite.
In the second half of 1893, as part of the stagiaire system, Captain Dreyfus was attached to the First Department of the General Staff. While there he had access to the safe containing the blueprints of various fortifications, including those at Nice. His behaviour throughout his attachment was suspicious. Enquiries have established that it would have been an easy matter for him to remove these plans when the office was unattended. These were passed to the German Embassy, and later forwarded to the Italian military attaché (see attached document: ‘that lowlife D’).
At the beginning of 1894 Dreyfus joined the Second Department. The presence there of a German spy was drawn to the attention of M. Guénée in March (see attached report by Major Henry) . . .
    And that is all. I take the envelope and shake it out again, just to make sure. Can that really be it? I feel a sense of anticlimax, and even some anger. I have been duped. There is nothing in the so-called ‘secret file’ but circumstance and innuendo. Not one document or witness directly names Dreyfus as a traitor. The nearest it comes to incriminating him is an initial letter: ‘that lowlife D’.
    I reread du Paty’s compilation of breezy non sequiturs. Does it actually make sense? I