An Officer and a Spy

either way, and neither should you. I did as I was told. You order me to shoot a man and I’ll shoot him. You tell me afterwards you got the name wrong and I should have shot someone else – well, I’m very sorry about that, but it’s not my fault.’ He pours us both another cognac. ‘You want my advice? Well here’s a story. When my regiment was in Hanoi, there was a lot of thieving in the barracks. So one day my major and I, we laid a trap and we caught the thief red-handed. It turned out he was the son of the colonel – God knows why he needed to steal from the likes of us, but he did it. Now my major – he was a bit like you, a little bit of the idealistic type, shall we say – he wanted this man prosecuted. The top brass disagreed. Still, he went ahead and brought the case anyway. But at the court martial it was my major that was broken. The thief went free. A true story.’ Henry raises his glass to me. ‘That’s the army we love.’

15
    THE FOLLOWING MORNING when I go into the office, the Dreyfus file is on my desk – not the secret dossier but the Colonial Office record, which continues to be sent over regularly for my comments.
    There have been two security scares about Dreyfus in recent weeks. First there was the English newspaper report that the prisoner had escaped. Then there was a letter addressed to him posted in the rue Cambon and signed with a name that looked like ‘Weiler’ that contained a message supposedly written in invisible ink: Impossible to decipher last communication. Return to the former procedure in your answer. Indicate precisely where the documents are and how the cupboard can be unlocked. Actor ready to move immediately. Dreyfus’s guards were ordered to observe him closely after he was handed this letter. He merely frowned and put it aside.Manifestly he had never heard of ‘Weiler’. Both we and the Sûreté were in agreement that this was just a malicious hoax.
    Yet as I turn the pages of the file I see that the episodes have been used by the Colonial Ministry as a pretext to make Dreyfus’s confinement much harsher. For the past three weeks he has been clapped in irons every night. There is even an illustration of the contraption shipped over from the penal colony in Cayenne that is used to restrain him. Two U-shaped irons are fixed to his bed. His ankles are put into these at sundown. A bar is then inserted through the irons and padlocked. He is left in this position until dawn. In addition, a double perimeter fence of heavy timber is being erected around his hut to a height of two and a half metres. The inner fence is only half a metre from his window. Therefore his view of the sea is entirely cut off. And during the day he is no longer allowed access to the island beyond the second perimeter fence. The bare narrow space of rock and scrub between the two walls, in which there are no trees or shade, is now the entirety of his world.
    As usual, the file contains an appendix of Dreyfus’s confiscated writings:
Yesterday evening I was put in irons. Why, I know not. Since I have been here, I have always scrupulously observed the orders given me. How is it I did not go crazy during the long, dreadful night? (7 September 1896)
These nights in irons! I do not even speak of the physical suffering, but what moral ignominy, and without any explanation, without knowing why or for what cause! What an atrocious nightmare is this in which I have lived for nearly two years! (8 September)
Put in irons when I am already watched like a wild beast night and day by a guard armed with rifle and revolver! No, the truth should be told. This is not a security precaution. This is a measure of hatred and torture, ordered from Paris by those who, not being able to strike a family, strike an innocent man, because neither he nor his family will accept submissively the most frightful judicial error that has ever been made. (9 September)
    I am disinclined to read any further. I have seen what the chafing of leg-irons can do to a prisoner’s flesh: cut it to the bone. In the insect-infested heat of the tropics, the torment must be unendurable. For a moment my pen hovers over the file. But in the end I simply mark it ‘Return to the Colonial Ministry’ and sign the circulation slip without comment.
    Later that day I attend a meeting in Gonse’s office to settle last-minute security details for the Tsar’s visit. Sombre-faced men from the Interior and Foreign Ministries, the Sûreté and