Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [110]
The arrest, trial, conviction and sentencing of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer assigned to the General Staff, which took place in the months October to December, 1894, was not a deliberate plot to frame an innocent man. It was the outcome of a reasonable suspicion acted on by dislike, some circumstantial evidence and instinctive prejudice. Evidence indicated betrayal of military secrets to Germany by some artillery officer on the General Staff. Dreyfus, besides fitting the requirements, was a Jew, the eternal alien: a natural suspect to absorb the stain of treason. As a person he was not liked by his brother officers. Stiff, silent, cold and almost unnaturally correct, he was without friends, opinions or visible feelings, and his officiousness on duty had already attracted unfavorable attention. These characteristics appeared sinister as soon as he came under suspicion. His appearance, the reverse of flamboyant, seemed the perfect cover for a spy. Of medium height and weight, medium brown hair, and medium age, thirty-six, he had a toneless voice, and unremarkable features distinguished only by rimless pince-nez, the fashionable form of eyeglasses in his milieu. His guilt was immediately presumed. When motive and material proof could not be found, the officers who were charged with the inquiry, especially Major Henry and Colonel du Paty de Clam, made up for it by helpful construction and fabrication. Certain that they were dealing with a vile traitor who had sold secrets of military defence to the traditional enemy, they felt justified in supplying whatever was needed to convict him. The dossier they assembled, later to be known as the “Secret File,” was persuasive enough to cause the General Staff chiefs sincerely to believe Dreyfus guilty, but it lacked legal proof. Knowing this, and dealing in a case particularly sensitive because of the involvement of Germany, and fearing the blackmail of the press, the then Minister of War, General Mercier, ordered, and the Government of which he was a member permitted, Captain Dreyfus’ court-martial to be held in camera. When the questions of the five military judges indicated their doubts, the Secret File was submitted to them and withheld from the defence. Convinced by these documents, the judges reached a unanimous verdict of guilty. The death penalty for political crimes having been abolished in 1848, the sentence was life imprisonment. On the prisoner’s refusal to confess and persistence in maintaining his innocence, he was ordered confined to Devil’s Island, one of three prison islands off the coast of South America used for desperate criminals. A barren rock two miles long and five hundred yards wide, it was cleared of all but guards to accommodate Dreyfus alone, in a stone hut under perpetual surveillance. The unanimity of the military court seemed confirmed by a published rumor that Dreyfus had confessed, which, as it passed from journal to journal, acquired the force of an official statement and satisfied the public.
The next three years were marked by intense efforts both to uncover and to conceal the truth. The long, painful struggle for judicial review, or “Revision,” as it was known, originated in the doubts of a few scattered individuals uneasy about the closed trial, who suspected a miscarriage of justice. They uncovered the illegality of the trial—on the basis of material not having been shown to the defence—and accumulated evidence pointing to the probable true culprit, a raffish and exotic officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy. Their pressures and pryings caused the officers originally responsible for constructing the case against Dreyfus to try to strengthen its weaknesses. Major Henry of the Counter-Espionage Bureau, which by nature dealt in forgery and extra-legal procedures, forged a letter, supposedly from the Italian military attaché, Major Panizzardi, to his German colleague, incriminating Dreyfus after the event, and on this letter, thereafter,