An Officer and a Spy

The prisoner was taken with a sudden burst of sobbing, and said, ‘It cannot last long; my heart will end by breaking.’ The prisoner always weeps when he receives his letters. (2 September 1895)

The prisoner sat for long hours today not moving. In the evening he complained of violent heart spasms, with frequent paroxysms of suffocation. He requested a medicine chest in order to make an end of his life when he could stand it no longer. (13 December 1895)

Gradually over the winter I discern that we do in fact have a policy with regard to Dreyfus, it has simply never been explained to me in so many words, either verbally or on paper. We are waiting for him to die.

6

The first anniversary of Dreyfus’s degradation comes and goes on 5 January 1896 with little comment in the press. There are no letters or petitions, no demonstrations for him or against. He seems to have been forgotten on his rock. Come the spring, I have been in charge of the Statistical Section for eight months, and all is calm.

And then, one morning in March, Major Henry asks to see me in my office. His eyes are pink and swollen.

‘My dear Henry,’ I say, laying aside the file I have been reading. ‘Are you all right? What is the matter?’

He stands in front of my desk. ‘I’m afraid I need to ask for some urgent leave, Colonel. I have a family crisis.’

I tell him to close the door and take a seat. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘There isn’t anything that can be done, Colonel, I’m afraid.’ He blows his nose on a large white handkerchief. ‘My mother is dying.’

‘Well, I’m extremely grieved to hear that. Is anyone with her? Where does she live?’

‘In the Marne. A little village called Pogny.’

‘You must go to her at once, and take as much leave as you need. Get Lauth or Junck to cover for your work. That’s an order. Each of us only has one mother, you know.’

‘You’re very kind, Colonel.’ He stands and salutes. We shake hands warmly; I ask him to pay my respects to his mother. After he has gone, I wonder briefly what she must be like, this pig farmer’s wife on the flatlands of the Marne, with her noisy soldier-son. It can’t have been an easy life, I imagine.

I don’t see my deputy again for about a week. But then late one afternoon there is a knock at my door and Henry enters carrying one of the bulging brown paper cones that signifies a delivery from Agent Auguste. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Colonel. I’m in a rush between trains. I just wanted to drop this off.’

I can feel at once from the weight of it that there is more than usual. Henry notices my surprise. ‘I’m afraid because of Mother I missed the last meeting,’ he confesses, ‘so I arranged for Auguste to make the drop today, during daylight hours for a change. That’s where I’ve just come from. I’ve got to get back to the Marne.’

It is on the tip of my tongue to issue a reprimand. I ordered him to hand his duties over to Lauth or Junck: surely someone else could have made the pickup, and done it in the darkness as usual, when there would have been less risk of our agent being seen? Besides, isn’t it a golden rule of intelligence — as he has often impressed upon me — that the faster information is processed, the more useful it is likely to prove? But Henry looks so haggard, having barely slept for a week, that I make no comment. I simply wish him bon voyage and lock the cone away in my safe, where it remains overnight until Captain Lauth comes in the next morning.

My relations with Lauth have not moved on from the first day we met: professional but cool. He is only a couple of years younger than I, clever enough, a German-speaker from Alsace: we ought to get on better than we do. But there is something Prussian about his blond good looks and stiffly upright figure that stops me warming to him. However, he is an efficient officer, and the speed with which he reconstructs these torn-up documents is phenomenal, so when I take the cone to his office I am polite as usual: ‘Would you mind attending to this now?’

‘Of course, Colonel.’

He dons his apron, and while he fetches his box of equipment from his cupboard, I empty the paper sack over his desk. Immediately my eye is caught by a sprinkling among the white and grey of several dozen pale blue fragments, like patches of sky on a cloudy day. I poke a couple with my forefinger. They are slightly thicker than normal paper. Lauth picks one up with his tweezers and examines it, turning it back and forth in the beam of his powerful electric lamp.