An Officer and a Spy

Days, nights, are all alike. I never open my mouth. I no longer ask for anything. My speech used to be limited to asking if my mail had come or not. But I am now forbidden to ask even that, or at least, which is the same thing, the guards are forbidden to answer even such commonplace questions. I wish to live until the day of the discovery of the truth, that I may cry aloud my grief at the torture they inflict on me. .

And again:

That they should take all possible precautions to prevent escape, I understand; it is the right, I will even say the strict duty, of the administration. But that they bury me alive in a tomb, prevent all communication with my family, even via open letters — this is against all justice. One would readily believe one is thrown back several centuries. .

And on the back of one intercepted and retained letter, written out several times as if he is trying to commit it to memory, is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Othello:

Who steals my purse steals trash. ’Tis something, nothing:

’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him

And makes me poor indeed.

As I turn the pages, I feel as if I am reading a novel by Dostoyevsky. The walls of my office seem to melt; I hear the ceaseless crash and roar of the sea on the rocks beneath his prison hut, the strange cries of the birds, the deep silence of the tropical night broken by the endless clumping of the guards’ boots on the stone floor and the rustle of the venomous spider crabs moving in the rafters; I feel the saturating furnace of the humid heat and the raw itch of the mosquito bites and ant stings, the doubling-over stomach cramps and blinding headaches; I smell the mouldiness of his clothes and his books destroyed by damp and insects, the stink of his latrine and the eye-watering clinging pale smoke of the cooking fire built from wet green wood; above all I am hollowed by his loneliness. Devil’s Island is twelve hundred metres long by four hundred wide at its maximum point; it has a surface area of just one sixth of a square kilometre. It wouldn’t take long to map it. I wonder if he remembers what I taught him.

After I have finished reading the file, I take up my pen and write a note to the Colonial Minister informing him that I have no comments to make.

I place it in my out-tray. I sink back in my chair and think about Dreyfus.

I became professor of topography at the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris when I was thirty-five. Some friends thought I was mad to take the post — I was already a battalion commander in Besançon — but I saw the opportunity: Paris is Paris, after all, and topography is the fundamental science of war. Could a battery at A bring fire to bear on N? Would the churchyard, village Z, be under fire of a battery at G? Could a picket be posted in the fields immediately east of N, unseen by an enemy’s vedette at G? I instructed my students in how to measure distances by counting their paces (the more rapid, the more accurate); how to survey terrain using a plane table or a prismatic compass; how to sketch the contours of a hill in red pencil using a Watkins clinometer or Monsieur Fortin’s mercurial barometer; how to bring the sketch alive by mixing in green or blue chalk scraped from a pencil in imitation of a flat wash of watercolour; how to use a pocket sextant, a theodolite, a sketching protractor; how to make an accurate representation from the saddle under fire. Among the students to whom I taught these skills was Dreyfus.