An Officer and a Spy

However hard I try, I cannot recall our first meeting. I looked down from the lecture podium week after week at the same eighty faces and only gradually did I learn to distinguish his from the others: thin, pale, solemn, myopic in his pince-nez. He was barely thirty but his lifestyle and appearance made him seem much older than his contemporaries. He was a husband among bachelors, a man of means among the perennially hard-up. In the evenings when his comrades went out drinking he returned home to his smart apartment and his wealthy wife. He was what my mother would have called ‘a regular Jew’, by which she meant such things as ‘new money’, pushiness, social climbing and a fondness for expensive ostentation.

Twice Dreyfus tried to invite me to social functions: on the first occasion to dinner at his apartment on the avenue du Trocadéro and on the second to what he called ‘some top-class shooting’ he had rented out near Fontainebleau; on both occasions I declined. I didn’t much care for him, even less so when I discovered that the rest of his family had elected to remain in occupied Alsace, and that Germany was where his money came from: blood money, I thought it. At the end of one term, when I failed to award him the high marks for cartography he believed he deserved, he actually confronted me.

‘Have I done something to offend you?’ His voice was his least attractive feature: nasal and mechanical, with a grating trace of Mulhouse German.

‘Not at all,’ I replied. ‘I can show you my marking scheme if you like.’

‘The point is, you are the only one of my tutors who has given me a low mark.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps I don’t share your high opinion of your own abilities.’

‘So it’s not because I’m a Jew?’

The bluntness of the accusation took me aback. ‘I am scrupulous not to let any personal prejudices affect my judgement.’

‘Your use of the word “scrupulous” suggests it might be a factor.’ He was tougher than he looked. He stood his ground.

I replied coldly, ‘If you are asking, Captain, whether I like Jews particularly, the honest answer I suppose would be no. But if you are implying that because of that I might discriminate against you in a professional matter, I can assure you — never!’

That concluded the conversation. There were no more private approaches after that; no further invitations to dinner or to shooting, top-class or otherwise.

At the end of three years’ teaching, my gamble paid off and I was transferred from the École to the General Staff. There was talk even then of sending me to the Statistical Section: the skills of topography are a useful grounding for secret intelligence. But I fought hard to avoid becoming a spy. Instead I was made deputy chief of the Third Department (Training and Operations). And here I ran across Dreyfus again.

Those who graduate in the highest places from the École Supérieure are rewarded by a two-year attachment to the General Staff, consisting of six months in each of the four departments. It was part of my job to supervise the placement of these stagiaires, as they are called. Dreyfus had passed out ninth in his year. Therefore he was fully entitled to come into the Ministry of War. It fell to me to determine where he should go. He would be the only Jew on the General Staff.

It was a time of growing anti-Semitic agitation within the army, whipped along by that poisonous rag La Libre Parole, which alleged that Jewish officers were being given preferential treatment. Despite my lack of sympathy towards him, I took some care to try to protect Dreyfus from the worst of it. I had an old friend, Armand Mercier-Milon, a major in the Fourth Department (Movement and Railways), who was entirely free of prejudice. I had a word with him. The upshot was that Dreyfus went to the Fourth for his initial placement at the start of 1893. In the summer he moved on to the First (Administration); then at the beginning of 1894 to the Second (Intelligence); and finally in July he came to my department, the Third, to complete his rotation on the General Staff.