An Officer and a Spy

The third reconstituted letter is a note from Schwartzkoppen to Panizzardi:

P 16.4.94

My dear friend,

I am truly sorry not to have seen you before I left. Anyway, I will be back in eight days. I am enclosing twelve master plans of Nice which that lowlife D gave me for you. I told him that you did not intend to resume relations. He claims there was a misunderstanding and that he would do his utmost to satisfy you. He says that he had insisted you would not hold it against him. I replied that he was crazy and that I did not think you would resume relations with him. Do as you wish! I am in a hurry.

Alexandrine

Don’t bugger too much!!!

The final document, again handwritten, is a commentary on Dreyfus’s alleged career as a spy signed by du Paty. It attempts to draw together all these various scraps of evidence into a coherent story:

Captain Dreyfus began his espionage activities for the German General Staff in 1890, aged thirty, while undergoing instruction at the École Centrale de Pyrotechnie Militaire in Bourges, where he purloined a document describing the process for filling shells with melinite.

In the second half of 1893, as part of the stagiaire system, Captain Dreyfus was attached to the First Department of the General Staff. While there he had access to the safe containing the blueprints of various fortifications, including those at Nice. His behaviour throughout his attachment was suspicious. Enquiries have established that it would have been an easy matter for him to remove these plans when the office was unattended. These were passed to the German Embassy, and later forwarded to the Italian military attaché (see attached document: ‘that lowlife D’).

At the beginning of 1894 Dreyfus joined the Second Department. The presence there of a German spy was drawn to the attention of M. Guénée in March (see attached report by Major Henry). .

And that is all. I take the envelope and shake it out again, just to make sure. Can that really be it? I feel a sense of anticlimax, and even some anger. I have been duped. There is nothing in the so-called ‘secret file’ but circumstance and innuendo. Not one document or witness directly names Dreyfus as a traitor. The nearest it comes to incriminating him is an initial letter: ‘that lowlife D’.

I reread du Paty’s compilation of breezy non sequiturs. Does it actually make sense? I know the layout and procedures of the First Department. It would have been practically impossible for Dreyfus to have smuggled out undetected something the size of architectural plans. And even if he had, their absence would have been noticed immediately. And yet there have never been, to my knowledge, any complaints about stolen documents. So presumably Dreyfus must have copied them and then replaced them — is that the suggestion? But how did he have so many copies made so quickly? And how did he manage to smuggle the originals back into the safe again without being seen? The dates don’t fit, either. Dreyfus only joined the First in July 1893, yet according to Henry, Schwartzkoppen already had some stolen plans in his possession by June. And the German attaché’s description of D as ‘crazy’: is that a word one would apply to the meticulous Dreyfus, any more than one would call him ‘lowlife’?

I lock the file away in my safe.