So that nobody in the world except the judges and the prosecuting attorney can know exactly why and on what Dreyfus was convicted. Unhappily, they are bound by professional secrecy, and so I do not see how our confrère, “Le Jour,” will be able to give any interest to its investigation.
Yes, traitors are abominable beings, who should be pitilessly shot like wild beasts; but, for the very reason that the punishment incurred is the more frightful and the more deserved, and carries with it no pity, it should not have been possible for the cowardice of the government with reference to Germany to have left us in a horrible doubt which authorizes us to ask ourselves sometimes if really there is not on Devil’s Island a human being undergoing in innocence a superhuman torture. Such doubt is a frightful thing, and it will continue, because publicity of trial furnishes the only basis for a revision. Now there is no revision. There is no appeal from a sentence wrapped in artificial and deliberate darkness.
“That is what M. de Cassagnac said, and, when he wrote it, he did not know what you have learned during the last fortnight. You see, then, the source of the campaign to which Colonel Picquart alluded in one of his letters to General Gonse. It is not the article in ‘L’Eclair,’ for those letters appeared before September 15. It is these articles that I have just read you; the Dreyfusian campaign, there you have it. The article in ‘L’Eclair,’ in which the name of Dreyfus was falsely written in full, was simply an infamy resorted to to stop that campaign.
“But, whatever the energy and the devotion of the men who undertook this work, it would have come to nothing, if in the staff which has played so prominent a part in the case there had not been found an admirable man,—a soldier, he too, like the others. He has been treated shamefully. Insults have been heaped upon him here which seem to me unworthy of the eminent soldiers whence they came. But the purity of his soul has enabled him to rise above interests, above mere esprit de corps, to the more elevated regions of the ideal and of humanity. I refer to Colonel Picquart. He has remained calm; he has remained silent. He has not violated the iron countersign which he, as a soldier, respects. But I know well that, from the broader and more general standpoint of humanity, he will come out of this case increased in stature. I must say a word to you, gentlemen, of his military antecedents and his life. He is now in command of the Fourth Algerian; he is forty-three years of age; at thirty-two he was in command of a battalion; he left the war school a breveted officer; he is a knight of the legion of honor; he was formerly a professor in the war school; he was chief of the third bureau of the staff office, then chief of the bureau of information, and, finally, in April, 1896, was made a lieutenant-colonel. And a fact that makes it vain for his superior officers to try to ruin him is that he was especially appointed, and is the youngest lieutenant-colonel in the French army. Moreover, gentlemen, Colonel Picquart was delegated by his superiors to follow the Dreyfus trial before the council of war of 1894. That will tell you whether he knows the case or not. He too,—at least, I imagine so,—believed in the guilt of Dreyfus. But after the departure of Dreyfus what has been picturesquely called the ‘flights’—that is, the disappearances, the departures, the thefts of documents—continued. Then, gentlemen, his suspicion was aroused.
“In May, 1896, or, at any rate, in the spring of 1896, he discovered the famous dispatch that has been mentioned here. Certain agents bring to the war department—and here, if I commit errors of detail, it will be due solely to the fact that complete explanations have not been given at this bar; if my errors should now provoke them, I should congratulate myself upon it, and accept the corrections,—certain agents bring to the war department cornucopias or packages containing fragments of papers, taken wherever documents coming from the enemy are liable to be found, papers some of which are without interest, but others of which are of value, mixed up by the agents, who take them en masse and deliver them to one of their superiors, who sorts them, in order to find out if there is anything of value among them. The important point is the origin of these packages. What gives them their value is their source, the fact that they are taken on territory where everything that is found, really or fictitiously, has a special value. Before Colonel Picquart became chief of the information service, as we have been given to understand, these packages were handed to Colonel Henry, then major, who, in turn, after sorting them, transmitted them, because he did not know foreign languages, to Captain Lauth, now major. When Colonel Picquart became chief of the bureau, he changed his method of procedure. He asked that these packages be given to him. It was his right. Colonel Sandherr died of general paralysis. He had already been a victim of it for sometime, when Colonel Picquart succeeded him. Colonel Picquart was chosen for this eminent post because they had the fullest confidence in him. And, if he took it upon himself to conduct the services a little more strictly than had been the custom, it was because he intended to give it the closest personal attention.
“You know, gentlemen, what happened in this special matter of the dispatch, addressed to Major Esterhazy. One day a package of documents was handed to Colonel Picquart, and, some days after, Colonel Picquart gave this dispatch to Major Lauth that he might reassemble the fifty-nine or sixty pieces into which it was torn. It was very natural that this document should be given to Major Lauth, for operations of this character were one of his duties.
“What was this dispatch, and what was its value? In itself—and this is a very important point—it had no value at all. Here is the text, with which you are as yet unfamiliar. The document was publicly read during the Esterhazy trial.
I await, first of all, an explanation more detailed than that which you gave me the other day regarding the question at issue. Consequently I beg you to give it to me in writing, in order that I may judge whether I should continue my relations with the R establishment or not.
“This little document, taken from the mails, is of value only on condition that its source is the same as that of the documents in the package of which I have just spoken, that source being a foreign embassy, an enemy’s territory. Coming from that source, the document at once takes on a special importance, for it shows that the embassy in question is in relations with the person to whom it is addressed.”
The Judge.—“Make no reference to that.”