An Officer and a Spy

by Robert Harris

  Billot interjects a number of shrewd questions. How valuable is this material? Why didn’t Esterhazy’s commanding officer notice something strange about him? Are we sure he’s operating alone? He keeps returning to the image of Esterhazy emerging empty-handed from the embassy. At the end he says, ‘Perhaps we should try to do something clever with the scum? Rather than simply lock him up, couldn’t we use him to feed false information to Berlin?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that. The trouble is, the Germans are already suspicious of him. It’s unlikely they’d simply swallow whatever he told them without checking it for themselves. And of course—’

  Billot finishes my argument for me. ‘And of course, to get him to play along, we’d have to give him immunity from prosecution, whereas the only place for the likes of Esterhazy is behind bars. No, you’ve done well, Colonel.’ He shuts the file and hands it back to me. ‘Keep on with the investigation until we’ve nailed him once and for all.’

  ‘You’d be willing to take it all the way to a court martial?’

  ‘Absolutely! What’s the alternative? To allow him to retire on half-pay?’

  ‘General Boisdeffre would prefer it if there were no scandal . . .’

  ‘I’m sure he would. I don’t relish one myself. But if we allowed him to get away with it – that really would be a scandal!’

  I return to my office well satisfied. I have the approval of the two most powerful men in the army to continue my investigation. Effectively Gonse has been cut out of the chain of command. All I can do now is to wait for news from Basel.

  The day drags on with routine work. The drains stink more than usual in the heat. I find it hard to concentrate. At half past five, I ask Captain Junck to book a telephone call to the Schweizerhof hotel for seven o’clock. At the appointed time I stand by the receiver in the upstairs corridor, smoking a cigarette, and when the bell sounds I snatch the instrument from its cradle. I know the Schweizerhof: a big, modern place overlooking a city square crossed by tramlines. I give Lauth’s cover name to the front desk and ask to speak to him. There is a long wait while the undermanager goes off to check. When he returns, he announces that the gentleman has just checked out and has left no forwarding address. I hang up, wondering what I should read into this. It may be that they are continuing the debriefing into a second day and have taken the precaution of changing hotels, or it could be that the meeting is over and they are rushing to catch the overnight train back to Paris. I hang around for another hour in the hope of receiving a telegram, then decide to leave for the evening.

  I would welcome some company to distract me, but everyone seems to be away for August. The de Commingeses have closed up their house and decamped to their summer estate. Pauline is on holiday in Biarritz with Philippe and her daughters. Louis Leblois has gone home to Alsace to be with his gravely ill father. I am suffering from a pretty bad dose of what the gentlemen in the rue de Lille would call Weltschmerz: I am world weary. In the end, I dine alone in a restaurant near the ministry and return to my apartment intending to read Zola’s new novel. But its subject, the Roman Catholic Church, bores me, and it also runs to seven hundred and fifty pages. I am willing to accept such prolixity from Tolstoy but not from Zola. I set it aside long before the end.

  I am at my desk early the next morning, but no telegrams have come in overnight and it isn’t until early in the afternoon that I hear Henry and Lauth coming upstairs. I rise from my seat and stride across my office. Flinging open the door, I am surprised to find them both wearing uniform. ‘Gentlemen,’ I say with sarcasm, ‘you have actually been to Switzerland, I take it?’

  The two officers salute, Lauth with a certain nervousness it seems to me, but Henry with a nonchalance that borders on insolence. He says, ‘I’m sorry, Colonel. We stopped off at home to change.’

  ‘And how was your trip?’

  ‘I should say it was a pretty good waste of time and money, wouldn’t you agree, Lauth?’

  ‘It proved to be disappointing, I’m afraid, yes.’

  I look from one to the other. ‘Well, that’s unexpectedly depressing news. You’d better come in and tell me what happened.’

  I sit behind my desk with my arms folded and listen while they relate their story. Henry does most of the talking. According to him, he and Lauth went directly from the railway station to the hotel for breakfast, then upstairs to the room, where they waited until nine thirty, when Inspector Vuillecard brought in Cuers. ‘He was pretty shifty from the start – nervous, couldn’t sit still. Kept going over to the window and checking the big square in front of the station. Mostly what he wanted to talk about was him – could we guarantee the Germans would never find out what he’d done for us?’

  ‘And what could he tell you about the Germans’ agent?’

  ‘Just a few bits and scraps. He reckoned he’d personally seen four documents that had come in via Schwartzkoppen – one about a gun and another about a rifle. Then there was something about the layout of the army camp at Toul, and the fortifications at Nancy.’

  I ask, ‘What were these? Handwritten documents?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In French?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘But he didn’t have a name for this agent, or any other clue to his identity?’

  ‘No, just that the German General Staff decided he wasn’t to be trusted and ordered Schwartzkoppen to break off relations with him. Whoever he is, he was never very important and he’s no longer active.’

  I turn to Lauth. ‘Were you talking in French or German?’

  He flushes. ‘French to start with, in the morning, then we switched to German in the afternoon.’

  ‘I told you to encourage Cuers to speak in German.’

  ‘With respect, Colonel,’ cuts in Henry, ‘there wasn’t much point in my being there unless I had a chance to talk to him myself. I take responsibility for that. I stuck it for about three hours then I left it to Captain Lauth.’

  ‘And how long did you talk to him in German, Lauth?’

  ‘For another six hours, Colonel.’

  ‘And did he say anything else of interest?’

  Lauth meets my gaze and holds it. ‘No. We just went over the same old ground again and again. He left at six to catch the train back to Berlin.’

  ‘He left at six?’ I can no longer suppress my exasperation. ‘You see, gentlemen, this just doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would a man risk travelling seven hundred kilometres to a foreign city to meet intelligence officers from a foreign power in order to say almost nothing? In fact to say less than he’d already told us in Berlin?’

  Henry says, ‘It’s obvious, surely? He must have changed his mind. Or he was lying in the first place. What a fellow blurts out when he’s drunk at home at night with someone he knows is different to what he might say in the cold light of day to strangers.’

  ‘Well why didn’t you take him out and get him drunk then?’ I bang my fist down on the desk. ‘Why didn’t you make some effort to get to know him better?’ Neither man answers. Lauth looks at the floor, Henry stares straight ahead. ‘It seems to me that you both couldn’t wait to get back on that train to Paris.’ They start to protest but I cut them off. ‘Save your excuses for your report. That will be all, gentlemen. Thank you. You may leave.’

  Henry halts at the door and says, with quivering and affronted dignity, ‘No one has ever questioned my professional competence before.’

  ‘Well I’m very surprised to hear it.’

  After they have gone, I lean forward and put my head in my hands. I know that a decisive moment has just been reached, in terms of both my relationship with Henry and my command of the section. Are they telling the truth? For all I know, they might be. Perhaps Cuers really did clam up when he got into their hotel room. Of one thing I am sure, however: that Henry went to Switzerland determined to wreck that meeting, and succeeded, and that if Cuers told them nothing it was because Henry willed it to be so.

  Among th
e files demanding my attention that day is the latest batch of censored correspondence of Alfred Dreyfus, sent over as usual by the Colonial Ministry. The minister wishes to know if I have any observations to make ‘from an intelligence perspective’. I untie the ribbon and flick open the cover and begin to read:

  A gloomy day with ceaseless rain. The air full of tangible darkness. The sky black as ink. A real day of death and burial. How often there comes to my mind that exclamation of Schopenhauer at the thought of human iniquity: ‘If God created the world, I would not care to be God.’ The mail from Cayenne has come, it seems, but has not brought my letters! Nothing to read, no avenue of escape from my thoughts. Neither books nor magazines come to me any more. I walk in the daytime until my strength is exhausted, to calm my brain and quiet my nerves . . .

  The quotation from Schopenhauer leaps out at me from the file. I know it; I have used it often. It never occurred to me that Dreyfus might read philosophy, let alone harbour a blasphemous thought. Schopenhauer! It is as if someone who has been trying to attract my attention for a long while has finally succeeded. Other passages catch my eye:

  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.

  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 wors
t 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.

  I saw very little of Dreyfus throughout that summer and autumn of 1894 – he was often away from Paris – although we would nod civilly enough to one another if we happened to pass in the corridor. From the reports of his section chiefs I knew that he was regarded as hard-working and intelligent but uncongenial, a loner. Some also spoke of him as cold and arrogant to his equals and obsequious to his superiors. During a General Staff visit to Charmes he monopolised General Boisdeffre over dinner and took him off for an hour to smoke cigars and discuss improvements in artillery, much to the annoyance of the more senior officers present. Nor did he make any effort to disguise his wealth. He had a wine cellar built in his apartment, employed three or four servants, kept horses in livery, collected pictures and books, hunted regularly and bought a Hamerless shotgun from Guinard & Cie on the avenue de l’Opéra for five hundred and fifty francs – the equivalent of two months’ army salary.

  There was something almost heroic in his refusal to play the part of the grateful outsider. But looking back, one can see it was a foolish way to behave, especially in that climate.

  A regular Jew . . .

  Operation Benefactor languishes in the August heat. There are no fresh sightings of Esterhazy in the rue de Lille. Schwartzkoppen seems to be away on leave. The Germans’ apartment is shuttered up for the summer. I write to Boisdeffre on his estate in Normandy asking for permission to obtain a sample of Esterhazy’s handwriting, in case it matches any scrap of evidence retrieved by Agent Auguste. My request is turned down on the grounds that this would represent ‘a provocation’. If Esterhazy has to be removed from the army, Boisdeffre reiterates that he wants it done quietly, without a scandal. I raise it with the Minister of War. He is sympathetic, but on this issue he refuses to overrule the Chief of the General Staff.