The Dreyfus Affair (20 page)

The train left the station for La Rochelle on the western coast of France. After frequent requests, Dreyfus was given some bread, cheese and black coffee. It was a journey of many hours in cramped conditions and, even after they had reached La Rochelle at midday on Friday the 18th, Dreyfus was not removed from his coach. A number of curious onlookers gathered to watch the prisoners taken from the train for transportation to the Île de Ré, a couple of miles off the coast, sensed from the demeanour of the guards that someone of significance was among the convicts, and then learned that that someone was the traitor Alfred Dreyfus. The word spread, and the group became a crowd. The shout went up: ‘Death to the traitor! Death to the Jew!’ Dreyfus remained the whole afternoon in the barred compartment of the stationary carriage, listening to the abuse of the growing crowd outside. Finally at nightfall he was taken from the coach. As soon as he was seen leaving the train, the crowd surged forward to attack him. He was struck by fists as his guards formed an inadequate cordon around him. Dreyfus, by his own account, remained impassive: ‘I even felt myself alone in the middle of the crowd, and was ready to give up my body. My soul remained my own.’

Were it not for the phalanx of guards, Dreyfus would no doubt have been lynched by the crowd. He remained remarkably sanguine about the hatred he inspired. ‘I heard the perfectly legitimate cries of a brave and noble people raised against a man they thought was a traitor, the lowest of wretches,’ he would later write to Lucie, who had been ignorant of his ordeal; her family had removed the newspapers describing the fracas
at La Rochelle before she had a chance to read them. He had an almost mystical desire to break away from his guards and offer up his body to the crowd hoping that this would somehow convince them of the purity of his soul. But the guards knew their duty: they threw him into a prison wagon and drove him, pursued by the crowd, to the port of La Palice where he embarked on a boat to take him to Saint-Martin on the Île de Ré.

It was snowing and extremely cold. From the jetty, Dreyfus was marched through the snow to the gates of the huge fortress built to the design of Vauban during the reign of Louis XIV; it replaced an earlier citadel which had held out against an English army under the Duke of Buckingham sent to raise Cardinal Richelieu’s siege of the Protestants in La Rochelle. Huguenots and Jansenists had been imprisoned there and, since the Revolution of 1789, it had been used to assemble prisoners condemned to deportation to penal colonies – the
bagne
. During the Directory, several hundred Catholic priests who had refused to take the oath of loyalty to the republican regime had been held there, their deportation thwarted by the British fleet; many had died from their ill-treatment and privations.

At the gates of the fortress, the official of the Ministry of Justice handed Dreyfus over to the prison Governor. He was strip-searched, then locked up in a cell adjacent to the guard post; there was an aperture in the cell door through which, every two hours, day and night, the guards checked up on their illustrious prisoner. He remained in solitary confinement. His daily exercise was taken alone. He was searched daily. Smoking was forbidden. Twice a week, paper and pen were brought into his cell so that he could write to his wife. Other forms of writing or study were forbidden.

After two and a half weeks held incommunicado, Dreyfus was told that he was to be allowed a visit from his wife. Lucie made the arduous journey in the bitter cold to the Île de Ré on 13 February accompanied by Alfred’s brother-in-law, the businessman from Carpentras, Joseph Valabrègue. Once again, the Governor had received instructions not to allow the married couple to touch one another, and sat between the two during their twenty-minute encounter. Only news of family members was permitted; they could not discuss Alfred’s case or his incarceration. Nonetheless, both felt ‘a great interior happiness’ at seeing one another once again.

A second visit under the same conditions took place the following day. Lucie then returned to Paris but was back on the Île de Ré for two further visits on 20 and 21 February. Lucie again asked that, if her hands were tied behind her back, she might be allowed to kiss her husband; again the request was refused. This final meeting lasted an hour. Lucie then left the fortress and Alfred was taken back to his cell. They would not see one another again for more than four years.

Only hours after the departure of his wife, Dreyfus was told to put his few personal effects into a suitcase and prepare to depart. After being strip-searched yet again, he was escorted by six guards to a steam-launch which took him to the warship
Saint-Nazaire
. Once on board, he was locked into a cell beneath the bridge, with a metal grille gate that provided no protection against the cold. A hammock was thrown into the cell. He was not told where he was being taken. He was given no food. After having so recently been with his wife, knowing that he was to be cut off from her and his children in an unknown location and for an indefinite period of time, Dreyfus’s morale collapsed. He threw himself on to the floor in the corner of his cell and wept.

2: Devil’s Island – 1

The Îles du Salut, or Salvation Islands, lie in the Atlantic Ocean around sixteen kilometres off the coast of French Guiana and 150 kilometres north-west of its border with Brazil. Though closer to the port of Kourou at the mouth of the Kourou river, the islands were served by the larger port and regional capital, Cayenne, forty-three kilometres to the south-east. The two larger islands, the Île Royale and Île Saint-Joseph, had, since the early years of the Second Empire, housed a penal colony which had taken the name of the third and smallest of the three, Devil’s Island.
*
Devil’s Island itself, difficult to access because of the strong currents in the Passe des Grenadines which separated it from the Île Royale, had been used to isolate those convicts with leprosy. Ruins of the leper colony remained among the scrub and palm trees, the only vegetation on the island of volcanic rock.

Throughout the month of March and the first half of April 1895, Alfred Dreyfus was held in the prison on the Île Royale. This was part of a network of penal settlements in French Guiana, some on the mainland such as a centre for deportees at Saint-Jean-du-Maroni or camps deep in the jungle such as Godebert or Charvein where convicts condemned to forced labour would work in abominable conditions clearing the forests for roads and canals. Each metre of the road built linking Cayenne to Saint-Jean-du-Maroni was said to cost the life of a convict and each kilometre the life of a warden – an exaggeration, because twenty years after the construction started, the road had got no further than twenty-four kilometres and, of the 500 convicts who worked on it, 178 died.
16

Three categories of offenders were sent to French Guiana. The first were the
transportés
, the deportees, guilty of serious crimes – armed robbers or murderers who for one reason or another had escaped the guillotine. Whatever the length of their sentence, these major criminals were forbidden ever to return to France. Even those with sentences of less than eight years were caught by the law of 1854 which imposed
le doublage
, confinement in French Guiana after their release for a period equal to their sentence.

The second category were the political prisoners, the
déportés politiques
, found guilty of espionage, treason, desertion, even counterfeiting. They were sentenced either to simple deportation or, like Dreyfus, not just to deportation but to detention in ‘a fortified enclosure’.

The third category of deportee were the
relégués
, recidivists who under the law of 27 May 1885 were sent to French Guiana if they had four convictions or more for theft, swindling, offences against public decency, habitual enticement of minors to debauchery, vagabondage or mendacity. Half of the deportees for life were petty criminals of this kind. They were not necessarily sentenced to forced labour; some had merely been deported and had only to report to the prison administration from time to time. They were even permitted to marry. Of the 52,000 convicts and 15,600
relégués
transported to French Guiana, 850 were women.
17
However, the more lenient regime of the
relégués
, like that of the
libérés
, the liberated prisoners, was still harsh. The prisoners who had served their sentence, often doubled, had no money to pay for a ticket back to France. Among the
libérés
,
the journalist Albert Londres counted 2,448 ‘whites without a roof, without clothes, without food, without work and without hope of a job. All were hungry. They are dogs without owners. Their sentence is served. They have paid. Has one the right to condemn someone for the same fault twice over?’
18

In this nineteenth-century gulag archipelago operated by the French government in its torrid colony of Guiana, the prisons on the Salvation Islands were considered the
bagne du bagne
, the penal colony within the penal colony, and, of the three Salvation Islands, the most secure was Devil’s Island.

On 14 April 1895, the preparations made for Dreyfus’s transfer from the prison on the Île Royale to Devil’s Island were completed with the construction of a guard-house and, some distance away, a stone hut with a corrugated-iron roof. The guard-house was surrounded by a veranda and attached to it was a look-out tower topped by a loggia from which the guards could survey the whole island and scan the sea.

The hut comprised a cell four metres square, and a small annexe for the guard, two by three metres. The cell was separated from the guards’ annexe by an iron-grilled gate, and the guards’ annexe from the exterior by a wooden door. Both the gate and the wooden door were locked at night. There was a change of guard every two hours so Dreyfus was woken by the jangling of keys and the turning of locks. There was a barred window to the cell with a view of the sea. The island itself measured only 1,200 by 365 metres, but when Dreyfus was released from the cabin during the day, he was confined to an unshaded area of 170 square metres between the jetty and the ruins of the leper colony. He was accompanied wherever he went by an armed guard. Conversation with the guard was forbidden. He wore the regulation clothes for a deportee: a canvas jacket and trousers, a cotton shirt, a flannel belt.

Dreyfus received the rations of a soldier which he had to cook for himself, but on arrival he was provided with no utensils. On his first morning, on 15 April, he was given a ration of bread, raw meat and green coffee beans. Wholly ill-equipped by his upbringing to fend for himself, Dreyfus had first to gather firewood, light a fire and grill the meat on some pieces of scrap metal over the embers. With no means of grinding the beans, he could not make coffee. His lunch was bread and tea, his supper bread and water.

By 19 April, Dreyfus had somewhat developed his cuisine. He made a stew in an old tin with meat, salt and a pepper that he had found growing on the island. One of the main complaints that he made in the diary which he started on his first day on Devil’s Island was the way in which the wind blew the smoke into his eyes. ‘My eyes suffered horribly; what misery!’ On 24 April he was ‘
lent
four flat plates, two deep ones, and two saucepans, but nothing to put in them’. He was incensed when given tinned bacon. ‘I threw it all into the sea because the tinned bacon was inedible, the rice, which was brought to me in a filthy state, was offensive, and I had nothing with which to roast the coffee beans, which, in bitter derision, were given to me raw.’
19
Instead, Dreyfus made himself a stew of dried peas ‘which will be my food for the day’.

In due course, Dreyfus established a daily routine. Because the heat quickly became intolerable, he rose early.

I get up at dawn (5), light the fire to make coffee or tea. Then I put my dried vegetables on to cook, then I make my bed, tidy my room and wash. At 8 they bring me my rations. I finish cooking my vegetables; on meat days I cook that. All my cooking is done by 10, I eat what’s left cold in the evening, not wanting to be in front of the fire for three more hours in the afternoon.

At 10 I eat. I read, I work and suffer until 3. Then I wash. When the heat goes, around 5, I cut wood, get water from the well, wash my clothes etc. At 6 I eat what’s left of lunch. Then they lock me up. That is the longest time. I haven’t been able to get a light in the hut. There is one on the guard post, but too weak to see for long. So I have to go to bed and that is when my brain begins to churn, and all my thoughts turn to the ghastly drama of which I am the victim, and I remember my wife, my children and all those who are dear to me. How they must be suffering too!

The inadequate diet gave Dreyfus stomach cramps, and he contracted a tropical fever. On 17 May, the prison doctor examined him: he prescribed forty centigrams of quinine a day and ordered twelve boxes of condensed milk for his patient and some bicarbonate of soda. ‘So I shall be able to put myself on a milk diet, and shall not have to eat the food that is so repugnant to me that I have taken nothing for four days.’
20

The lepers had cultivated tomatoes on the island and these had now grown wild and yielded a good crop. Dreyfus also received some fresh food sent to the convicts by a group of compassionate women among the wives of the prison guards; and by the summer of 1895 food parcels would arrive from Paris sent by Lucie via the Colonial Office on the rue Oudinot containing delicacies from Félix Potin and other shops in Paris – condensed milk, Vichy water, coffee, cigarettes, pipe tobacco, chocolate, biscuits and quinine – the deliveries irregular, the packages frequently delayed and sometimes pilfered en route; they nonetheless contained welcome supplements to Dreyfus’s diet and were a sign that he was not forgotten. Lucie also paid 500 francs a month into an account as Dreyfus’s
mass
or pocket money which he could draw on to order provisions from Cayenne.
21
He was permitted to smoke and was relieved of having to wash his own clothes: his sweat-sodden linen was sent to the laundry of the infirmary on the Île Royale but when returned to him was thrown at him as if he was a dog.