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Secrets from the Archives
(Volumes 1-5)
David W. Carmicheal
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by David W. Carmicheal
For Yvonne. As always.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the copyright owner. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of the author.
1. The Miracle Letter: A forgotten request unmasks a traitor
2. Proven to all the World: The pewter plate that changed history
3. Reputation in Flames: A President lost, found, and lost again
4. The Most Important Book in America: The exile of America's chronicle
5. Uncommon Descent: Rediscovered images of humanity
The Miracle Letter
A forgotten request unmasks a traitor
Secrets from the Archives: 1
It was a simple, one page letter: a request for information about the French Congo. The letter’s recipient thought it so unimportant he set it aside and forgot to answer it. But those two acts—writing the letter and not answering it—eventually saved the letter-writer’s life and helped correct one of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated. And it all began with a chance encounter on a sunny Paris street.
Philippe-Jean and Alfred had been students together at the École Polytechnique, casual acquaintances, just familiar enough to pause and chat on the Avenue Montaigne that fateful day. There, on the street that was slowly being transformed into the most fashionable in Paris, the two discovered a shared interest in the French Congo: Philippe-Jean was directing a construction project in that African colony; Alfred was writing a technical report for the army about the geography of French colonies in Africa. A few days later Alfred wrote Philippe-Jean to ask more detailed questions about the colony. The busy engineer laid the letter aside and procrastinated. Eventually he filed it among his papers without answering it. Whatever Alfred thought of his schoolmate’s rude behavior, that simple act proved to be the luckiest break of his life.
Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla is best remembered—when anyone remembers him at all—for his lifelong obsession to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Photographs taken about the time of the encounter on the Avenue Montaigne show a man in the early stages of baldness with deep-set fiery eyes and a scimitar-like nose, the mustache beneath carefully sculpted like diverging daggers. He was an intense, dashing figure. Driven, perhaps, by a need to live down his illegitimate birth, Bunau-Varilla’s every gesture seemed calculated to underscore his military training and professional success.
Soon after leaving the École Polytechnique Bunau-Varilla joined the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique, the French company that was trying to gouge a waterway across the treacherous spit of land separating Central and South America. They sent him to Panama in 1884; less than a year later the twenty-five year old engineer was General Manager. For three years the work inched along under his direction until the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique went bankrupt, swallowed by the most stunning financial scandal in France’s history.
Bunau-Varilla’s prominent position in a bankrupt, scandal-plagued company might have spelled the end of a lesser man’s career, but the scrappy Frenchman rebounded and found a place in the New Panama Canal Company. When that company’s efforts were defeated by swamps and disease, Bunau-Varilla might have moved on to more promising prospects, but by then he was obsessed. He determined to see the canal built, and he turned to the one power he thought capable of achieving that dream: the United States.
Interest in a cross-isthmus canal ran high in the United States, and the scrappy nation, bristling with youthful bravura, dismissed the failed attempts of others as the frailty of exhausted nations. But while fervor for a canal was strong, opposition to a route through Panama was equally strong. Powerful men in the United States Senate favored a canal across Nicaragua which, they were quick to point out, was a more politically stable country. Bunau-Varilla was convinced that Panama offered the best route, but for years he made little headway, and his dream might have died had it not been for two volcanoes.
On May 7, 1902, the “dead” volcano of Mount Pelée erupted in Martinique, killing thirty thousand people. Two days later a volcano in the West Indies followed suit and several more thousand people died. One person’s tragedy was another’s opportunity, and Bunau-Varilla seized the moment. He rushed out and bought ninety Nicaraguan stamps, each bearing an image of Mt. Momotombo spewing lava—lava that might bury the proposed Nicaraguan canal route—and sent one to each United States Senator. Though the volcano was not entirely dormant—it had spit fire earlier that year—Mt. Momotombo’s last cataclysmic eruption had occurred in 1605, a fact that Bunau-Varilla’s letter to the Senate conveniently overlooked. The ploy worked. Confronted with the prospect of their beloved canal disappearing under a river of volcanic lava Senate opinion swung suddenly in favor of the Panama route.
Only one political problem remained: Panama was a territory within the sovereign nation of Columbia, and the Columbian government steadfastly refused to grant permission for the United States to build its canal. Undeterred, Bunau-Varilla met secretly in New York City with independence-minded Panamanians and offered to personally bankroll a “war for Panamanian independence.” Before the first shot was fired, the intrepid Frenchman even drafted Panama’s new constitution and designed her flag. After a brief fight (in which the only casualties were a donkey and one civilian accidentally killed by a stray Columbian cannonball) Panama was independent and Bunau-Varilla was promptly named her first ambassador to the United States. Not surprisingly, the new ambassador’s first act was to conclude a treaty to allow the United States to build the Panama Canal. The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty was signed on November 18, 1903 by Secretary of State John Hay.
Bunau-Varilla’s single-minded determination, which brought about the greatest engineering feat of the early twentieth century, would easily ensure his place in history, despite what the world thought when they eventually discovered the lengths to which he had gone to achieve his goal. But if Bunau-Varilla’s conscience allowed him to start wars and stretch the truth to achieve a canal, it was that same conscience that prompted a different kind of act, one of uncommon selflessness. By it he saved the life and reputation of his old acquaintance, Alfred Dreyfus—and Bunau-Varilla made the effort despite the fact that the two were not close friends.
Alfred Dreyfus was not known for inspiring deep friendships. Even those who liked him thought him haughty and aloof. At the time he met Bunau-Varilla on the Avenue Montaigne, Dreyfus was a student in the elite École Supérieure de Guerre, the French Military Academy established by Louis XV in 1751. For all that, Dreyfus displayed none of the military bearing that characterized Bunau-Varilla.
Born into a close-knit, well-to-do family of textile manufacturers, Alfred’s appearance seemed to mark him as a pampered youngest son. He had a soft chin, rounded like his tiny glasses; his mustache seemed too delicate for a soldier. His voice was weak and monotonous. In fact, except for his protruding ears, his physical features were as undistinguished as his record in the École Polytechnique. His superiors could think of nothing remarkable to record in Alfred’s graduation record, though they noted, rather blandly, that he “could make a good officer.”
In time, though, Dreyfus would prove far tougher and more resilient than his looks and voice implied. No soldier ever endured more hardship or successfully held his position against longer odds. But that was far in the future, and though many of his fellow officers did remark negatively about Dreyfus’s looks, it was not because he looked weak: it was because he was a Jew.
Many years later Bunau-Varilla would recall Dreyfus’s “very characteristic Jewish look, which was rather unprepossessing.” The comment was typical of French—and, indeed, worldwide—attitudes of the late nineteenth century. Dreyfus’s career in the French army was hobbled by instances of anti-Semitism, some of them concealed beneath a façade of camaraderie, others blatant. A bad mark received at the end of his second year in the École Supérieure de Guerre—a mark also received by the only other Jew in the academy—nearly derailed Dreyfus’s career for good. Still, he managed to graduate ninth in his class of 81, an automatic ticket to a coveted post on the General Staff of the French army.
Dreyfus no doubt blessed his fortune at receiving the General Staff appointment. Despite the prejudices of his fellow-officers he was finally positioned to launch a distinguished career. His internship would place him for six months at a time in each of the four offices that made up the French Army High Command. He could expect to emerge with influential contacts and a breadth of experience that would open doors for him in every major department of the army. But if Dreyfus relished the prospect of a brilliant career, his General Staff appointment held a deeper, more profound, meaning as well. For generations, the Dreyfus family had lived in Alsace-Lorraine, and there they had learned to love France and, more importantly, to despise Germany.
If the French in the 1890s distrusted Jews, they trusted Germans even less. For two centuries the nations had fought one another for supremacy in Western Europe. In the 1890s the Germans were clearly on top and the French ached for revenge. Just twenty years before, in the last stroke of the Franco-Prussian War, the Germans had laid siege to Paris and starved the French into submission. They humiliated the French in surrender, seizing the Dreyfus’s home province of Alsace-Lorraine. Two decades later the bitterness of that war still galled.
For Dreyfus, appointment to the General Staff offered the pleasant prospect of avenging his homeland. From here he would help France prepare for the next war with Germany, which everyone knew must come. When it did, Dreyfus would help free Alsace-Lorraine from the grip of her conquerors. Though it must have seemed like a dream come true, Dreyfus had no way of knowing that his General Staff appointment was, in fact, the spark that would explode his dreams forever.
In one sense, war between Germany and France had not ended with the close of the Franco-Prussian War, it had simply moved out of sight, into the shadows of spies and clandestine meetings. In the days before high-tech listening devices and wiretapping, the best way for the French to gather intelligence about German plots was the simple expedient of collecting trash from the German Embassy or reading the Embassy’s mail. With the help of a charwoman, named Madame Bastian, the French Intelligence agency saw to the wastebaskets, while an agent name Brucker handled the mail. Which one of the two discovered the first incriminating memorandum—or bordereau as it was called in French and by which it became famous—is not known for certain. What is known is that one of the spies discovered the bordereau in the German Embassy in 1894, and its contents were sensational.
The bordereau was a handwritten list of document titles, each of which some Frenchman had secretly passed to the German Embassy. Some of the documents were among France’s most top secret: a description of the workings of a hydraulic brake used to reduce recoil in field pieces; the plans for a proposed French invasion of Madagascar; and a copy of a field artillery manual so confidential that only a few French officers had ever seen it. The bordereau was clearly the work of a French traitor—it was written in his own hand—and it just as clearly shattered the French army’s ability to surprise and overwhelm their archenemies. The High Command was stunned. In great secrecy they began their search for the traitor in their midst.
The generals who first examined the bordereau concluded—falsely, as it turned out—that only a French staff-officer could have accessed the secrets it contained. And because the document contained information gathered from several different army departments, they surmised that the traitor must be a “stage” officer, that is, one who was being trained by rotation through each army department in succession. When Dreyfus’s name was discovered among the stage officers, his dream appointment began its descent into nightmare.
For reasons still unclear, two of the men charged with investigating the bordereau concluded that Dreyfus was the traitor as soon as they saw his name on the list. Further contemplation only confirmed their suspicions: He was a stage officer; he was in the final phase of his two year rotation through the offices; and he was a Jew. The High Command seized on the idea, relieved at the speedy conclusion of the matter, and still more relieved that the traitor was a Jew rather than a “real” Frenchman. Within a few weeks of the bordereau’s discovery Dreyfus had been convicted in the minds of every army officer who mattered. There remained only the formality of convicting him in a military court.
What followed was one of the greatest travesties of justice ever perpetrated on an innocent man. News of the betrayal was carefully leaked by the army to the press and the public demanded swift justice for the villainous traitor. Next, Dreyfus’s name was leaked as well; the public clamored for exemplary punishment, and the military authorities gave up even the pretense of an objective investigation. All evidence that might have exonerated the artillery officer—and there was much in that category—was ruthlessly suppressed, including all the documents related to the case.
First to be suppressed was the bordereau itself; it was declared top secret and withheld from anyone outside the military, most especially the public. The document was photographed and a few copies were produced, but these were tightly guarded and shared only with several handwriting “experts,” carefully selected to bolster the government’s case. After examination, each copy was returned to military control and carefully guarded. One French officer who did see the photographs, Colonel Georges Picquart, became convinced that Dreyfus could not have written the bordereau. Without arousing suspicions he investigated quietly and uncovered further evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence, but when he presented the facts to his superiors they ordered him never to reveal what he had seen. A short time later they transferred him to Tunis. Even from North Africa, though, Picquart persisted in his efforts to uncover the truth. The army, vexed by Picquart’s constant inquiries, finally silenced him by accusing him of forging documents and then ‘retiring’ the Colonel from service.
Dreyfus was charged and held in secret, his wife forbidden to tell anyone even that her husband had been arrested. During the trial, in December 1894, the army presented the bordereau as evidence, along with a general compilation of documents about spies in France, none of them connected to Dreyfus except by implication. Now the document they had withheld from the public was to be withheld again: Incredibly, the bordereau and other evidence were presented to the judges inside a sealed envelope; Dreyfus and his attorney were forbidden to see its contents. On the basis of such questionable evidence Dreyfus was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. The French public breathed a collective sigh of relief that the Jew traitor had been caught. Many expressed regret that treason was no longer punishable by death, the law having been revised only a year before. Devil’s Island seemed too good for a traitor.
In 1894 the penal colony in the Caribbean was already infamous for its dense, malaria-infested jungles buzzing with insects that thrived in the steamy tropical heat. There, for five years, Dreyfus survived in brutal conditions: underfed; poorly clothed and housed; condemned to cut his own firewood under a relentless sun; surrounded by guards and filth. Once, when a rumor circulated in France that he had escaped, Dreyfus was chained to his bed each night for two months. His letters home reveal a man staggering like a drunkard between hope and despair. At times he was suicidal.
Year after year dragged by, but Dreyfus’s wife and brother refused to let the case fade from public view. They had little of substance to place before the public since neither had seen the documents on which Dreyfus’s conviction was based. Still, their pressure worried the French army, which forged documents and intimidated witnesses to prevent the case from being revisited or overturned. Some inside the army suspected the truth, but even these thought it more important to safeguard the nation’s confidence in its military than to set one innocent man free. Alfred Dreyfus seemed likely to die on Devil’s Island unless some miracle produced dramatic evidence of his innocence.
The miracle came in the form of Dreyfus’s long-forgotten letter to Bunau-Varilla, and it started with a man who set out to prove Dreyfus’s guilt.
One of the so-called handwriting experts who had received a photograph of the bordereau back in 1894 was a man called Teyssonnières. Before he returned the photograph, Teyssonnières had made a copy of it, despite its top secret designation. Whatever his motives—perhaps he wanted to inspect it further or simply thought it might prove an interesting souvenir of a fascinating case—he kept his copy of the photograph until 1896, when he had an idea and carried the photograph to the editor of the newspaper, Le Matin. Teyssonnières’ idea was that the photograph could prove Dreyfus’s guilt. France, he argued, was being torn apart by the argument over the Dreyfus case. Publication of the bordereau would prove Dreyfus’s guilt beyond doubt and quiet the turmoil that threatened to destroy the nation. Ironically, the editor of Le Matin refused to publish the document even though he agreed with Teyssonnières. Doing so, he said, would only draw attention to a vile traitor and encourage his misguided supporters to continue their futile fight. Instead, the editor—Maurice Bunau-Varilla—carried the photograph to dinner on the night of November 9, 1896 and showed it as a conversation piece to his brother, Philippe-Jean.
In a flash, Philippe-Jean remembered the unanswered letter about the French Congo. Here, he realized, was an unprecedented opportunity to compare the handwriting on the bordereau to that of a letter he knew beyond doubt had been written by Alfred Dreyfus. But Bunau-Varilla was not prompted by a belief in Dreyfus’s innocence; the comparison, he was certain, would firmly establish the traitor’s guilt. He left the room and, after much searching, returned with the unanswered letter to lay it beside the photograph of the bordereau. “The first glance,” he later said, “gave me the impression that they were in the same handwriting. But, suddenly, I observed something which caused me profound astonishment.” What Bunau-Varilla saw was a distinct difference—something that proved the letters could not have been written by the same hand. Like any letter written in French, Dreyfus’s inquiry about the French Congo contained many double s’s, one long (ƒ) and one short (s). Dreyfus’s double s’s were written with the long s first and the short s second (ƒs). In the bordereau the double s’s were reversed, with the long s following the short one (sƒ). Bunau-Varilla, who himself wrote the double s as “sƒ”, tried to reverse the letters. He could not. It was, he said, “like a right-handed man trying to write with his left hand.” Maurice tried to write the letters and came to the same conclusion. The men, who only moments before had been totally convinced of Dreyfus’s guilt, felt “as though an earthquake had shaken us.”