This trial of Zola and l’Aurore was the greatest crisis in the long succession of crises which centred themselves round Dreyfus. The more serious the evidence against the conduct of the Court Martial and the honour of the army, the more truculent became the attitude of the militarists, Catholics, anti-Semites and their following. Passion swept away every vestige of judgment or reason. There was no pretence of fair play to the defendants. Inside the Court, which was packed to overflowing, inarticulate roars came from the audience when any telling argument or conclusive piece of testimony was put in on the side of truth and justice. Outside, an infuriated mob of reactionists demanded the lives of the accused. The smell of blood was in the air. The likelihood of organised massacre grew more obvious every day. Clemenceau told me himself—and he does not know what fear is—that if Zola had been acquitted, instead of being condemned, the Dreyfusards present would have been slaughtered in court.  
How determined the whole unscrupulous and desperate clique were to carry their defence of injustice to the last ditch was displayed when M. Brisson, the President of the Republic, himself a man credited with austere probity and cool courage, was forced by them to authorise proceedings against Colonel Picquart, because he had offered the highest personage in France to help him to discover the truth. Picquart was therefore to be victimised still further: likewise for the honour of the army! He was duly incarcerated and degraded. France herself was being found guilty and cashiered by the persecution of this high-minded and courageous colonel. Esterhazy runs[163] away when his treachery and forgeries are finally exposed. Clemenceau and the Dreyfusards are willing that he should have a safe-conduct back again, if his coming will help to manifest the truth. A very different attitude towards a culprit convicted, not by a secret Court Martial, but by his own public actions and admissions. Yet General Gonse and the General Staff were ready at first to aid and support Colonel Picquart in exposing Major Esterhazy, as only a German spy, in constant communication and collusion with Colonel Schwartzkopfen, acting on behalf of the German Army and the German Government. Esterhazy was no direct agent of the French Staff! When, however, it was discovered that Colonel Picquart’s investigations went far to clear Captain Dreyfus altogether, and proved that he had at any rate been condemned on a forged document, then Picquart himself was to be treated as a criminal, unless he suppressed the truth at once, and held his tongue for ever.
 
And so this extraordinary case was now being tried in the open street before the public of France and of the world—for every civilised nation followed the changes and chances of Dreyfus’s martyrdom—and so day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, Clemenceau, Scheurer-Kestner, Jaurès and the Socialists fought on for a re-trial. The highest Court of judicature in France, worthy of its history, accorded the right of appeal. A sense of doubt was beginning to creep through the community. Thereupon, the Generals, their Church, their Press, their Mob, their Army, began afresh a very devil dance of organised forgery, calumny, perjury, vituperation, attempted murder and concomitant infamies.
 
Looking back at that period of desperate antagonism, it seems strange that open conflict should have been averted. It was no fault of the General Staff and its myrmidons that it did not break out. That such a result of their campaign of injustice and provocation would have been welcomed by many of the chiefs of the French Army is beyond question. At more[164] than one juncture the outlook was so threatening that two, if not three, pretenders to the throne of France were in the country at the same time. Things did not take the turn they expected, and they went off again. All this was known, of course, to Clemenceau, who was also well aware that a great deal more lay behind the Dreyfus affair than the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus. Nor did the fact by any means escape him that those semi-occult ecclesiastical influences which had been against him all his life, not for personal reasons, but because he was a Radical, a free-thinker and a champion of free speech, a free press, secular and gratuitous education, and separation of Church and State—that those hidden powers were at work behind the General Staff in the Dreyfus case in the hope of gaining ground on a side issue which they were losing steadily on the main field of battle.
 
This it was which made the collision between the two opposing forces so critical an event for France. This, too, accounted for the desperation of the losing party.
 
The Jesuits of the Dreyfus affair had none of the diabolical far-seeing coolness of the type represented by the Père Rodin in Eugène Sue’s Wandering Jew. They were infuriated fanatics whose unreasoning anxiety to torture and burn their heretic opponents was reflected in the blundering mendacity and undisguised hatred of their tools of the military Staff. Hence, in the long run, they delivered themselves into the hands of the Frenchmen of the future—Zola, Jaurès, Picquart and Clemenceau. Clemenceau’s daily articles, which constituted the most formidable barrage on behalf of Dreyfus, make up five closely printed volumes. They are full of life and fire; but they are full also of crushing argument enforced with irony and sarcasm and illustrated by telling references to recent history. Abuse and misrepresentation could not permanently hold their own in a discussion thus conducted. Forgery and perjury when brought home to the real criminals necessarily made their case worse. Nothing is more surprising than the lack of dexterity and acumen on the part of the[165] reactionary forces. They forgot that a bludgeon is a poor weapon against a rapier in the hand of an expert.
 
Thus it came about that after a long contest, whose interest, even for outsiders, was maintained throughout by tragical incidents such as the suicide of Colonel Henry—the forger for esprit de corps as Esterhazy was the forger for money and power—the attempted poisoning of Picquart and the attack upon Labori, a re-trial was forced from the Government of the day. The names of the chief opponents are already forgotten, such minor actors and apologists of injustice, forgers and spies on the “right side” were never remembered. Who now cares whether the petit bleu was written by Schwartzkopfen or not? Who can recall what Major Lauth did or bore witness to? The trail of the serpent is over them all. That is what the world bears in mind to-day. The broad features of the drama are recorded on the cinema film of history. The faces and characters of the villains of the piece are already blotted out. Only the heroes of the conflict remain. And of these heroes Clemenceau might fairly claim to be the chief. The re-trial at Rennes was, when all is said, mainly his work.
 
What a re-trial it was! The Court was still a Court Martial. The president of the court, Colonel Jouaust, was still a violently prejudiced officer. The judges behind him were all inspired by that fatal esprit de corps which accepts and acts upon the Jesuit motto that the end justifies the means, where the interests of a particular set of men are concerned. In fact, the combination in favour of military injustice remained what it had been throughout: a body resolved that, come what might, the victim of the forged document and other criminal acts should not be formally acquitted, even if monstrous illegality at the first trial forced a revision.
 
Nearly five years had now elapsed from the date of Dreyfus’s original condemnation, when, released from his imprisonment, he stood at the Bar after that long period of physical and moral torture. Clemenceau is not a man of sentiment: he had long doubted whether Dreyfus was really innocent: even the[166] outrageous proceedings at the first Court Martial had failed to convince him that there might not be something behind the forged bordereau, concealed from the prisoner, which could in a degree justify his judges: not until the close of the case against Zola and l’Aurore was his mind made up that, “consciously or unconsciously,” a terrible crime had been committed. But now, with Dreyfus himself present, with all the old witnesses contradicting, more directly than ever, one another’s testimony, yet allowed incredible licence of exposition and explanation by the Court; with the evidence of General Gonse, General Mercier, Roget, Cinquet, Gribelin, Lauth and Junck cut to ribands by the questions of Dreyfus&rsqu............