The Great Lie

CAPTAIN DREYFUS (274 pp.)--Nicholas nalasz--bimon and Schuster ($3.50).

On Jan. 5, 1895, a spectacled and mustached French army captain stood stiffly at attention on the parade ground of the Ecole Militaire. As a huge crowd looked on, a guardsman came forward and ripped the epaulets from his shoulders, yanked away the red stripes of the general staff from his trousers, took the officer's sword and broke it across his knee. The crowd roared its approval. In a small yard of the same school 11 1/2 years later, the same officer stood before a brigadier general who intoned: "I make you a Knight of the Legion of Honor." Then the general pinned on the medal and kissed him on both cheeks. This time there was no crowd to watch, but when the decorated soldier rode away from the yard in an open carnage, 200,000 people jammed the neighboring streets to cheer.

Two Marks. Between the insult and the honor, Captain Alfred Dreyfus had endured a personal agony that included four years of solitary imprisonment on Devil's Island. Because of the injustice done him, France had gone through a dozen of the most turbulent years in its hectic history and come close to civil war.

During those years and since, thousands of articles and hundreds of books have been written about the Dreyfus Affair. Now comes Hungarian Refugee Journalist Nicholas Halasz to prove that the story has lost none of its excitement when coolly researched and laid out in skillful narrative 60 years later.

Dreyfus was a brilliant, studious artillery officer who ate, slept and dreamed the army. But in a French officers' club of those days, he had two marks against him: he was stiff, studious and humorless, and he was a Jew. He refused to be cowed by the anti-Semitism of the day, through sheer ability became the first Jewish officer to be appointed to the French general staff. Suddenly, on Oct. 15, 1894, he was ordered to report to the office of the chief of staff. There a Major du Paty de Clam dictated a letter filled with secrets known to have been stolen from the French by a German spy. Major de Clam's theory was that Dreyfus would recoil in terror at the familiar facts and figures, thus revealing himself as the spy. When Dreyfus took the dictation without a flicker, the major turned on him and shouted: "You are accused of high treason." Two months later, Dreyfus was court-martialed, found guilty of selling secrets to the Germans, cashiered from the army and sentenced to deportation and exile for life.

Strained Conscience. Treason there was, but the traitor was not Dreyfus. As a Jew, he made an excellent scapegoat. Even after the high command learned that the real traitor was Major Count Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, decadent scion of the aristocratic Hungarian family, they tried to cover up their mistake and even let Esterhazy keep his rank and assignment. Dreyfus' conviction touched off a wave of anti-Semitism that made it dangerous for anyone to doubt his guilt. But one general-staff officer, Lieut. Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart, found the truth more than his conscience could stand, although he cordially disliked Dreyfus. Novelist Emile Zola ripped into the nasty mess with his famous l'accuse! Georges Clemenceau became a Dreyfusard; famous lawyers kept trying to reopen the case at the risk of their lives. Not until July 1906 did France's highest court throw out the pack of lies and forgeries that had sent Dreyfus to Devil's Island. By that time, Traitor Esterhazy was safe in England, where he survived to an obscure old age in a boarding house in a slum quarter of London. After Dreyfus was exonerated, he served one year, retired, then came out of retirement to fight with distinction at Chemin des Dames and Verdun in World War I. He died in Paris in 1935, aged 75.

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