Trooper 3809

The bitter and protracted discussions which have arisen out of the Dreyfus case, and which have divided France into two hostile camps, have concentrated the attention of the civilised world on the French army, but nobody has done more to disgrace it, and to lower it in the eyes of friends and foes alike, than Frenchmen themselves.
Those who, persuaded of Dreyfus' innocence, made superhuman efforts to further the noble cause of justice and to obtain the redress of one of the greatest wrongs ever committed against a human being, spoiled their noble task by indiscriminate and wholesale abuse of the army in general, holding the thousands of French officers responsible for the conduct of a few of their number. Those, on the other hand, who believed in the guilt of Dreyfus, based their conviction upon their blind belief in the infallibility of half a dozen officers who had passed judgment upon the condemned man. Trusting to unworthy subordinates, the highest officers of the General Staff made of Dreyfus' guilt a matter on which they staked their own[x] honour and reputation, and when they discovered that they had been deceived, they found themselves in the position of having either to acknowledge that they had been befooled, or else of having to stand by those who had led them into their awkward predicament. They chose the latter alternative, and their friends and supporters played into the hands of those who so fiercely attacked the army, by refusing to admit that there could be a single black sheep in it, and by thus linking together the whole body of French officers and making their collective honour dependent on the honour of every individual member.