The death of Colonel Alfred Dreyfus can mean little to
anyone born within the last thirty years—though readers of Anatole France's L'Ile des Pingouins must find the political allusions with which the satire, teems very largely unintelligible without a rough working know- ledge of the Dreyfus case._ But to those of us who by the turn of the century had reached newspaper-reading age Memories of the famous trial and . its leading figures, Dreyfus himself, Maitre Labori, Zola and the real criminal Esterhazy, are vivid enough—thanks largely to the work of that brilliant journalist, G. W. E. Steevens. , Anti- semitism (Dreyfus was, of couse; a Jew) and Germano- phobia were the forces behind a case that split France in two for a dozen years, for it was in 1894 that Dreyfus was charged with selling military secrets to Germany and sent to the Ile du Diable, and in 1906 that he" was finally restored to his lost rank and invested with the Legion of Honour as well. And all .because smile, scraps of torn-up paper in a waste-paper-basket at the German Embassy were falsely represented as being in Dreyfus' writing.
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