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 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.