WHERE DREYFUS IS IMPRISONED.

Waikato Argus, Volume IV, Issue 303, 18 June 1898, Page 1 (Supplement)

WHERE DREYFUS IS IMPRISONED.

For several weeks past the whole world has been interested in the animated discussion regarding the guilt or innocence of the French artillory officer. Captain Dreyfus, who was accused by his Government of selling valuable State documents to the emissaries of a foreign power and transported for life. Few people, however, have any idea as to the oxact spot where the hapless man is passing the weary hours of his captivity. Off the coast of French Guiana, about three-qu\tters of a mile east ot Cayeune, in the Atlantic Ocean, lie a group of small islands, designated upon the maps as Les lies duSalut, or Islands of Safety. For nearly half a century these islands have been utilised by the French Government as a penal settlement for Anarchists and other wagers of war against society who have escaped the clutches of the guillotine. The most northerly and desolate island of this terrible group is LTle du Diable, which interpreted means, of course, Devil's Island. It was to this barren waste that Captain Dreyfus was conveyed to eke out the remaining days of his earthly exisence. Prior to his transportation this island was utilised as a sanatorium for lepers. It is in reality but a large rock, and has almost been denuded of the scant tropical vegetation that formerly thrived, so that no concealment should offer itself to the prisoner, should he be fortunate enough to effect hia escape. Not that this is at all likely, for he is most religiously guarded. The island is safely covered by the heavy guns of the fort of Cayenne, which aloue would be almost sufficient to blow the island to astoms if the necessity arose, while mitrailleuses and other quick-firing guns are trained upon it from every point of vantage, ready to discharge their leaden hail at any moment. Twenty soldiers are told off to guard the State prisoner, yet so deadly is the climate that they have to be relieved every three weeks ; while as a final precaution the torpedo boat La Terrible has beeu specially commissioned to guard agaiost any rescue or escape by sea. There is no depth of soil for cultivation, the heat is moss oppressive, and the atmosphere reeks with malaral fever. Dreyfns's plight is indeed a pitiful and terrible one. His house, which is a rudely-built shanty of one small room, containing a plank bed, table, and chair, is constructed within, and completely covered by, a huge iron cage about 10ft high and 12ft square, similar to those used for immuring wild beasts in a menagerie. On no pretence whatever is he permitted outside the narrow confines of t'his barbarous prison. The sentries armed with loaded rifles watch religiously over him night and day being relieved every two hours, and they have strict injunctions to mercilessly shoot down the prisoner should he make a dash for deeply yearned liberty. They are rigorously forbidden to hold any intercourse whatever with the degraded officer under pain of the most severe penalties. Recently a sergeant was reduced to the ranks for deigning to answer in a moment of abstraction an interpolation by Dreyfus as to when the mails would arrive. This it is stated to be the only occasion upon which Dreyfus has spoken to a human being since his incarceration, and it is a wonder that the solitary confinement has not deprived him of his reason.

Dreyfus' life is, indeed, intolerable. He has to rise with the sun and is compelled to show himself for five minutes every hour in his outer cage until sunset, when he retires, so that the governor of the penal colony upon the adjacent island can testify, by the aid of his field glasses that the prisoner is still in safe custody, and report the matter direct by cable to Paris.

His clothes are of the roughest description, and hie food of the coarsest. When he ventures outside his primitive bedchamber he is confronted with the gaunt iron bars of his cage, which gall him terribly. He paces the green sward that skirts his shanty feverishly, and gazes in sad abstraction and anxiety out to sea looking in vain for help. At loDg intervals he is permitted to write to his sorrowing family in France, and although subjected to stringent surveillance," the authorities deleting anything which they do not care to pass the epistles are so harrowing in the vividness of the detailed horrors and intense misery of this liviug hell that the most hard-hearted can scarcely fail to be moved to pity. The outside world is to him a perfect blank, He is utterly in ignorauce of the strenuous efforts that have been made in Paris to establish his innocence, as any passages in his few letters from home relating thereto are ruthlessly cut out by the authorities.