Homing pigeons

Homing pigeons enter the narrative not as participants in the Dreyfus investigation, but as the subject of an improbable security scare. Colonel Sandherr’s fear that birds might carry secret messages turns an English pastime into a proposed matter of national legislation, landing an opaque file on Georges Picquart’s desk as chief of the Statistical Section.

The Cross-Channel Flights

Pigeon-fanciers in England transport their birds to Cherbourg and release them to fly back across the Channel. About nine thousand are released each year. The book presents the practice as harmless, if unappealing, before setting it against the military suspicion that the birds might be used to carry secret messages.

From Suspicion to Proposed Legislation

In the final phase of his illness, Colonel Sandherr decides that the pigeons could pose a threat to national security and that their flights should be banned. The concern has already been moving through the Ministry of the Interior for nearly a year, and draft legislation has been prepared. The account establishes a proposal, not an enacted ban.

Picquart and the File

General Boisdeffre requires Picquart, as chief of the Statistical Section, to prepare the Ministry of War’s opinion on the draft. Gribelin brings him the file from the rue Saint-Dominique; as he hands it over, Picquart detects a faint gleam of malicious pleasure in Gribelin’s otherwise dull eyes. Picquart says he has no opinion, then reviews the papers after Gribelin leaves. The file makes so little sense to him that he thinks he needs a lawyer and turns to his old friend Louis Leblois. The episode makes the pigeons’ significance administrative as well as comic: an ordinary cross-Channel flight has become a security question that the intelligence chief is expected to answer.