Chapter 2
Thursday 6th April
SMS Breitenfeld, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
Fifty-four-year-old Rear Admiral Erwin von Reuter watched from the port wing of the eighteen-thousand-ton cruiser’s compass platform, as the last of the most seriously wounded men were brought up from below in the first light of dawn.
It was no mean task to transfer men maimed by blast and fire, their stretchers, drips and monitors from the sick bay and the emergency casualty handling stations deep within the ship, up and through the smoke-blackened passageways of the aft superstructure and onto the quarterdeck where doctors and nurses from the armed fleet auxiliary, SMS Weser did what they could to make the injured men as comfortable as possible before their transfer to their own ship’s hastily expanded hospital wards.
Fifty metres away the flag of Nuevo Granada, the Mexican lands, fluttered limply from the flagship’s halyards in the early morning breeze like an ever-present reminder of the undying shame von Reuter’s Government – he prayed that the shame was the mad old Kaiser’s alone, not of those around him, whom he still hoped and prayed clung to their sanity in Berlin – had brought down upon the Imperial flag that, until the last day of February, had previously flown with untrammelled honour from that same main mast halyard. Time and again in recent days he had tried, and failed, to imagine what his old friend Crown Prince Wilhelm must be thinking at this moment, of the abject disgrace of the Kaiserliche Marine.
Wilhelm must be tearing out his hair…
“Ah, there you are!”
Von Reuter did not turn, knowing his face would be like thunder beneath the still bloody bandage swathing his badly gashed brow. He planned to have that wound looked at properly when his wounded were safely on board the Weser. A surgeon’s mate had put several hurried, crude stitches in the shrapnel gouge across his neck, and the superficial tear across his scalp, injecting some kind of local anaesthetic which had worn off several hours ago.
“I thought I’d find you skulking up here!”
Forty-year-old Vice Admiral Count Carlos Federico Gravina y Vera Cruz, a man used to easy living and tending toward corpulency, the Chief Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Amada de Nuevo Granada, was still basking in the warm inner glow of his latest promotion, as the High Admiral of the Fleets of the Triple Alliance. In theory, he was Erwin von Reuter’s commanding officer.
Or at least, he thought he was.
Personally, so far as von Reuter was concerned, he remained a German officer and the only man he had ever sworn an oath of allegiance to was the man elected to rule the Empire that sunny day in Berlin in July 1937, by the grace of the twenty-four ‘Electors’ – kings and princes of Germany – and mad or not, it was to him, his Kaiser, that his unconditional fealty was due.
Unlike von Reuter’s officers, most of Gravina’s senior staffers had retired to their cabins. Well, those who still had cabins. The bastards had actually complained about the passageways being crowded with the overspill from the main and emergency sick bays! With leaders like that it was hardly surprising that the majority of the ‘Mexican’ – that had been a surprise, that none of the people in Vera Cruz called themselves Spaniards, or even New Granadans – crewmen who had come aboard, some four hundred men, almost entirely conscripts, among them scores of natives from the countryside with few or any words of Spanish, meaning that not even their own officers could communicate with them, had been little better than terrified passengers during yesterday’s battle!
That von Reuter had had to send nearly one in three of his well-trained, good Germans home in the days before the ‘Allies’ into whose hands his fleet had been delivered, insanely, just weeks before he had been ordered to trade broadsides with the Royal Navy, defied all logic!
Predictably, although the newcomers had not – so far as he could tell, only a proper analysis of the recent action would prove it one way or the other – obviously impaired the gunnery of his ships, mainly because he had not permitted any of the new men to get anywhere near the main batteries of his ships, the presence of so many ‘passengers’ had half-crippled the Breitenfeld’s damage control, fire-fighting and casualty handling teams, the performance of which had, at times during the battle and in the hours since had been nothing short of… deplorable.
Even now, there were scores of Mexicans wandering around like lost souls – basically, getting in the way – while their officers got drunk in the Wardroom celebrating the ‘great victory’.
“Do we really need so many men attending to the injured?” Vice Admiral Count Carlos Federico Gravina y Vera Cruz inquired, his dark, aquiline features, belying his girth, creased with impatience.
Very few of von Reuters officers and men spoke Spanish, and experience had revealed that the Castilian dialect common in the West Indies and Central America often took a little getting used to even for a native of Old Spain. The ‘American tongue’ of the Spanish throughout the lands of New Spain, was shot through with corruptions of old words picked up from the languages of the indigenous peoples of the long-conquered lands, and its syntax subtly altered – some said improved – by seemingly random interjections of pigeon Portuguese.
Fortunately, as was to be expected of naval officers world-wide, Gravina and his officers, if not many of his petty officers and other rates, spoke passable English. Thus, if nothing else, both men at least understood the language of their enemies.
Except, von Reuter, for all that he had been an ardent pro-nationalist, ‘imperial German’, his whole adult life and had no reason to doubt that his friend and sponsor in Berlin, the Crown Prince, shared all those ‘Grosse Deutschland’ dreams of a World Order in which the Empire was the equal, not forever the supplicant to Britannia, suspected that somewhere along the line there had been a dreadful error in translation.
Von Reuter’s anger simmered and seethed just beneath his icy self-possession.
Dammit, the bloody British drove him up the wall!
Their insufferable air of superiority was like a slap in the face with a wet fish every day of his life!
Much as they might claim they did not own every bloody inch of every bloody ocean!
But did he imagine, want, think it was remotely sane to trade broadsides with the British…
Of course not!
That was insane!
He and the Crown Prince had both, independently, sought clarification of the Kaiser’s ‘Vera Cruz Decree’, and the orders subsequently issued with regard to the terms of the transfer of von Reuter’s West Indies Squadron to Las Armada de Nuevo Granada.
Unambiguous clarification had arrived back in February.
He was to transfer his ships into the hands of, and report to C-in-C Vera Cruz. The ship’s crews were to be rotated home over the next ten months in three approximately numerically equal groups; all commanding officers were to retain day to day operational control of their ships until notified to the contrary. The idea was that his people were supposed to stay long enough to train the Mexicans how to steam and fight the ships; although, from what he had seen of the quality and competence of the officers and men posted to the squadron thus far, ten months was not going to be anywhere like long enough.
While some of the officers seemed to have a little bit of savvy about them, they were as a group well-educated and some had spent time at staff colleges in Germany after all, they might learn the technical ropes fairly quickly. Their ‘men’ were another thing altogether. Half of them could not read or write, most of them had never been to sea before and generally speaking, they seemed to react badly to the discipline essential to safely and efficiently run any ship, heaven forfend, ones as hideously complicated and potentially lethal as those of the Vera Cruz Squadron.