“I see sucking German cock has lost none of its appeal,” Flynn said, giving in to temptation. “How much did they tell you about us?”
“They said that the British were going to take over our territory and strengthen their empire,” Darlan said. “You betrayed us…”
“Oh, come on,” Flynn snapped. “Surely a nation with the heritage of Napoleon, of Louis, even Marshal Foch, would have thought that it might be a good idea to make certain that all possible angles of attack were covered, eh? Indeed, an army unit near the Ardennes would have crushed the Boche; instead of sucking them off you could be sipping drinks in Berlin.”
“We were betrayed by Communists, traitors, Jews,” Darlan snapped. “The entire army was badly handled – your people…”
“Expected you to live up to your boasts,” Flynn sighed. “Admiral, I wanted to try to talk you into joining the war against the Germans – seeing that they now have no reason to put up with Vichy any longer – but you’re clearly unreasonable…”
“I would have command of the invasion, if you’re as powerful as your notes suggested?” Darlan asked. “I could bring the French Empire to the table…”
“Most of the Empire has already fallen to us or to the Japanese, for whom you opened the door,” Flynn said. “Allow me to explain your position; you have no empire, no modern forces, and the Germans will begin converting France into a bastion to fight us from, while they get their nukes ready.
“Oh, never mind,” he snapped, as Darlan began to look interested. “You have no bargaining power and a complete refusal to look reality in the face. You will be held here, pending the outcome of the war.”
He stormed out, passing the guards at the door; they’d not put the Frenchman in the cells used for dissidents. Pacing down through the stairs, he reached his armoured car and climbed in, nodding politely to the driver.
“Well?” The driver asked, as he took the armoured car back to the new base. Flynn knew better than to bite his head off; the driver didn’t work for the army. “How did it go with the Frog?”
“Badly,” Flynn said. “That man is very unreasonable.”
“What do you expect?” The driver asked. “He’s French. C Section?”
“It looks that way,” Flynn said to the driver who was not a driver. “As soon as possible, if you please.”
“It shall be done, Superior Sir,” the driver said, and laughed at Flynn’s puzzlement.
General Flynn took off his uniform jacket with every expression of relief, before taking the seat in the conference room. Air conditioning hadn’t been a concept the French commander had enjoyed; setting up a proper solar power plant and air conditioning had been a priority, along with a powerful and capable communications station. The room was now one of the most advanced command centres in the world, linked into the similar centres on Malta, Gibraltar and Ark Royal II.
“The French are proving unreasonable,” he said without preamble. Beside him, General Wavell snorted. “Apart from the sheer refusal of their leaders – those who survived the bloody nationalist purge – to cooperate, some of them have made it clear that they will only assist us in exchange for great power status.”
“Talk about playing without a full deck,” Colonel Weston commented. “What about the German prisoners?”
All eyes turned to Doctor Hamilton. “We have begun to use the recordings of Nazi Germany to attempt to convince them that they were fighting on the wrong side,” he said. “Unfortunately, we have only a handful of German prisoners, mainly trainers ordered to stiffen Italian spines. The results have been mixed; we really need someone of great statue.”
“Bother,” Flynn said. “What about the Italians?”
“We captured nearly fifty thousand Italians in the war,” Hamilton said. “Most of them are very resentful at being told what to do by the Germans, the more so when we explained what the Germans were doing in Italy. Many of them would be willing to fight for us, they would need a great deal of training, however, and it might not be wise to trust them with modern equipment.”
“People are working on that,” Flynn said. “General Wavell?”
He’d appointed General Wavell his deputy and given him command of the final missions. The Contemporary had adapted surprisingly well; his mixture of caution and confidence, combined with a genuine concern for his soldiers, had made him popular with the 2015 officers. Politically, appointing him made sense; he was nowhere near as incompetent as some historians would later brand him.
“We have finished the task of occupying Morocco,” he said. He tapped the map delightedly; he’d fallen in love with the electronic maps. “The Spanish fought hard, so we had to blast them out with field guns. Unfortunately, this is likely to lead to war with Spain.”
“It was a political decision,” Flynn said. He suspected that the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet had seen it as a way to underline the danger to Franco if he came out on Hitler’s side, and at the same time to get a head start on investing in the new free Morocco. With the Spanish undecided about joining the Axis or not, with two examples of punishment from each side, he couldn’t tell which way they would jump in the end.
“The downside is that we’re at 30% of Contemporary ammunition,” Wavell said. He scowled. “Guns need bullets, field guns need shells, tanks need shells, and aircraft need and so on and so on. We’re simply not getting any from home anymore.”
Flynn winced. Somehow, the thought of running out of Contemporary ammunition had never occurred to them. “We’re working on providing you with reactivated tanks, mainly Chieftains,” he said. “There are so many things to do and hardly enough trained men to do them.”
“There have also been some discipline problems,” Wavell continued. “The common soldier doesn’t like the fact that your troops are obviously better looked after, better paid and better armed. There have been scuffles already, some injuries and a handful of accidents when they experiment with your equipment. It’s also started to sink in that they’ll never see home again; the married men in particular have been shocked, particularly when they got the letters…”
Flynn shuddered. Some of the men, hardly more than teenagers in 1945, had older versions of themselves in the 2015 Britain. There weren’t many, all in their nineties, but there were enough to cause more legal problems. Others had heard from older versions of their wives, or their children, all of whom were older than them.
“I won’t say that morale is down, because the victories have boosted it, but it’s starting to fall again,” Wavell said. “General, what are we going to do?”
“They’ll have to go back to school,” Flynn said, thinking of two cases in particular. A woman in Britain was suing for divorce; her husband had warned his Contemporary counterpart not to marry her when she arrived from France. A second case had been an angry note from a woman who’d killed the future counterpart – after she’d been treated very badly indeed. The legal ruling that Contemporary personnel were not their future lives in the original timeline was under challenge; the crimes everyone remembered were the really grim ones.
“That won’t help much,” Wavell said. “General, how can they fit into your society?”
“I don’t know,” Flynn said. “We have to try, though; we owe your men so much.” He coughed once. “Ideally, we should be getting the reactivated Chieftain tanks in a week or so, so we can begin training your men to use them. They’re not up to Challenger levels, but they are still far more advanced than anything else on the planet. Then we have to decide what to do next and…”