Some had called Philip De L’Isle’s ‘border policy’ appeasement; personally, he had always regarded a new war as being, sooner or later, inevitable but had inherited a mandate requiring him to do nothing to risk provoking ‘Spanish aggression in the South West’.
Besides, drastic reductions in manning and equipment levels, and the consequent budgetary savings arising from his policy had been universally welcomed throughout New England, not least on the East Coast, many of whose legislatures were filled with people who did not see why they ought to be paying to ‘defend the Border’, some two thousand miles away, in the first place.
West Texas, Sequoyah, the highlands of the Colorado Valley, and the barely mapped parcels of designated Indian Country scattered in a disorderly patchwork all across the South West into the foothills of the Sierra Madre and the Rocky Mountains, were after all, foreign countries, deserts and wildernesses to most of the citizens of the First Thirteen. So, the establishment of notional de-militarized zones either side of the border and the draw-down of colonial forces had been welcomed practically everywhere, except in the still relatively sparsely populated South West. Inevitably, with the influx of settlers and industry to the borderlands that had been beginning to change; nevertheless, it remained a fact that less than five percent of all New Englanders lived within two hundred and fifty miles of the border with Nuevo Granada.
The Borderlands of the South West remained country of which most New Englanders new little and sadly, cared less…
Moreover, even if De L’Isle had wanted to substantially alter the military balance in the region his hands were tied by what he, as a military man, well understood to be ‘the facts on the ground’.
The problem was that while many colonies had been persuaded to call up the majority of their reservists to spring camps, aircraft had been taken out of mothballs and one of the four mechanised infantry divisions stationed in the British Isles◦– the 52nd Highlanders◦– had been warned to embark for New England in the coming days, there was no magic wand that Philip De L’Isle or his military advisors could wave to remedy overnight the ‘peacetime’ status of the forces down on the Border.
They were where they were…
The policy mandated from London had been one of watchful vigilance; so, the avoidance of unnecessary incidents and provocations had been the guiding order of the day while the men in the Old Country tried to work out what to do about the ‘Spanish Problem’.
The mission to Madrid was supposed to have been a fig leaf behind which preparations might be made and which hopefully, would gain a little more time to resolve the conundrum of whether or not there was any such thing any more as the ‘Empire of New Spain’. The assumption had been◦– complacently, in De L’Isle and Matthew Harrison’s opinions◦– was that the Spanish provinces ringing the Caribbean and dominating the central Americas were so many disarticulated, uncoordinated entities incapable of acting in concert to bring their truly massive combined military clout, and latent economic power to bear against their northern neighbour and or to challenge British imperial hegemony over North America.
Which was all very well if one ignored the five-ton rogue African bull Elephant in the ‘room’ of global realpolitik, the German Empire. Frustrated by the British Empire’s command of practically all the international trade routes, Germany had been investing heavily in Spain’s colonies in both the East and the West Indies, and attempting, with varying degrees of success to increase its influence in Africa, Latin America and the Far East, at the same time modernising and increasing the size, capabilities and reach of the Deutsches Heer (the Imperial Army), the Kaiserliche Marine (the Imperial Navy) and the Deutsche Luftstreitkräfte (the German Air Force). At the same time the Abwehr, the combined military intelligence service of the three arms of the forces, and the Foreign Intelligence Service controlled by the Wilhelmstrasse, the German Foreign Office, had also massively extended their tentacles in the last decade.
Nowadays, everything that happened in Old Spain and elsewhere needed to be viewed through the prism of a thus far militarily peaceful, yet otherwise hostile and antagonistic German strategy which could only be designed to erode British global hegemony.
There were those who accused British ministers of appeasement; of criminal inaction in the face of German intimidation. Whatever his critics in New England accused him of, De L’Isle was not a man in that camp.
In any event, he recognised that his view of the ‘big picture’ was restricted, which was just as well because he had quite enough on his plate already. He planned to carry on working within the policy framework handed down to him by his principals in the Foreign and Colonial Office in Whitehall.
Historically, whatever one thought of the state of Old Spain sandwiched between long-time British ally Portugal to the west and the Mediterranean◦– a Royal Navy ‘pond’◦– to the east, with British occupied France to its north, separated from the Americas by an ocean ruled by Britannia, and with every passing year that little bit more impoverished in comparison with its own colonies and all the other major European powers, it was assumed that the King-Emperor in Madrid at least exerted a restraining hand on the ambitions of his most unruly ‘subjects’ abroad. It was taken as read that Ferdinand was not about to become a meek vassal to the Kaiser’s Germany, no matter how much treasure in the form of military, economic and straightforward humanitarian aid the Germans dispersed in the distant colonies.
This ‘foundation’ presumption was pretty much an article of faith in the corridors of the FCO whose wise denizens argued, persuasively, that if Spanish colonies unwisely fomented war with British Imperial interests then inevitably, the old country back on the Iberian Peninsula would ‘get it in the neck’ from just about every quarter, regardless of what happened elsewhere in the subsequent conflagration. Therefore, the wise men in Whitehall prognosticated, it was in nobody’s interest in Madrid to play that particular game.
Therefore, the Peace of Paris remained inviolate.
For the moment, at least.
This had seemed a safe basis for the ongoing conduct of international affairs, given that there was no intelligence that the government in Madrid had, for example, even attempted to build an atomic bomb and it was generally assumed that not even the Kaiser would contemplate handing over any of the dreadful things to the Spanish in the Americas or the Pacific.
The rationale was reasonable; unfortunately, it pre-supposed that other first, second and third rank powers would view the ‘Spanish Problem’ through the same prism as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Such an assumption had suited successive recent governments much in the fashion of turning a blind eye to a signal one does not wish to receive.
Right now, Philip De L’Isle and Matthew Harrison were confronting a developing situation which might, very easily, turn into the sort of nightmare they had discussed, many times in recent years and tried, and repeatedly failed to get Whitehall to take seriously.
“All the lines to Madrid have gone down,” the Governor reported tersely. “Just before it happened there were several reports of troop movements and heavy gunfire. Other big cities appear to have gone off ‘the grid’ in the last few hours.”
“Could it be a coup?” Harrison mused, thinking aloud. In a moment he clicked his thoughts into gear. “Henrietta and Melody Danson are not in Madrid at present. My information is that they were the guests of the Duke of Medina Sidonia out in the country somewhere. They weren’t due back at the Embassy until the coming weekend at the earliest.”