If this or any other vexation was presently costing Lord Collingwood to lose sleep there was little in his calm, unruffled demeanour to betray it. If nothing else a career in the Navy inured a man to setbacks and frustrations; a captain at sea often had to choose between the lesser of two evils so it paid to be mindful of what remained on the credit side of the ledger regardless of the down side of the naval balance sheet.
On paper, and in reality, he knew that the Atlantic Fleet remained nothing less than formidable, of itself the equal of any other Navy on the planet with the obvious exception of the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet, and the rapidly modernising Imperial Japanese Navy. The Spanish colonies in the Americas had no centralised command system, no modern battleships, no aircraft carriers, an antique collection of ironclads, a dozen variously modern cruisers but perhaps as many as thirty or forty notionally operational destroyers and frigates of varying vintages and utility.
“If this goes badly,” Rear Admiral Parkinson observed, daring to mention the dog in the manger which had be-devilled planning. The big unknown was the quality of enemy air. “Frankly, nobody seems to have the remotest idea whether the Spanish, be it on Santo Domingo, Cuba, or New Spain or in Colombia or Venezuela, are capable of projecting meaningful air power over any or all of the Caribbean or the Gulf of Spain. Goodness, we don’t even know if the beggars are capable of bombing southern Florida!”
What with one thing and another the presence of the modern German ‘Vera Cruz Squadron’ inconveniently muddied the tactical situation. In much the same way that a similar, more powerful German East Asia Squadron at Tsingtao, flying the flag of Rear Admiral Reinhard von Trotha in the battlecruiser Goeben, was complicating the strategic calculus in the Far East where, in comparison, the Royal Navy was spread somewhat thinly.
Other Kaiserliche Marine squadrons and flotillas, and a number of lone vessels were currently abroad conducting ‘good will visits’ and suchlike. There was nothing remotely unusual about this: the Kaiser was as enthusiastic about flag-waving as anybody. Some analysts speculated that perhaps, one in four ‘active’ units in the Imperial Navy was presently engaged on such ‘flag-waving’ missions outside European waters. This was important because the last time there had been so many German warships ‘showing the flag’ in foreign parts had been at the height of the Submarine Crisis in the mid-1960s.
That had turned out all right in the end…
Collingwood stepped back into the conversation, electing to defer further, unprofitable discussion of the intentions of Edwin von Reuter’s cruiser squadron, for another time.
“Achilles is going south with the latest covert electronic listening gear on board,” he reported, for the Governor’s information. “She may be able to answer one or two of the questions we have concerning, particularly, the Dominicans’ electronic warfare capabilities along the north coast of Santo Domingo. Frankly, the thing which worries me at the moment is not if the Spanish come out looking for a rough-house fight with my ships but if they attempt to fight an asymmetric campaign of attrition.”
Philip De L’Isle frowned, said nothing.
“For example,” Collingwood continued, “the blighters could secretly mine shallow water channels in the Floridian Keys, or ports in the south, the entrance to the Mississippi Delta say. Or make sneak hit and run attacks using their fastest units against undefended or lightly-defended coastal targets in the Gulf or as far north as the Carolinas.”
“Is that likely?”
Parkinson shrugged: “It is very hard to say, sir,” he admitted. “But one has to try to visualise how they, knowing they are outgunned, might view things. If I was in my counterpart’s place in Havana I’d seriously think about a range of well, basically, underhand options. One of which might be to convert several merchantmen into disguised commerce raiders…”
De L’Isle was lost now.
“Sorry, sir. If you’d bear with me,” Parkinson apologised. “You’d take an ordinary motor ship, install as many heavy guns, torpedo tubes, too, on it and then hide everything away behind hinged hull panels and so forth. The idea being that you would creep up on one of our unsuspecting merchantmen, or even a small warship, probably swapping friendly, jovial signals and mega-phone hails all the way and then when the two ships were next to each other unmask one’s guns…”
“Is that even legal?”
“Er, yes, sir. I’m afraid it is. We, er, vetoed resolutions at Paris a decade or so ago, which would have outlawed that kind of thing because we wanted to be able to legally employ so-called ‘decoy’ ships to sink submarines.”
“Submarines are banned,” the Governor of New England growled, eyes narrowing. “Are you telling me that the Spanish might have submarines too?”
The Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet sighed.
“We don’t know, sir. If one discounts the normal rumours about the Kaiserliche Marine exercising covertly built submersibles in the Baltic, there are credible reports that the Cubans might have attempted to construct several small ‘submersibles’ in big sheds at their Guantanamo Bay shipbuilding facility but honestly and truly, we just don’t know what they were up to there or anywhere else.”
Philip De L’Isle would have despaired but that would never have done.
So, instead, he thoughtfully sipped his tea.
ACT II – THE MADNESS OF PRINCES
Chapter 14
Sunday 19th March
Hotel Atlantique, Boulevard du Wellington, Paris
The news from Spain had fallen upon the city’s diplomatic community like a tsunami that nobody had seen coming. Not that most Parisians or the thousands of British, German, Scandinavian and Mediterranean visitors to the cultural capital of western civilisation would have known it as they strolled the grand boulevards, or emerged from their religious observances in chapels, churches and cathedrals into the blissful spring sunshine.
Notwithstanding, the background burbling of radios followed one wherever one went. Suddenly, the news was closer to home, at the very borders of the country with the most sensitive and bloodily fought over borderlands on the planet. There remained an angst written into the souls of the French nation, an acknowledgement that the ‘great peace’ was not a thing within its sovereign control and that an equilibrium maintained for so long must, one day, come to an end. The Grand Alliance had brought not peace, rather an absence of war to an utterly shattered, broken country in 1866. A peace not unlike that the Romans had brought to Gaul two millennia ago. Although Tacitus had not been writing of the downfall of Vercingetorix before Julius Caesar’s legions, all French school children learned of the ancient histories that were still achingly relevant to their modern situation.
Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant… To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace…