If the FCO’s intelligence was half-right, anywhere remotely near the mark, the coup in Madrid had probably been fomented by a cadre of middle-ranking Spanish Army and Navy officers trained in Germany with close links to the Imperial Army, the Deutsches Heer and the Navy, the Kaiserliche Marine.
The Germans privately called this generation of Spanish brigadiers, colonels and majors, naval captains and commanders das junge blut◦– the young bloods◦– men who were schooled in Prussian military thinking and tactics. The Spanish had sent many of their best and brightest officers to Germany since the mid-1950s in a belated attempt to meaningfully modernise, intellectually and technologically, its ‘home’ armed forces, a move subsequently mirrored by the governors of Nuevo Spain (New Granada), Cuba, Santo Domingo and several of the South American provinces.
Sir George Walpole and his predecessors had always viewed the ‘Germanisation’ of elements within the Old and New◦– colonial◦– Spanish military establishments, and the supply of German weaponry, everything from state-of-the-art medium-sized warships to infantry small arms although as yet, it seemed, no advanced guided munitions, to the King-Emperor’s Iberian forces and worryingly, to several of Spain’s far-flung, disobedient colonies, particularly those closest to New England, with immense suspicion. Yet, keen to avoid provoking an international crisis at virtually any cost, successive British governments had restricted its protests to quiet, behind the scenes ‘conversations’.
There were men in Walpole’s own Progressive Tory coalition who privately called the policy of ‘quiet diplomacy’ appeasement but they had always been in the minority.
“You will understand that my colleagues in London are concerned that while our diplomatic missions in Spain have been mercilessly targeted that German, and to a degree, Russian interests have escaped the attention of the mobs, Lothar?”
The German minister did not flinch.
“Our influence with the factions vying for control in Spain is not, perhaps, what some of your colleagues might imagine it to be, George.”
The Englishman smiled, his eyes cold.
“I am informed that Admiral von Reuter’s squadron may have departed Vera Cruz?”
“I’m sorry. I have no knowledge of that.”
The two 8-inch gunned heavy cruisers, the Lützen and the Breitenfeld, three 5.9-inch armed light cruisers, Karlsruhe, Emden and Breslau, and as many as eight fleet destroyers of the C-79 and D-111 classes armed with 4.1-inch 55-calibre guns and fitted with between six and eight 20-inch torpedo tubes had been scattered about the Caribbean and the ports of the Gulf of Spain until about a fortnight ago when they, their oilers and supply ships had rendezvoused at the Spanish port of Vera Cruz. Even with the recent deployment of the mighty old warhorse HMS Indomitable and her screening destroyers at New Orleans, the handful of other Royal Navy ships, just one cruiser until HMS Achilles arrived on the Jamaica Station, a few older destroyers and a handful of gunboats, were hugely outnumbered by von Reuter’s powerful modern squadron, the oldest ship of which was the sixteen-thousand-ton heavy cruiser Seiner Majestät Schiff Lützen commissioned in 1969.
“You must be concerned for the safety of your advisors in the Caribbean?” The British Foreign Secretary prompted.
Actually, von Bismarck was extremely worried about the thousands of dependents of the small but very significant regiment of German diplomats, soldiers and sailors, resident in Cuba and Santo Domingo, although not so much about the even larger German presence in New Granada.
Potentially, Santo Domingo was a nightmare with various theocratic movements constantly calling for the persecution of foreign apostates regardless of their own government’s crying need for outside help◦– exclusively German in the last twenty years◦– to run its poverty-stricken territory’s basic infrastructure and to maintain its mainly early twentieth century military equipment in something like good fighting order.
The situation on Cuba was different, the civil population◦– over fifty percent slaves◦– was largely quiescent under a colonial regime which had ceased to pay anything other than lip-service to Madrid for decades, and had formed increasingly intimate military and commercial links with the regime in Mexico City in the wake of the loss of its Floridian lands in the late 1950s.
“Look, Lothar,” Walpole went on, not having expected his friend to have responded to his previous, essentially rhetorical question. “I am very worried that it would not take much for things to get completely out of hand…”
“So, am I.” The Kaiser’s Foreign Minister sipped his Balvenie, enjoying the warmth of the spring sun on his face.
Back in Berlin, the General Staff parroted out the mantra that ‘we are ready for anything, Your Majesty’ but actually, that was a misnomer. Whereas, the British Empire spread its fleet around the World and committed relatively small land forces◦– relying on locally raised units in the main◦– the German Empire had several armies distributed around its borders and whole divisions deployed abroad, at ruinous expense to the Berlin Treasury, already engaged in three or four low-level, enervating ‘bush-fire wars’. In the West, it had maintained active force levels at two to three times that of the British Army of the Rhine occupying France and in the east, three further German Armies confronted the Russian bear and its potentially bottomless pit of manpower. Likewise, another whole Army Group held down the Balkan remnants of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, deterring the militaristic ambitions of the resurgent Caliphate in Istanbul. The spiralling cost of it all◦– yearly exacerbated by the steadily rising developmental and procurement costs of increasingly more sophisticated armaments◦– had been the bane of all German civil administrations for a generation.
Ironically, the Kaiser◦– unlike his son, Crown Prince Frederick◦– was not really a very warlike man who listened to his generals’ and admirals’ prognostications with a complacent ear, allowing himself to be comforted by statistics: men under arms, reserves standing ready for mobilization, ships ready for action, etcetera ad infinitum.
Basically, the Kaiser liked to style himself as the ‘Hadrian of the Reich’. The ‘Empire is big enough, what we have we hold, in perpetuity’ and until recent years his mainly Prussian, military establishment, had fortified the borders of his Reich with immense purpose and professionalism. Consequently, regardless of the changing winds of international affairs, Germany was superbly placed to defend itself; but as to progressing its imperial ambitions abroad, well, that was another matter. The Royal Navy and the North Sea bottled up this Kaiser’s◦– as with all Kaisers since the turn of the century◦– pride and joy, the High Seas Fleet, in its Baltic lair; and its presence other than in the Caribbean and on the Asia Station, remained globally insignificant.
Unfortunately, with the Kaiser’s withdrawal from public life in recent years, a disconnect had emerged within the higher echelons of the Imperial body politic. The old Kaiser was failing fast and the Crown Prince had long been an advocate of a ‘less apologetic’ approach to the ‘shackles of the 1866 Treaty’, which he and his clique, regarded as an outdated, borderline irrelevant straightjacket denying the German Empire its ‘rightful place in the sun’.
Nevertheless, the reality on the ground was that the Imperial General Staff had, for as long as anybody could remember, always planned on the basis that there would be no general war in the next five years, or a major conflict overseas◦– that is, with a second, or a third-rate power, because a ‘European war’ with the British was too unimaginable as to be not worth planning for◦– within the next two years. This was still the General Staff’s assumption despite the messages Bismarck had been trying to get the idiots to listen to; ever since the ripples of the explosions of those speedboats crashing into the side of those British battleships on Empire Day had begun to fan out around the globe.