The German Foreign Minister felt sick to his stomach.
Nobody in the German government wanted a war for which it was neither prepared militarily, logistically, politically or psychologically. The problem was that elements close to the Crown Prince in the Wilhelmstrasse and to a degree, a few like-minded hotheads in the Navy, had given their friends and clients in the Spanish Empire the impression that German policy was something it patently, was not. Worse, unknown to the British a little over a month ago, the Kaiser had been persuaded to put his signature to an Imperial edict transferring Rear Admiral Erwin von Reuter’s squadron to the Armada de las Americas, the Navy of Nuevo Granada.
Nobody at the Wilhelmstrasse had been informed of this ‘development’ until yesterday, by which time the first of the men sent ashore from von Reuter’s ships◦– which in the interim were to remain under the tactical command of von Reuter and his officers retaining over half their existing German crews but operating under the orders of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armada de las Americas, which of course, was insane◦– had cabled back to Germany complaining about having to hand over their ships to a quote: ‘Bunch of bloody amateurs who don’t know the bow from the stern,’ and complained volubly that some of the vessels were already ‘real shit-holes…’
The Kaiser had been in decline for some years, everybody knew that: this latest madness had spawned an outcry for the Crown Prince to step in and in effect, become Regent…
Lothar von Bismarck leaned forward.
The situation was so unthinkably bad that he had no choice but to tell his English friend the truth, the whole truth and nothing but…
“This can never be admitted beyond these walls,” he said in a near whisper, imploring confidentiality. “But my Kaiser,” he hesitated, shaking his head, “has placed von Reuter’s ships at the disposal of the Triple Alliance…”
The German Foreign Minister explained further, sharing his analysis that the ‘re-flagging’ of the German squadron ‘might’ conceivably convince the regimes in Mexico City, Havana and on Santo Domingo, as well as ‘unstable entities’ on the northern coast of the Southern continent, that they have ‘carte blanche’ to aggressively challenge British Imperial interests in the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean. There was also the personality of von Reuter himself to be considered; he was an old friend of the Crown Prince and within the Kaiserliche Marine something of an outspoken ‘Anglophobe’, who had long advocated a ‘more assertive policy against British domination of the world’s sea routes.’ The fact that he had been left in command of the so-called ‘Vera Cruz Squadron’ and, according to some reports, been promoted Vice-Admiral in the Armada de las Americas and given command of the naval forces of the putative Triple Alliance, was currently giving rise to ‘serious unhappiness’ in the High Command of the Ministry of War in Berlin.
As Sir George Walpole listened, he was sorely tempted to drain his glass and pour himself another drink.
A big one…
His friend might have been reading his thoughts.
“Nobody knows what is in the mind of the Triple Alliance, or what von Reuter will do next, George.”
“Can’t your Admiralty recall the bloody man?” Walpole demanded quietly.
The German shook his head.
“The Crown Prince will not countenance that,” he sighed, placing his empty tumbler on the table.
The two friends viewed each other for some moments, too distraught to say another word.
Presently, as one they rose to their feet and went to the window to stare at the great monolith of the L'arc de la Victoire.
“Sometimes,” Lothar von Bismarck confessed, wearily, “a fellow must admit, to himself if nobody else, that things might turn out as badly as one first feared.”
Chapter 28
Sunday 2nd April
HMS Achilles, 40 miles south of the Turks and Caicos Islands
Neither of the cruiser’s other pilots had the foggiest idea what they were ‘playing at’ taking their aircraft, each ‘loaded up to the gills’ with the ‘hush hush’ equipment the boffins had installed back on Bermuda, up to their maximum service ceiling of about twelve or thirteen thousand feet◦– on a good day◦– and stooging around within twenty miles of the ship until they got low on fuel. Some of the zigzag courses they had been asked to navigate added a little interest to the flying but not a lot, otherwise the two crews involved, had found the whole thing ‘tiresome’.
Meanwhile, Surgeon Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln had temporarily been removed from the flight roster because three days earlier his superior, Surgeon Commander Flynn had been flown to Cockburn Town, the capital of the Turks and Caicos Islands where the Governor had been taken ill with what now seemed to have turned out to be a straightforward case of a ruptured appendix. Abe had not even tried to get to the bottom of why a passing Royal Naval ship should have been ordered to fly its surgeon ashore to a protectorate that had its own fully-staffed garrison medical corps.
Ours is not to question why…
In any event, he had enjoyed being HMS Achilles’s surgeon the last three days and knew he was going to miss the responsibility, and the feeling of being ‘useful’, when his chief came back on board either later that afternoon or sometime tomorrow morning. Not that he had had a lot to do: the normal daily sick parade, rarely more than two or three malingerers or fellows testing if the ‘new man’ was a soft touch, the periodic health checks that every man had to undergo once every few weeks in tropical waters, this latter a regimen commenced the first day out of Norfolk en route south with no reference to when the ship was actually expected to cross the Tropic of Cancer, a thing it had not done until the day after she sailed south from Bermuda.
However, unlike his fellow pilots he had sought out an opportunity to chat with ‘the boffins’ who had come on board at Bermuda. Apparently, the two pilots had thought this was an underhand approach to discover what they were playing at.
“Well, the thing is we haven’t got a clue what sort of ELDAR coverage the Spanish have in these parts,” Abe was told. “We know they have radar stations on the northern coast of Cuba but this far east, well, nobody’s ever even looked before now. The equipment on your planes will tell us if anybody is broadcasting electronic pulses, and their wavelengths, from the south. If we pick up any signals it will tell us a lot, and if and when we compare the plots from the various flights, we ought to be able to triangulate the approximate position, perhaps to within a mile or so, of any Spanish ELDAR ground stations near to the coast. We need you chaps to fly as high as you can, so that any ELDAR activity on Santo Domingo, about seventy or eighty miles to the south isn’t blocked by the curve of the horizon. Achilles, this far north of Spanish territory will be invisible to any ELDARs on land hopefully, and in the unlikely event the Dominicans detect the Sea Foxes, they won’t think anything untoward of it!”
Abe had processed this information a lot slower than the talkative boffin, Jack Muir◦– a Scot from the Imperial Radio Research Laboratory in Edinburgh, the top secret government establishment which had pioneered the development of cathode ray tubes and beaten the Germans to producing the prototype black and white television broadcast and reception system back in the 1930s◦– a man in his middle years with a shiny, perspiring pate and quick grey eyes who clearly loved his work, had explained it.