“Your word is our command, my dear,” her husband assured her, taking off his reading glasses as he rose to welcome Walpole. “I’ve called the inner circle over this evening,” he said to his visitor when they were alone. “For obvious reasons, I wanted to hear your take on the latest developments first.”
The men took chairs by the cold hearth where a tea pot, a jug of milk and a pair of cups and saucers awaited them on a low table. They looked at each other.
“What the Devil are the Germans playing at, George?” The Prime Minister asked quietly.
“It’s not just the Germans,” his Foreign Secretary countered. “If it was, things might be explicable. In some sense, at least. Frankly, I’m not entirely convinced that the German Minister really knows what his Navy is up to in the Caribbean. It’s the old problem of the Army, the Navy and the Foreign Ministry each pursuing their own agendas. It does not help that the Kaiser seems to be a little do-lally some weeks… Goodness knows what the Crown Prince and the Tsar said to each other the other week; everybody knows they hate each other’s guts and have done since they were cadets…”
“Perhaps, they’ve finally agreed that they dislike us more than they loathe each other?”
Sir George Walpole shook his head, forced a grimace because they both knew that was not what this was all about. The German Navy, the Kaiserliche Marine, modelled itself on the Royal Navy, its officers were expected to be fluent English speakers and writers, and close, life-long and life-defining friendships between officers in the two navies were common. The relations between the Deutsches Heer and the British Army were less cordial, as was to be expected from the men of armies watching each other across the broad expanses of the upper Rhine.
But that was not the problem, the problem was that something unquantifiable had suddenly altered and the whole calculus of Anglo-German relations had somehow shifted, like continental tectonic plates grinding against each other, suddenly shifting without warning; and he had not seen it coming, so, perhaps it was not really that inexplicable that for the first time in his political career he was at a complete loss as to know what to do next.
The academic and the historian in him wanted to offer analysis, to dissect the runes uncovered by the not so subtly moving pieces on the geopolitical chessboard but the time for that had come and gone, possibly years ago.
He began to list the new, and old◦– unresolved◦– issues separating London and Berlin.
“While I am convinced that there would be no consensus within the circle around the Kaiser, or within his government, which would support any direct threat of armed aggression against our fundamental interests in Europe,” Walpole prefaced, cursing how ponderously his mind was turning of late, “German policies challenging our traditional hegemony around the world and encouraging allies and proxies to oppose our influence, essentially although not exclusively non-violently have led to conditions in some regions which have generated a momentum of their own. I do not know, nor can I claim to know, if this was the hope or the plan of my counterparts at the Wilhelmstrasse, or simply a concatenation of unseen or unforeseeable consequences.”
The Prime Minister’s eyes narrowed.
“An accident, you mean?”
“Perhaps, more likely an object lesson in the workings of the law of unintended consequences…”
“You do know that you start speaking like a professor of the old school when you are worried, George?”
Walpole forced a smile.
“Yes, sorry.”
Hector Hamilton rubbed his chin with his free hand before picking up his tea cup with the other. He raised the cup to his lips, thought better of it and replaced it on the table top.
“The Crown Prince has been talking about pulling out of the Submarine Treaty ever since the ink dried on it,” he reminded his friend. “The Germans have been complaining about our alleged interference in the development of their Caribbean oil refineries on Aruba, without cause, obviously, for almost as long. As for their army of so-called technical advisors on Cuba and in New Spain, well, we decided to turn a blind eye to that as part of the quid pro quo, or rather, the diplomatic scaffolding supporting the Submarine Treaty and its related sub clauses…”
“Lothar warned me that the Kaiser is on the verge of posting notice to quit from the Treaty,” Walpole informed Hamilton. “It is blatantly clear to me that the coup in Spain must have been instigated by a middle-ranking cadre of Army and Navy officers trained in Germany.”
The Foreign Secretary’s tone was suddenly harsh.
“The thing that worries me, scares me, if I’m being honest about it, Hector,” George Walpole continued glumly, “is the news that the Wilhelmstrasse, albeit apparently at the Kaiser’s command, has allowed the re-flagging of Admiral von Reuter’s squadron. It is unclear when exactly this occurred, probably sometime in the last fortnight but those ships are now under the operational control of the Armada de las Americas. Which means that this blasted ‘Triple Alliance’ that the Spanish colonies in the region have been talking about for years, now has the nucleus of a modern navy…”
“Surely, our German friends must realise that this risks temporarily altering the balance of naval power in the Caribbean,” Hector Hamilton remarked, cool as a cucumber. “Presumably, you explained this to Count Bismarck?”
“Yes,” his friend confirmed abruptly.
The Prime Minister remained relatively sanguine.
“With the Indomitable and her squadron at New Orleans and the Princess Royal and Task Force 5.1 of the Atlantic Fleet presently exercising within seven days’ steaming time of anywhere in the Gulf of Spain or the rest of the Caribbean, any advantage the Spanish, or their German mentors, might hope to gain from this ‘exercise’ would be short-lived, George.”
“Would it, Hector?” His old friend objected. “All we have down there right now is a single light cruiser, the Cassandra at Kingston Jamaica, and another, the Achilles on her way to join her in a few days’ time. We have negligible air forces on Jamaica, or for that matter on any of our other island territories in the eastern Caribbean. Goodness knows what potential havoc Admiral von Reuter’s ships could wreak down there before our capital ships caught up with them. If they ever caught up with them, that is. And what if we eventually capture or destroy those German-Spanish ships? There are already nascent independence movements on many of the islands under our control. There have been sporadic campaigns of civil disobedience on both Jamaica and Barbados, goodness, we had to send in the Marines to restore order in Trinidad two or three years back. What message will it send to the peoples of those far-flung islands if we cannot even defend them from a handful of bloody ‘Spanish’ cruisers?”
The Prime Minister digested this in silence, then, forsaking his tea went to the drinks cabinet and returned with a decanter of whisky and two crystal tumblers. He poured generous measures into each of the glasses.
The two men sipped, then as if by common consent, imbibed deep draughts of the restorative amber liquid as they mulled cause and effect, and ultimately, their failure.
Walpole knew that the King had talked his friend out of resigning in the aftermath of the Empire Day atrocities of two years ago, that personally, Hector had felt then, and ever since that he ought to have departed Downing Street back in July 1976, standing aside in favour of a younger, and perhaps, angrier and more decisive man to face the music.