HMS Cassandra was attacked while in harbour at Kingston, severely damaged and forced aground to prevent her total loss while simultaneously Spanish and Cuban troops made landings at Montego Bay on the north west coast, and units of the Dominican San Lorenzo Commando came ashore at St Margaret’s Bay in the north east. Heavy fighting is still going on between garrison troops and a brigade hastily formed from the survivors of HMS Cassandra and other naval shore detachments in and around the capital of the colony, Kingston. The situation is desperate as more enemy ships arrive to land more invaders and to intensify the bombardment of our positions.
Simultaneously, HMS Achilles was ambushed in the Windward Passage by the former German heavy cruisers SMS Lutzen and SMS Breitenfeld in company with at least two large fleet destroyers. Achilles’s sea planes had previously valiantly attacked and disabled a third cruiser, the former SMS Karlsruhe. However, confronted by two modern cruisers with hugely superior firepower whose armoured sides her own, much smaller guns could not hope to penetrate, Achilles fought like a lion at bay to the very end, until overwhelmed by her attackers she sank with the loss, we fear, of over four hundred lives.
I must emphasise again that these were unprovoked, sneak attacks mounted in flagrant contravention of the accepted rules of war and those responsible for them will be held accountable.
The Empire will go to the aid of Jamaica.
The Empire will remember the men who have died this week.
The Empire will remember brave Achilles!
Today, in fulfilment of our solemn imperial obligation we shall meet force with force. We have a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to keep the peace.
People will ask why we have not declared war on Spain itself. Had not that sad country descended into madness in recent weeks that might have been a consideration which sorely tried my government. Nobody should be under any illusion that if ‘Old Spain’ threatens or in any way instigates military aggression against our ally, Portugal, or against our colony at Gibraltar or in any way seeks to impede traffic in international waters the consequences will be immediate, and severe. As always, we stand by our Treaty of Paris commitments to guard in perpetuity the historic northern border between Spain and France.
For the moment we are content to sever normal diplomatic relations and all trading links with ‘Old Spain’. At some point in the near future we will raise as a matter of urgency the disgraceful treatment of our diplomatic personnel and property in Madrid and elsewhere. Rest assured that we will demand justice for our murdered people and continue to pursue the prompt return, unharmed of members of the Empire and international community still unaccounted for in Spain.
Hector Hamilton well understood that the neo-barbarians currently consolidating their power in Madrid would claim the burning of the British Embassy was the work of a mob, and that this and other excesses of the enraged crowds were the very things they had mounted their coup to put an end to… And in the meantime, death squads roamed the country settling old scores and quietly liquidating what little survived of Queen Sophia’s faction’s influence outside the big cities. There had already been two botched attempts on that courageous lady’s life in the few short days she had been in exile in Lisbon.
Now may God bless you all. May He defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against◦– brutish force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and religious persecution◦– and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
It is my fervent hope that the military actions initiated by my government to quickly snuff out the real and present threats posed to our cousins in New England by the so-called Triple Alliance to their south, will soon restore sanity to the region.
That was no lie.
In the meantime, I say to New England, trust in God and remember brave Achilles!
Chapter 42
12:55 (New England Time)
Sunday 10th April
Anson Road, Norfolk, Virginia
Everybody in the married quarters estates surrounding the great naval base and dockyards, and across Hampton Roads in the settlements around Newport knew that something awful had happened last week in the seas of the Gulf of Spain and the northern Caribbean. Something so bad that the Royal Navy had rigorously enforced a previously unheard of◦– certainly in recent times◦– complete news blackout about all its operations in the Americas. In effect, the whole of the base had been ‘locked down’ and all normal communications with the families of men currently on active service at sea had been ‘temporarily suspended for operational reasons.’
Notwithstanding, under the informal leadership of the wife of HMS Achilles’s Executive officer, the redoubtable Melanie Cowdrey-Singh, the cruiser’s ‘wardroom wives’ had rallied together, attempting to include every member of the Achilles family in a series of impromptu gatherings both large and small. The older wives had appointed themselves ‘comforters in chief’ and done what they could to keep up spirits and basically, to inculcate a ‘never say die’ attitude towards what they all tacitly expected was not going to be good news, when eventually, they learned what had befallen their menfolk.
Inevitably, dark, horrible rumours were rabidly stalking the neat, superficially calm streets of the married quarters estates fuelled by the reckless abandon of many of the East Coast’s bestselling newspapers and the inability, because of censorship, of the television stations, led by the New England Broadcasting Corporation, and the majority of the radio broadcasters to cast any meaningful light on the subject.
Literally, people did not know what to believe.
At one end of the spectrum some commentators said the whole Caribbean was on fire, the British and German Empires were about to go to war with each other. And as for Spain and its dastardly colonies around the World, what on earth was going on? There was civil war in Old Spain, frenzied sabre-rattling in New Granada, Havana and among those religious fanatics on Santo Domingo…
The one voice that was getting drowned out by the media background noise, was that of calm.
Kate Lincoln had promised herself that she would wait to hear ‘real’ news before she panicked. This despite some of the other wives, including her next-door neighbours on both sides, being already in mourning: in her tradition mourning was a thing one did in memory of loss, not in the anticipation of it. Rumours and gossip were not facts. If the worst came to the worst her husband still lived in, and would for ever more, in her heart and her thoughts and in their son’s blood and in the veins of their unborn child, and she would always remember the joy of her life with Abe.
Nevertheless, just before one o’clock that afternoon she carried Tom, a chubby, precocious toddler, into the apartment’s small lounge and turned on the small, black and white, television in the corner of the room. She bounced her happily gurgling son in her lap as the TV set warmed up.
The other wives all seemed to have larger, colour TV sets. She and Abe hardly watched the set, preferring to listen to the radio and besides, her husband was a voracious reader, not a slavish watcher. Modest living was a virtue in her culture, a thing Abe had embraced from boyhood. They had each other◦– and Tom◦– and no need to surround themselves with ‘things’ they neither needed, or remotely cared about just days after they had acquired them.