by James Philip
Sometimes, George Walpole felt as if he and his friend had outgrown their relevance in a World increasingly dominated by proletarian ambition and the crying need for faster economic development. They were men of empire and now and then, just occasionally, he looked in the mirror and glimpsed…a dinosaur.
When the King and Queen had returned from their post-Empire Day World tour, Walpole had spent a long weekend with the Royal Household at Balmoral in company with the Prime Minister and other senior members of the current administration discussing, in the main, how the Empire was going to ride out the storms to come. Nobody, least of all the King, honestly believed that the current ‘imperial model’ was sustainable and that talk of full ‘Dominion Status’, self-rule by any other name albeit under the flag of the British Commonwealth, even in the cases of Australia, New Zealand, the Canadian Provinces and although this was probably a pipe dream, India, could give the Empire more than a ‘few short decades’ breathing space, grace, some kind of buffer against the rising demands for self-determination.
Now, it seemed to Walpole, that the crisis they all feared years hence – hopefully, when men of their generation were all retired or dead, basically – might be upon them already.
For much of the twentieth century the ruling classes of both Germany and the British Isles had cultivated and by and large, enjoyed, cordial and mutually respectful relations. Unfortunately, like many old couples whose marriages seem rock solid from the outside, both parties had concluded that their union had never been more than one of convenience. Obviously, this was not a thing the hundreds of thousands of Anglo-German families inextricably linked by matrimony over the last century, had been in a hurry to come to terms with and their existence, as a minority but significant influential polity in both Empires had to some extent, provided a societal brake, a bridge of sorts over the years, which thus far had frustrated open talk of divorce.
Walpole was afraid that things had gone too far to halt the inevitable parting of the ways. The Submarine Treaty of the mid-1960s had, in retrospect, marked the end of informal co-operation and ushered in an era of co-existence in which the protocols of the century-old Treaty of Paris were increasingly, little better than a fig leaf.
“I’m dreadfully sorry to keep you waiting, old man,” Lothar von Bismarck apologised profusely as he led his aides into the room. His English was clipped, precise and tripped off his tongue with the same native fluency as his Saxon-accented German.
Today, he spoke in English and beneath his normal savoir-faire he was clearly a little flustered. Angry, in fact, that circumstances had delayed him. There was absolutely nothing forced or false about his apology – he was clearly mortified by the discourtesy of having kept his old friend waiting - and he smiled with tight-lipped relief when Walpole grimaced and assured him that he, too, had been unexpectedly detained by the exigencies of his own administrative duties.
Each man, in common with all members of each country’s professional diplomatic corps was as at home speaking or writing the other man’s language, for such was a basic qualification for all men in their profession. Normally, every diplomat posted to Paris was also expected to be at least, passably proficient in French, an invaluable skill since every second member of the secretariat of the Palace of the Nations these days was a French man or woman.
He was attired as he invariably was of late when he visited the Palace of the Nations, in the immaculate uniform of a Colonel of the 7th Regiment of Foot, Hesse-Kassel, into which he had been commissioned as a cadet at the age of twenty-four, being of that class whose sons’ education was incomplete without a mandatory period of military service of not less than four years between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine.
“I was hoping we might have a little chat alone before we started the main meeting, Lothar,” Walpole suggested urbanely as the two men shook hands.
“Yes, that would be most agreeable,” the German Minister concurred.
They soon retreated to chairs by the windows commanding a view across the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, at this season bursting into leaf and adorned by the first blooms of spring for as far as the eye could see between the Palace of the Nations and the monumental, three hundred and fifty-foot high marble, granite and terracotta L'arc de la Victoire nearly a mile away.
The Arch of Victory…
Walpole had often wondered how it might have altered the perspectives of generations of British statesmen who had walked through the portals of the Palace of the Nations since its completion in 1875, had they looked out not on the L'arc de la Victoire but upon the overgrown ruins of the Tuileries, ploughed under by the merciless artillery of the Kaiser’s Army in the 1860s, the view allocated to Lothar von Bismarck and his predecessors for the last one hundred and three years…
The Foreign and Colonial Secretary forced himself to focus on the here and the now. Unbidden, his aides had placed crystal tumblers and a bottle of twenty-year old Balvenie single malt whisky on the coffee table between the two men.
“Can I tempt you, old friend?” Walpole murmured. Both men shared true connoisseurs’ appreciations of fine whiskies.
“Thank you, yes,” von Bismarck guffawed, allowing himself a thoughtful sigh. “You will be hearing the same news that I am hearing from Spain, George?”
The two men nursed their drinks.
Sipped reflectively.
“Yes.” The Englishman nodded, staring into the mid-distance.
“I am assured that our agents had nothing to do with the timing or the ongoing blood-letting,” Lothar von Bismarck said tersely, picking his words and meanings with exaggerated care even for a career diplomat.
Sir George Walpole had taken it as read that the Kaiser’s surrogates would have been making mischief in Madrid, had Whitehall had the same opportunities as the Wilhelmstrasse, it would have played the same shady game down the years. That said, Lisbon, rather than the Spanish capital, had always been the hotbed of British imperial intrigue in the Iberian Peninsula, a deficiency he had done what he could to address; in hindsight it amounted to too little too late.
“My Kaiser wishes it to be made known to you that he deplores, with all his heart, the desecration of diplomatic property and the abominable treatment of foreign nationals caught in the ‘crossfire’ in Spain.”
One of the telegrams which had been awaiting Walpole at the Gare de Nord Terminus had confirmed that the German and the Russian Embassies in Madrid had not been stormed and ransacked like every other embassy, consulate and foreign commercial concern in Madrid, a pattern repeated in practically all the big cities of Old Spain. The situation in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain was less immediately dire but no less threatening: in Mexico City, Havana and elsewhere British Embassies and Consulates, as yet unmolested by the mobs ranging the streets were ringed by – essentially, besieged – by large, heavily armed police and militia ‘protection’ detachments.
“That is good to know,” Walpole nodded, unconsciously running a hand through his thinning still dark hair, secretly wondering how much it cost his old friend to deal in such transparently false commiserations.
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 ‘Ger
manisation’ 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.
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 ove
r 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.”
