George Washington's Ghost

The ‘long peace’, and the coming of democracy to the Mexican Republic a dozen years ago, had redirected the wealth of the country’s mines into the public purse. Previously, the war lords and their minions had siphoned off the fruits of the land; now there were modern hospitals in all the big cities, public servants got paid regularly, the sick no longer starved on the streets, new roads and railways were under construction and industry, previously hamstrung by corruption and the country’s medieval, chronically under-invested infrastructure, had leapt ahead. The economy had grown at over ten percent for each of the last eight years, and fuelled by the runaway growth of the mining sector, foreign currency had poured into the country.

“I think you know why we are here today, Minister,” Walther von Hagen suggested.

Santa Anna nodded.

The German Empire had been perfectly happy to collude in the Triple Alliance’s re-armament programs, and by implication, connive in its preparations for war. What the wise men of the Wilhelmstrasse had not banked on, was the war breaking out this year, nor next year and consequently, no steps had been taken to stockpile essential raw materials sourced from the region by the Reich. And now it was too late to do anything about it.

Problematically, while the islands of the greater Antilles – Cuba, Hispaniola and Santo Domingo – only exported cotton, tobacco, sugar, exotic fruits, spices, hard woods and trinkets to the Fatherland, Mexico had, in recent years become a key supplier of key strategic minerals and this trade had, thanks to the British blockage of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain, and anticipation sooner or later, of the long Pacific west coast of Mexico, cased overnight.

“It is my government’s view that things,” Von Hagen hesitated, “need to be placed back on a more even playing field.” He was one of those profoundly undiplomatic diplomats the Wilhelmstrasse often despatched to friendly, and client states. Always something of a bull in a china shop, many of Santa Anna’s colleagues in the Cabinet of Il Presidente Hernando de Soto, regarded the German Ambassador as an uncultured oaf, frequently joking among themselves at the expense of the man’s often pigeon-Spanish. “There is a feeling in Berlin that things have rather got out of hand…”

Santa Anna smiled a saturnine smile.

“To the contrary, things are going very much to plan, Herr Ambassador.”

“Dammit, Felipe,” the German protested, “we’re bloody lucky Gravina’s adventures haven’t landed us all in a general war with the British!”

Santa Anna raised an eyebrow.

The President of the Republic, family members and a small number of old friends might casually employ his Christian name but he had always resented it when a man used it without his leave.

He carried on smiling, as if in sympathy.

Simply stated, because the Germans had not expected war this year; neither had the English.

The British Lion had been caught half-asleep and as yet, he had not fully awakened. Axiomatically, had the Wilhelmstrasse known that war was imminent it would have instructed all its citizens to return home, including the technicians who kept the Californian gold mines open and elsewhere, who had overseen a doubling in the production of silver in the last five years. Such an exodus would have shouted ‘war’ to the whole world; as it was there were still at least a hundred thousand German nationals ‘trapped’ in the ‘war zone’, and the great traffic in copper (of which, globally, Mexico was the third largest producer), and in sodium-sulphide, fluorite, celestite, and calcium inosilicate (of which it annually supplied upwards of one-third of all European demand) had come to a grinding halt. At the same time, the flow of oil from Curacao and the refineries at Aruba, and from the newly opened fields in the Venezuelan jungle territories had dried up.

While it was unfortunate that the German Empire was going to be the first to feel the pinch – the British could easily substitute supplies from elsewhere in their dominions – that had always been inevitable and there was very little, if anything, that Santa Anna could do to soften the blow.

Or, that he would have done to soften the blow, had it been within his power and he was a little irritated that the Germans, who were, after all the unwitting architects of the situation they now found themselves in, had not worked that out for themselves by now!

Dieter von Seydlitz-Hesse grunted like a boar with a huntsman’s dog clinging onto his hind leg, and scowled so hard Santa Anna was a little afraid his monocle was going to shatter. The German was an old soldier invalided out of the Army in his forties by a near fatal brush with fever in Africa.