George Washington's Ghost

“While there are bulk materials which cannot for the moment, be shipped to the Reich,” he sniffed, looking down his nose in the way that only Prussian aristocrats and British Guard’s officers could, “minerals such as graphite and strontium might be smuggled past the blockade with relative ease.”

The German Ambassador leaned forward in his chair.

“It has also been suggested to my principals in Berlin that ways might be found to enable gold and silver to find their ways onto the international exchanges?”

Since the Battle of the Windward Passage the price of gold and silver had begun to steadily inflate, and in the last week, race ahead. Needless to say, the German Empire had belatedly woken up to the fact that the British, having grimly clung to the so-called ‘Gold Standard’ ever since the Great War of the last century, now sat on a mountain of the stuff, and the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer – the Imperial Treasury – in Berlin, did not. Apparently, the German Reichsmark had already lost over twenty-five percent of its convertible value against the pound sterling. German pensioners living in England or anywhere else in the British Empire were facing penury, and there were suggestions that several of the larger German banks might shortly be confronted by unprecedented margin calls.

Santa Anna doubted either of his guests understood, or cared about such ephemeral details; leastways, not until their own bankers went to the wall and they were faced by the prospect of having to sell family heirlooms to make ends meet.

“That will not be possible,” he explained urbanely. “Much consideration has been given to how to finance the war to liberate the lost lands of old Mexico.”

Santa Anna was tempted to suck his teeth, and gloat a while. He resisted the temptation; these men were his guests and it was a poor host who mocked his visitors.

Von Hagen and con Seydlitz-Hesse were prisoners of their prejudices and lack of imagination. Neither they, nor their masters in Berlin had ever really troubled to understand Mexico, its people or its national aspirations, other than in where they exactly corresponded with some bizarre Germanic world view in which Mexicans, Cubans, Hispanics and Latins in general, were no more than intellectually and culturally challenged tools to be wielded for the greater good of the Grosse Reich.

At first Berlin had handed out penny parcels of military and economic assistance; then, when the Germans realised that the Mexicans were anything but paupers, they had greedily exchanged aircraft, ships, guns, and exchanged technology in return for gold and silver and discounted copper ore. It was as if the Germans had hardly noticed that all the while new factories were sprouting along the Caribbean coast, and dotting the Great Valley of Mexico; or that Mexican arms, airframe and engine plants were turning out improved versions of the originally supplied land cruisers, vehicles, infantry weaponry, aircraft and power plants, and that shipyards on the east coast were building new, sleek frigates and destroyers that outgunned the latest hulls on the slipways at Hamburg and Kiel.

Meanwhile, the first generation of Mexican students who had passed out of the German Technische Schulen – Technical Schools – in the late 1960s, were now driving the second Mexican industrial revolution. Twenty years ago, the country had still been an agricultural backwater littered with the ruins of nineteenth century factories, abandoned irretrievably flooded mines, a land still mainly lit by fire. Nowadays, in many cities at least, visitors from Old Spain marvelled at the modernity of the architecture, the new hospitals, and the pylons of the electricity grid remorselessly marching out into even the remotest corners of Mexico.

But the Germans had seen none of this; or if they had, they had not recognised if for what it was, Mexico belatedly stepping into the twentieth century and determined to assert its rightful place in the pantheon of great nations.

One day, perhaps, the German Empire would open its eyes and, as fashionable New Englanders were known to remark: ‘smell the coffee’. However, that was beyond the comprehension of Santa Anna’s visitors.

“The matter of the gold,” von Hagen groaned, “is most pressing, Felipe.”

“Yes, I agree,” Santa Anna concurred politely. “However, possibly it is a thing better discussed with my colleagues at the Finance Ministry, Walther.”

“Dammit,” Dieter von Seydlitz-Hesse complained, as if he did not see what the problem was, “you’re the only man who can make things happen in this country!”

Santa Anna did not rise to this.

He folded his hands in his lap.