George Washington's Ghost

They had known that Guaynabo was just one of several colonial ‘pressure release valves’ of the Empire; a place where Germans could come and behave in ways they would never get away with back home. There were other enclaves and concessions which served similar roles as tax-free free ports where none of the normal social mores applied. There were limits, of course. Hardly anybody ever got away with actual murder, for example; nevertheless, it was hardly any great recommendation for Germanic culture, or the virtues supposedly held so dear back in the Fatherland. People said the British had their own ‘Guaynabos, Mediterranean fleshpots and Asiatic opium dens’ but for the British those places were incidental, lost in the vastness of the Empire and economically insignificant; for Germany, such blots on the face of the globe were the Wilhelmstrasse’s only viable, self-supporting overseas domains. Even oil-rich Aruba and Curacao – ceded to Berlin in an annexe to the Submarine Treaty – on the southern shores of the Caribbean, which ought to have become the oil well of the German Empire was still little more than a seedy tropical Babylon, like Guaynabo.

Von Schaffhausen groaned just to think about that.

Instead of letting the Kaiserliche Marine, or one of the great Ruhr industrial combines take over and develop the oil fields and build new refineries, fearful of allowing the Navy, or any of those lower-middle class upstarts in Essen usurp the prerogatives of the Wilhemstrasse, Lothar von Bismarck, that peerless arbiter of geopolitical affairs who knew absolutely nothing about industry or commerce, had entrusted Aruba to a gang of merchant adventurers sponsored by his aristocratic friends at Court!

But then that was how the German Reich worked.

The British Empire had achieved practically everything it had achieved by allowing any Tom, Dick or Harry to ‘have a go’; a thing no Teutonic mind could ever permit. Now, those geniuses at the Wilhelmstrasse had blundered into a regional war so stupid and ill-conceived that it boggled the German Minister’s credulity.

The scene visible from his office balcony was just the thin end of a rapidly worsening wedge. The Liner wharves were unoccupied – apart from the Weser – the bars in the town were mostly shut, the two brand-new modern hotels built to welcome the Hamburg-America trade and to put up visiting businessmen and diplomats were deserted, and even within the boundaries of the Concession, Dominican men, women and children were begging on the streets.

Fortunately, his beloved wife was used to him drifting off into his thoughts.

“Hans, have you been listening to a single word I’ve just said?”

“Forgive me, mein Liebling,” the German Minister apologised, realising he had been brooding.

“Never mind,” his wife said with her customary happy forbearance.

“I am a bad husband,” von Schaffhausen chuckled. “I do not deserve you…”

“No, you don’t,” Angela agreed, happily. She sighed, sobering by degrees. “I just got back from the hospital,” she explained. “We didn’t lose anybody last night. That’s two nights in a row. I think the crisis may have passed.”

“That is good…”

Kapitan zur See Albrecht Weitzman, of the Weser, had succumbed to his wounds – for the want of antibiotics, most likely – on Tuesday afternoon, the twelfth wounded man brought ashore to die. That brave officer had been cut down early in the action with the two Dominican torpedo-boat destroyers Inquisitors in the San Juan regime had sent out to illegally arrest his ship.

“I must get on with things,” his wife declared. “Chin up, meine Liebe.”

Von Schaffhausen remained on the balcony, surveying the aquamarine waters of the bay now smeared with the diesel still seeping from the Weser, for some minutes after his wife hung up. Presently, he was disturbed by a polite cough.

It was Paul Meissner, his Private Secretary. Twenty-three years-old and less than six months into his first overseas posting since joining the Foreign Service of the Wilhemstrasse, the young man was a graduate of the University of Göttingen. Unlike many of the young tyros Berlin had sent von Schaffhausen down the years, Paul was a fluent Spanish-speaker, and more than competent in translating Portuguese. Like all University entrants to the Foreign Service it went without saying that he spoke English ‘like an Empire Broadcasting Corporation newsreader’.

“Leutnant zur see Kemper and Korvettenkapitän Cowdrey-Singh are here to see you, Minister,” the young man reported dutifully.

Von Schaffhausen blinked out of his thoughts.

Suddenly, he was all business, jovially urgent.

He switched to English.

“Wheel them in! Wheel them in! Try and get one of the girls in the office to bring us some decent coffee, please!”

Paul Meissner nodded his head in acknowledgement.