George Washington's Ghost

The young man was still getting used to the bear-like, seemingly irrepressible energy of the man who had been exiled to Santo Domingo eight years ago, and it seemed, forgotten thereafter by the Wilhelmstrasse. Normally, overseas postings were for three, and very occasionally, five years. The length of von Schaffhausen’s ‘sentence’ at Guaynabo was unprecedented; back in Berlin it was whispered that it was all to do with some ancient feud between Count Bismarck and the House of Schaffhausen but it was all so long ago, that nobody knew for sure.

Back at the Wilhelmstrasse, Paul had been warned that ‘your Minister has gone native’. In one way, von Schaffhausen had – he actually liked Santo Domingo and most of its people, just not its leaders or priests – but in another way, he was every inch a German patriot, organised, and a stickler for propriety.

That had surprised Paul Meissner, given that his chief presided over a veritable den of iniquity. He had been even more surprised to discover that away from the relatively small, ‘party area’ of the Concession mainly situated around San Juan Bay, the Concession was run very much like a little piece of Germany transplanted to the tropics. It had its own small garrison of Kaiserliche Marines, a German police force, a small modern hospital staffed by mainly volunteer ex-patriot women, and a couple of shops well off the well-beaten tourist path selling beers and delicacies from home. Further, although the port and dockyards were run mainly by local workers and stevedores, it was invariably managed with very nearly Teutonic efficiency.

Of course, everything had gone to Hell, as the English might say, ‘in a handcart’ in the last fortnight.

Nobody had the faintest idea what had got into the Dominicans’ heads thinking that they could arrest a German ship in international waters!

That was insane!

Clearly, somebody in the Palace of the People on the hill on the opposite side of San Juan Bay must have had some kind of psychotic episode…

Anyway, that was what the Minister’s wife, a most formidable and outspoken lady had said when the news broke. Unexpectedly, right from his first day on Santo Domingo, Frau von Schaffhausen had extended an open invitation to her husband’s new Private Secretary to dine with the family at the weekends, and indeed, for his first weeks on the island he had been a guest at the Minister’s Official Residence, very much under that formidable lady’s mother hen wing. Suitable accommodation for young men fresh from Germany was hard to come by in the Concession; and the Minister’s wife always took a very personal interest in making sure newcomers were ‘safely’ inducted into the ways of the community, and ‘properly’ settled.

Acting Leutnant Klaus Kemper, the twenty-one-year-old Captain of the Seiner Majestät Schiff Weser, and Commander Peter Cowdrey-Singh, RN, formerly the Executive Officer of the sunken HMS Achilles, were unlikely comrades in arms. The Indian-born Englishman was tanned, bearded, his facial scars still pinkly angry and his bearing stiff, as if he was in constant, niggling discomfort from his unseen wounds. Kemper looked like a schoolboy; lanky, pale-skinned with a crop of ginger to blond hair with uncertain, greenish eyes that spoke, eloquently, to the nightmare through which he had been navigating in recent days.

Kemper saluted the Minister, Peter Cowdrey-Singh simply shook von Schaffhausen’s hand. The German Minister waved his guests to take seats in the shaded, cool area of his office where occasionally, the breeze circulated.

The wind had shifted in the last few minutes.

Distantly, the sound of the Weser’s labouring pumps carried into the room. It was a faraway roaring, thumping like persistent gunfire just over the horizon.

“Paul, stay please,” von Schaffhausen decided. He had never got to the bottom of why, exactly, Peter Cowdrey-Singh had been on the bridge of the Weser

, nor when, within minutes of the opening of the battle poor Albrecht Weitzman was cut down, the Anglo-Indian had assumed command, ordering his own men – effectively up until then passengers, quasi-prisoners – to fight beside their German comrades, and fought the ship.

Had he not stepped in the Weser would probably have been sunk, or possibly captured by her assailants. It was a moot point which of the two eventualities could have had a more malign impact on Dominican-German relations.

Inevitably, the Dominicans wanted the heads of both young Kemper and of Peter Cowdrey-Singh and the other thirty-three surviving members of the crew of HMS Achilles.

“How go the repairs to the Weser?” Von Schaffhausen inquired of Leutnant Kemper.

“Slowly, Herr Minister,” the young man apologised, as if it was his fault those Dominican destroyers had raked his ship with cannon-fire and achieved half-a-dozen hits with larger shells, killing and wounding over a hundred men. Kemper glanced to his companion.