George Washington's Ghost

Rodrigo dismounted stiffly, took off his hat and swished it against his thigh to shake away the dust. A Navajo scout took the reins of his horse.

Some of his troopers – he had told his superiors that he had no need of a ‘bodyguard’ in the desert, knowing he was safe in the hands of his Navajo ‘brothers’ – were down on their haunches, scratching curiously at the ground.

“What happened here, sir?” One youngster asked, only a little timidly.

Rodrigo’s men knew him to be a fatherly figure who paid little more than lip service to spit and polish, whose real authority had nothing to do with his military rank.

These days, only a dwindling minority of Mexican officers commanded by fear alone; that was another mantra which had fallen into disrepute after the last lost war. The old ways had resulted in defeat after humiliating defeat, a new, model army had had to be created out of the ashes of the old, conscript ‘rabble’. All of Rodrigo’s men were volunteers. Literacy and a high school education at least up to the age of sixteen was mandatory for all inductees into the Army and its attached Air Force, although not, because Admirals were always the last to adopt modernity over tradition, in the Navy.

That said, even the Navy had begun to adopt the Kaiserliche Marine practice of inducting boy seaman – aged fourteen to sixteen – into what were in effect, military apprenticeships in seamanship, gunnery, engineering, electronics, logistics and all the other specialisations required to keep a modern navy at sea.

Perhaps, the most radical and beneficial of all the changes implemented in the last decade was that the Mexican Army was now built around a relatively small core of professionals, reinforced in time of war by a cadre of fully-trained reservists.

With the abandonment of military rule there had been no need to maintain a large standing army; now three-fourths of the combat strength of the Mexican Army was in its fully-trained, part-time ‘Territorial’ formations, each at any one time manned and kept ‘in being’ by a skeleton staff, ready to be fully activated at either one, three, six months’ notice, other than when the unit was required to muster for its annual thirty day training camp. In other words, once they had completed their one-hundred-and-twenty-day period of basic training, three-quarters of all trained soldiers spent up to eleven months of each year pursuing their civilian occupations other than when they were undergoing additional specialist education, or weapons or systems familiarisation.

Rodrigo had been surprised, not to say, somewhat taken aback to discover how much things had changed when he re-joined the active list last year. He had re-joined a new, different Army from the one he remembered from the early 1970s. From the modernity of the infantryman’s equipment to the flexibility of field tactics, and the remarkable level of personal initiative now demanded of even the most junior private soldier had astonished him; likewise, the professionalism and technical qualifications of the new officer corps had been a real culture shock. It was as if he had left a nineteenth century army and re-enlisted in a late twentieth century one that was, in many respects, indistinguishable from, say… the British Army.

Admittedly, his friend Santa Anna’s new model army lacked the bloody-minded esprit de corps of the best British regular units – tradition took scores, hundreds of years to build – but otherwise, the comparison was… unavoidable.

Rodrigo’s thoughts wandered a while longer, then slowly began to coalesce as he stared inscrutably at the half-melted stumps of what had, presumably, been at one time a steel tower. Judging by what remained, less than ten feet of twisted, still substantial rusting metal, it might once have been as much as a hundred feet, or more, high. He kicked at the dust and sand underfoot.

Beneath his feet the ground glinted dully.

Like glass…

Only one thing turned sand to glass: intense heat.

He remembered the younger man’s question.

“Something burned very hot here, son,” Rodrigo said, very nearly lost in rumination.

The native tribes, mainly Navajo but also roaming bands of Apache, had new camp fire legends of lights brighter than the son flashing momentarily in the night, of fireballs rising into the heavens like messengers to the gods of the skies, and of new stars briefly winking in the distance through the mountains.

There was one tale of a village on the ridges overlooking the Verde – Green – River over seventy miles to the south west awakening one morning to discover their tepees caked in the dust of the desert and within days, of men and women and children falling ill with some terrible, killing fever, their bodies wracked with agony as they bled from every orifice.

Rodrigo had consulted the School of Tropical Medicine at Toluca, which had been a magnet for the finest minds in the field of disease control for half-a-century.