George Washington's Ghost

From what George Washington had learned from Greg Torrance and his chief mechanic, Bill Fielding, the Spanish had bombed all the railheads to the south, and the retreating army had torn up the rails of all of those expensively built lines to nowhere in the south west as they retreated. Washington had watched those tracks being laid all over southern and western Texas, extended into the Sonoran deserts, and people said, blasted through the mountains. Those tracks were supposed to guarantee that reinforcements and supplies could be swiftly, efficiently delivered to the fighting men at the front in the event of war but there had never been enough rolling stock, or men guarding the borderlands; the reliance upon ‘bastion’ settlements and militiamen had been, to his mind, just plain dumb. Frankly, little better than an abdication of responsibility and now they were all paying the price for their neglect and negligence.

Every single one of those carefully, expensively built-up depots north of the demilitarized zone were now in Spanish hands, and the surviving colonial troops running ahead of the invaders, were heading due east.

The three riders had halted on a rise north of the town.

“The Spanish can read maps just like we can, boys,” George Washington observed wryly, gazing out across the partially flooded landscape of forest and grassland framed by the scrub and rock of the desert beyond the floodplains of the shallow valley bending away to the south for as far as the eye could behold.

God’s own country…

“They came at us all along the border,” he went on, the two youngsters, neither eighteen yet, listened respectfully. “They’ll halt a while, maybe around, or a little way beyond San Antonio and down on the coast. Maybe they’ll wait to link up with the force coming up from the south. If they do, they’ll meet up a long way south of here. Sometimes, armies get as disorganised advancing fast as an army in full retreat. They outrun their supplies, run out of ammunition. Sure, they captured our depots but we use different calibre rifle ammo, .303 against 7.92-millimetre metric, and artillery 3-inch imperial as opposed to 75-millimetre metric. Their land cruisers probably don’t use the same lubricants as ours. So, they’ll halt, reconsolidate, regroup awhile before they come on again. If we’re lucky we’ll get a couple of weeks, more likely a month or two, to get our act together.”

As of yesterday evening, courtesy of Flight Sergeant Bill Fielding and a couple of self-confessed ‘radio hacks’ the latter had identified, several wireless sets were now in full working order, enabling him to make contact with Western Command in New Orleans.

Those idiots had no idea what was going on.

Not that this surprised him; given that the man who had presided over the preparation for and the actual, wholly predictable shambles west of the Red River in the last few weeks, was ‘Chinese’ Forsyth, who, in the way of these things was at the tail end of a highly self-publicised but otherwise average career, being rotated, in unhurried stages back to the Old Country before he was finally put out to pasture.

By repute, it was said Lieutenant General Sir Roger Forsyth was – despite having earned the sobriquet ‘Chinese’ ruthlessly putting down rebellions around the British Concession of Shanghai in the 1950s – a gentle, bookish soul who had spent most of his twenty years or so in Asia learning occidental languages and patronising archaeological, anthropological and botanical expeditions, several of which he had led, apparently with no little distinction.

Well, he had plenty of new ruins to peruse now!

Washington had gleaned precious little satisfaction from his thirty-minute conversation over a swooping, noisy scrambler link to Forsyth’s headquarters in the Delta.

The man had talked airily about trading territory for time.

He had also ordered that all livestock was to be destroyed ahead of the approaching Spanish ‘horde’.

Scorched earth…

Blowing up oil well heads… denying the enemy the fuel to continue the war!

Washington had no intention of participating in that kind of crime. He had, as tactfully as possible, attempted to put Forsyth right.

This was his country the other man was glibly talking about laying waste; and potentially, his cattle and other Texan and border-landers’ livelihoods. Forsyth needed the support of every Texan and ordering them to wreck their country was not going to cut the mustard.

Worryingly, the C-in-C was perfectly happy, ‘reconciled’ was his exact word, to allow the Spanish ‘in their own good time’ to close up to the margins of the Delta and ‘if they want, up to the western bank of the Mississippi’, which was just plain crazy.