George Washington's Ghost

It also illustrated how poorly the C-in-C understood the ground for which he was responsible. It angered – but did not surprise – Washington that a man so ignorant was calling the tune. It riled him even more that he was having to argue with the idiot within his, uninformed terms of reference.

‘You can’t do that, sir,’ George Washington had said in exasperation. ‘If they take New Orleans the river will become a highway into the interior…’

‘Don’t talk rot, man!’

Washington had tried to point out to the idiot that unless Santa Anna was advancing with an ‘engineering cohort’ equipped to ford a major continental river system, there was precisely no prospect of the Mexicans crossing the Red River; so, how on earth the invaders were going to ‘close up to the Mississippi’ was a mystery to him.

However, this line of reasoning also fell on deaf ears.

It seemed that Forsyth was about to fly into the San Antonio ‘enclave’. He felt a flying visit would stiffen the resolve of the garrison; something of an oxymoron if Greg Torrance was to be believed. San Antonio was where everybody, soldier or civilian was fleeing towards now that the Spanish had landed on the coast at Galveston Island.

The chaos of the sprawling conurbation – before the war a boom town city of well over a hundred thousand souls, oil men, ranchers, chancers and shysters of every description – which was surrounded by industrial sites and small hamlets on the prairie, now choked with survivors, retreating troops and refugees would, inevitably, suck in Mexican troops and block the advance of the invaders for several days, possibly weeks regardless of whether the defenders put up a fight.

Unfortunately, Forsyth was obviously one of those senior officers honestly believed that men like him who had survived the trial by fire of a public school-education in the Old Country, could achieve anything they set their minds to!

Washington’s attempts to discover if there was anybody co-ordinating the operations of the Army south and west of San Antonio, or even if it still existed, the CAF and the Royal Navy in the Gulf of Spain, had also drawn scorn.

That ‘was not the concern of a middle-ranking field officer’, he was informed.

Washington had tried to be diplomatic.

‘I propose to send out mounted scouts to establish the lines of advance of enemy forces in my sector, sir,’ Washington had reported, realising that it was pointless having an argument with a man who had no idea whatsoever what was really going on anywhere between San Antonio and Alta California. ‘I urgently need aviation spirit for the aircraft under my command…’

That apparently, was a matter he needed to take up with the Quartermaster of the Colonial Air Force.

Whereupon, Forsyth had delivered a pep talk and hung up with the thought that, apparently, all would be well because ‘the ground is in our favour!’

Which was nonsense because all the things which had gone wrong before, during and after the last Border War were repeating, except on an exponentially more disastrous scale. And this time there was an idiot in command who seemed to think ceding hundreds of miles of territory east of the Delta and allowing the enemy to over-extend his lines of communication was the answer to everything!

In the last war New Englanders had been able to count on at least the tacit support of the native peoples of the region; in the last few years the ‘free land’ settlement policy planting alien communities, many of which had virtually popped up overnight, in the middle of the ancestral lands of the ancient tribal populations, had meant that this time around if the tribes co-operated with anybody, it was going to be with the Spanish.

Washington had left Greg Torrance trying to contact somebody, somewhere capable of trucking him enough high-octane petrol to get his airworthy aircraft into the air. His Goshawk was going to need a ‘little tender loving care’ before it flew again but he was optimistic that the pair of intact Fleabags would come in useful for ‘field observation’ if only he could get hold of some petrol!

The call had gone out around Trinity County for all able-bodied men to report to the airfield, with, if they had them, long rifles and spy glasses. Washington had requisitioned all the stores in the town, including the communal grain reserve. The town’s elders had been unenthusiastic, complaining that the war was still a long way away. Luckily, for all that Washington’s local knowledge and exploits in the last conflict with the Spanish counted for nothing with Chinese Forsyth; his own people had, reluctantly, seen the light and fallen in behind him.

George Washington went on staring at the floods.

No, he decided, the Spanish were not coming his way any time soon.