George Washington's Ghost

San Antonio was the best part of two hundred-and-fifty miles to the south-south-west. Strategically, New Orleans or one of the port towns on the Mississippi, possibly Natchez, about one-hundred-and-fifty miles up-river from the Delta might actually be a long-term objective of the next stage of the Mexican offensive. The Delta lands and the lower reaches of the great river constituted legitimate contested ground, whereas historically, the Spaniards’ claims on anywhere north and east of Trinity Crossing were purely hypothetical since those territories had never been administratively incorporated into the old Empire.

However, he did not believe it; Santa Anna had to know that a march to the Mississippi or the Delta was the equivalent to the German march on Moscow in the Great War. Pure folly, destined to end in untold grief and Washington was pretty damned sure that the Mexicans had already committed their best troops.

The other thing they forgot too easily back East was that history mattered; war was not just about what was possible or practical, it was also about folk memory and national identity.

Once the Spanish moved a few days march east of San Antonio, they were going to start trespassing upon what had been French Louisiana at the time of the failed East Coast rebellion in the 1770s, lands subsequently ceded to Great Britain as part of the settlement of the Anglo-French wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was one thing for foreign troops to trample on ‘Unincorporated’ Colonial territories which had been legitimately, formerly part of the Empire of New Spain but the Louisiana Lands, stretching from and including the whole Delta and hundreds of miles either side of it, all the way up the Mississippi very nearly to the border with the Canadian Dominions of Manitoba and Ontario, remained, inviolably, British sovereign soil. Logically, in defiling that ‘soil’ an invader would be crossing a very significant Rubicon because from that moment onwards, the war ceased, de jure

, to be ‘colonial’ and became ‘imperial’.

George Washington was confident that Santa Anna and Il Presidente de Soto, would be mindful of that distinction because in the event that line was crossed, the British Parliament would be bound to – if it had not already been promulgated – to invoke the so-called Sykes-Temple Rule, which specified that the violation of the territorial integrity of one Colony, Dominion or other land deemed to be equivalent to that of the United Kingdom, shall result in an imperial declaration of war against that ‘violator’.

Granted, such a declaration of war had already been made but thus far only in respect of an entity named ‘the Triple Alliance’, in response to the attack on HMS Achilles

and the invasion of Jamaica.

It seemed to George Washington that the British Government had been vacillating over declaring war against a named country, possibly because it was playing some kind of secret diplomatic game with the German Empire. It was odd how legal niceties clouded the conversations Government House in Philadelphia must be having with those self-seeking planters, bankers and merchants in the founding colonies.

Oh, how those fine gentlemen must be twisting and turning, arguing that it was the Empire’s responsibility to fund a ‘colonial war’, and resisting any blandishment to modify their entrenched resistance to the imposition of ‘war taxes’ in their individual Crown Colony fiefdoms. It was all semantics; somebody had to pay whatever price it eventually took to clean up this mess. Inevitably, the First Thirteen did not want to pay their share of the bill; they never had before. Even more inevitably, no East Coast colonial legislator wanted to have to take responsibility for taxing their voters; much better if all the blame was heaped on the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England when he stepped in to lance the boil. That way the Governor and the English back in the Old Country would take all the blame for heaping the cost of the war onto New Englanders.

Those East Coast scoundrels had got away with it in the last war when the full cost had been borne by the British Exchequer. The bankers of New England had made huge fortunes on the loans they had made to the Government in London, and generations of mill and factory owners had grown even fatter on bountiful military contracts. Contracts upon which the ‘English’ taxpayer was still paying interest because of the ‘war loans’ taken out in the early 1960s to save the miserable skin of those same patriotic colonists!

In the meantime, the defence of the borderlands had been denuded of real soldiers, the ranks filled with amateurs, colonial militiamen who had by and large, turned tail and run away when the first shot was fired.

“This is going to be a long war, boys,” he frowned, carefully nudging his mount’s flanks, leading the other two riders down the gentle slope towards the dry end of Trinity Crossing.