“I wish I could tell you how to do it all, but I can’t.” The foreigner smiled sadly, shaking his head at the memories of trench warfare that flooded back to him. “All I can say is, remember everything you have to do and do what you can as the circumstances demand. If you have to leave things undone, leave them; but never forget you have left them undone. It’s deciding what to leave undone that’s the hard part. You’ve heard of Generalship? Well, this is Corporalship. Generalship wins wars but Corporalship wins battles. Remember that. And, for last night’s exercise, a qualified well-done.”
Mongkut saluted and left, feeling ridiculously pleased with himself.
Inside, the German instructor made a mark in a file he carried. “Good NCO material there. I like the way he spoke up. We have to encourage that, you know. It’s the NCOs who will make or break any maneuver the Army tries to make. They have to be taught to think for themselves.”
“But….” The infantry lieutenant tried to get his mind around a concept that did not involve the blind obedience he had thought was ideal.
“Think on it this way. You guide the unit and decide what it must do. But it’s the NCOs at the sharp end who have to decide how to do, it then and there. That corporal shapes up well. We’ll have to watch him and help him grow. He might even make Sergeant one day.”
“Or an officer?”
The Lieutenant meant it as a joke, but the German advisor nodded thoughtfully. “Possibly. Time will tell.”
“The sovereign?” Thomas White made his question sound like an answer. The other two heads in the room nodded.
Fadden shrugged “Now, obviously there’s a lot of details to work through, both from our side and across the Empire, before we get a new currency up and running. But, as I say, the basics are pretty clear cut. The one thing we can’t do is wind back the clock. Our new currency is not going to have the British economy backing it in addition to the Empire, nor will it have the Bank of England and Whitehall looking after it and moderating the whole show. The sterling stood on its own two feet, not something we can say for our sovereign. The wider market has had little exposure to it directly over the years other than via London, so they’ve got no measure of its value, and without that yardstick, pessimism just snowballs.
“So, we have to establish a value for our pound against the sovereign. Just pinning it to gold will calm fears and get business moving again. But it’s the rate that is critical to the sort of business we get, and no matter what rate we set, its going to step on someone toes just as they’ll be stepping on ours. If we undercut the Kiwis, or more likely they undercut us, the Indians, Malays, whomever we cross swords with, will have a diplomatic bone to pick with us, as we with them. As I say, we won’t have London to balance the scales. The right way to do things would be to set up a bank specifically to run the sovereign; they’d buy the gold from the producers, mint the coin, set the rates, issue any notes and do the whole business.
“But?” Locock had some idea of where this was going.
“But,” Fadden sighed. “That bank would have an enormous influence over our economy and the economies of everyone else, which would make it an intensely political animal, and quite frankly, unworkable. so far as I can see. Yet, without one, we’ve got to work out some means of doing all the same things as individuals acting in concert; that is going to be interesting. Broadly speaking, the only alternative to a bank is a market. I’m just an out-of-practice accountant, but on the present advise I’ve had from Treasury and Commonwealth Bank, we end up with two options: chaos, or some pretty severe restrictions. The South Africans came up with this, and odds on, they think their gold production will give them a major say in things. God knows where they got that idea. Once this thing hits the open market, it’s going to be the trading countries turning over the money, and that means it’s the Canadians who’ll end up running the show, with us or India in second place, I should think. The keys to banking in this part of the world are the Hongs. We know the Japanese have covetous eyes on Hong Kong, so the Hongs will rebase themselves soon. There are already rumors they will be heading for China or India; probably the latter. With them will move any feasible chance of establishing a central bank and with it the economic clout that will mean.”
Fadden shook his head. There was a problem looming in his mind that he couldn’t quite put his finger on now. He had an eerie feeling he was staring out across a darkened field and hearing a dire wolf howling in the distance.
Locock probed. “Arthur?”
“Oh… Oh!” Fadden snapped back into the present, but was left with the stomach-tightening sensation that he was being stalked by a nameless, unseen predator. “I’m not sure if the Canadians will be too interested, you know. It occurs to me they’ve been cozening up to the Yanks for years. So, if they’ve got something to gain out of all this, they’ve also go a hell of a lot to lose… We need to talk to Ottawa and we need to do it now!”
“Oh what a tangled web, thought Locock, not for the first time. It really was a mess. It had to be for a semi-obscure back bencher to end up Prime Minister in one tumultuous night. He was only supposed to keep the seat warm while the power brokers thrashed out an acceptable solution to this three-way race. The problem came down to numbers; that was democracy, after all. If Labour had held off a few days more, White would have the support to take over the Party, but that was as leader of the opposition. There were far too many members who were happy enough to put White up as a punching bag for the Government, but would back Casey to actually lead the country, Locock himself not the least among them. Hughes had stepped aside, leaving White as his deputy leading the party. Without the numbers in his pocket, White dare not take the Prime Ministership he was entitled to, and they had a government to form in the morning…
Locock was under no illusions he was convenient, expedient and ultimately expendable, compromise. Privately, he took the job doubting he’d even make Sir Earle Page’s record of 20 days. With Casey now bound for Canada and Fadden seeming to warm to him… Well, hope might spring eternal, but in the mean time, there was work to do.
“We need someone good in Chile,” insisted Fadden. “They buy our coal.”
“Right you are, Arthur. Chile is on my list, but apparently that means we’ve got to do Argentina as well or they’ll get upset.” White pulled out a scrap of paper. “I was thinking we need the Philippines if only to liaise locally with the Yanks, and if we put a big High Commission in Singapore, it’ll cover the rest….”
“What about Bangkok and Batavia? I don’t know about the Thais as
yet, but we do a bit of business with the Dutchies.” Again, the picture of a bleak, snow-covered field glittering in the darkness as a dire wolf howled far away forced itself into his mind. “The Governor General has been our conduit with the British intelligence services for many, many, years. How the hell are we going to keep an eye on our friends and their money if we haven’t got the eyes to see?”
“It’s more like the ears to hear,” sighed Fadden reluctantly. For the third time, he seemed to hear the dire wolf howling in the darkness. The nameless apprehension it caused returned. There was a threat out there; one that nobody had seen or even recognized yet as real as any they had seen. “I suppose we had better clear this up. It’s got to be done at some point, and now is as good a time as any.”