Von Schaffhausen groaned just to think about that.
Instead of letting the Kaiserliche Marine, or one of the great Ruhr industrial combines take over and develop the oil fields and build new refineries, fearful of allowing the Navy, or any of those lower-middle class upstarts in Essen usurp the prerogatives of the Wilhemstrasse, Lothar von Bismarck, that peerless arbiter of geopolitical affairs who knew absolutely nothing about industry or commerce, had entrusted Aruba to a gang of merchant adventurers sponsored by his aristocratic friends at Court!
But then that was how the German Reich worked.
The British Empire had achieved practically everything it had achieved by allowing any Tom, Dick or Harry to ‘have a go’; a thing no Teutonic mind could ever permit. Now, those geniuses at the Wilhelmstrasse had blundered into a regional war so stupid and ill-conceived that it boggled the German Minister’s credulity.
The scene visible from his office balcony was just the thin end of a rapidly worsening wedge. The Liner wharves were unoccupied – apart from the Weser – the bars in the town were mostly shut, the two brand-new modern hotels built to welcome the Hamburg-America trade and to put up visiting businessmen and diplomats were deserted, and even within the boundaries of the Concession, Dominican men, women and children were begging on the streets.
Fortunately, his beloved wife was used to him drifting off into his thoughts.
“Hans, have you been listening to a single word I’ve just said?”
“Forgive me, mein Liebling,” the German Minister apologised, realising he had been brooding.
“Never mind,” his wife said with her customary happy forbearance.
“I am a bad husband,” von Schaffhausen chuckled. “I do not deserve you…”
“No, you don’t,” Angela agreed, happily. She sighed, sobering by degrees. “I just got back from the hospital,” she explained. “We didn’t lose anybody last night. That’s two nights in a row. I think the crisis may have passed.”
“That is good…”
Kapitan zur See Albrecht Weitzman, of the Weser, had succumbed to his wounds – for the want of antibiotics, most likely – on Tuesday afternoon, the twelfth wounded man brought ashore to die. That brave officer had been cut down early in the action with the two Dominican torpedo-boat destroyers Inquisitors in the San Juan regime had sent out to illegally arrest his ship.
“I must get on with things,” his wife declared. “Chin up, meine Liebe.”
Von Schaffhausen remained on the balcony, surveying the aquamarine waters of the bay now smeared with the diesel still seeping from the Weser, for some minutes after his wife hung up. Presently, he was disturbed by a polite cough.
It was Paul Meissner, his Private Secretary. Twenty-three years-old and less than six months into his first overseas posting since joining the Foreign Service of the Wilhemstrasse, the young man was a graduate of the University of Göttingen. Unlike many of the young tyros Berlin had sent von Schaffhausen down the years, Paul was a fluent Spanish-speaker, and more than competent in translating Portuguese. Like all University entrants to the Foreign Service it went without saying that he spoke English ‘like an Empire Broadcasting Corporation newsreader’.
“Leutnant zur see Kemper and Korvettenkapitän Cowdrey-Singh are here to see you, Minister,” the young man reported dutifully.
Von Schaffhausen blinked out of his thoughts.
Suddenly, he was all business, jovially urgent.
He switched to English.
“Wheel them in! Wheel them in! Try and get one of the girls in the office to bring us some decent coffee, please!”
Paul Meissner nodded his head in acknowledgement.
The young man was still getting used to the bear-like, seemingly irrepressible energy of the man who had been exiled to Santo Domingo eight years ago, and it seemed, forgotten thereafter by the Wilhelmstrasse. Normally, overseas postings were for three, and very occasionally, five years. The length of von Schaffhausen’s ‘sentence’ at Guaynabo was unprecedented; back in Berlin it was whispered that it was all to do with some ancient feud between Count Bismarck and the House of Schaffhausen but it was all so long ago, that nobody knew for sure.
Back at the Wilhelmstrasse, Paul had been warned that ‘your Minister has gone native’. In one way, von Schaffhausen had – he actually liked Santo Domingo and most of its people, just not its leaders or priests – but in another way, he was every inch a German patriot, organised, and a stickler for propriety.
That had surprised Paul Meissner, given that his chief presided over a veritable den of iniquity. He had been even more surprised to discover that away from the relatively small, ‘party area’ of the Concession mainly situated around San Juan Bay, the Concession was run very much like a little piece of Germany transplanted to the tropics. It had its own small garrison of Kaiserliche Marines, a German police force, a small modern hospital staffed by mainly volunteer ex-patriot women, and a couple of shops well off the well-beaten tourist path selling beers and delicacies from home. Further, although the port and dockyards were run mainly by local workers and stevedores, it was invariably managed with very nearly Teutonic efficiency.
Of course, everything had gone to Hell, as the English might say, ‘in a handcart’ in the last fortnight.
Nobody had the faintest idea what had got into the Dominicans’ heads thinking that they could arrest a German ship in international waters!
That was insane!
Clearly, somebody in the Palace of the People on the hill on the opposite side of San Juan Bay must have had some kind of psychotic episode…
Anyway, that was what the Minister’s wife, a most formidable and outspoken lady had said when the news broke. Unexpectedly, right from his first day on Santo Domingo, Frau von Schaffhausen had extended an open invitation to her husband’s new Private Secretary to dine with the family at the weekends, and indeed, for his first weeks on the island he had been a guest at the Minister’s Official Residence, very much under that formidable lady’s mother hen wing. Suitable accommodation for young men fresh from Germany was hard to come by in the Concession; and the Minister’s wife always took a very personal interest in making sure newcomers were ‘safely’ inducted into the ways of the community, and ‘properly’ settled.
Acting Leutnant Klaus Kemper, the twenty-one-year-old Captain of the Seiner Majestät Schiff Weser, and Commander Peter Cowdrey-Singh, RN, formerly the Executive Officer of the sunken HMS Achilles, were unlikely comrades in arms. The Indian-born Englishman was tanned, bearded, his facial scars still pinkly angry and his bearing stiff, as if he was in constant, niggling discomfort from his unseen wounds. Kemper looked like a schoolboy; lanky, pale-skinned with a crop of ginger to blond hair with uncertain, greenish eyes that spoke, eloquently, to the nightmare through which he had been navigating in recent days.
Kemper saluted the Minister, Peter Cowdrey-Singh simply shook von Schaffhausen’s hand. The German Minister waved his guests to take seats in the shaded, cool area of his office where occasionally, the breeze circulated.