Rodrigo still awakened some nights in a cold sweat, his nightmares turning around the scene that day when those two leviathans – he had since learned they were the battlecruiser Invincible and the battleship Hercules – had duelled with the batteries guarding the Golden Gate while a tide of Marines had swept ashore…
The ‘Battle of the Bay’ had shaken the Junta in México City, and ended the real fighting inside a month. The politicians had taken fright; terrified that the English would invade the west coast south of Baha California and invade the heartland.
In those days there had been no Triple Alliance, and on land and sea and in the air, his country’s armed forces had been technologically backward, outgunned and in the end, effortlessly out-matched by an enemy who had absolute command of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain and could roam at will his homeland’s Pacific coast, putting ashore raiding parties to terrorise innocent civilians and bombarding ports and cities up to twenty miles inland with impunity.
Those days were gone.
People believed it was because the Germans had given the Triple Alliance new weapons but that was only half the story; the indignity of the unequal armistice of the 1960s had been an iniquity which had galvanised the nation. The old military stranglehold over the government had been discredited: this war was a people’s war; a war to restore the pride and sovereignty of the whole Mexican nation over its God-given lands in the north.
Now Rodrigo had finally returned to the deserts of his youth.
He ought to have felt at least a trace of residual guilt at having pulled so many strings to be allowed to lead this expedition.
It was hardly Rodrigo’s fault that the Chief of Staff of the Army had once been a subaltern under his command, or that at the end of 1976, his old friend and tutor, Hernando de Soto, had swapped the Presidency of the University of Cuernavaca for the Los Pinos de Oro – the Pines of Gold – Palace, the official residence of the President of the Republic buried deep in the Chapultepec Woods in the heart of the capital, México City.
Il Presidente tried, as a rule, not to interfere with the machinations of the political parties or of the competing military factions but he had never been adverse, behind the scenes, to getting his hands dirty. To most Mexicans he was a gracious, grey-haired figurehead, dignified in his strict impartiality, the grandfather of the nation who had healed the dreadful wounds, still bleeding in the national psyche after the country’s humiliation in the last war with the English.
Rodrigo had little doubt that no other man in New Spain could have united the military and the feuding Nationalist, Liberal and Country Parties who together, had formed and unholy alliance with Cuban, Hispaniola and Santo Domingo which in the last few days had carried all before it.
He knew his old friend mistrusted the theocratic fervour of México’s allies; but Hernando de Soto was nothing if not a man who understood that sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. If México was ever to grown into a prosperous modern democracy it needed to throw off the shackles of its imperial past, and stand alone in the arena of the Great Powers. History decreed that it was his country’s destiny to demand, by war, to be treated as an equal by the Commonwealth of New England and its English masters.
‘The die is cast, my friend,’ Hernando had told him. ‘We cannot hold back the forces at play in our country. Yes, I am the people’s leader; yet no matter my misgivings about the coming war, I must follow the people where they lead. All things being equal, a wiser man than I would agree that we should delay another few months, perhaps a year, while expeditions such as yours unravel the mysteries of the deserts of Northern Sonora, but,’ the old man had shrugged, and spread his hands, ‘although I give you my blessing to undertake your mission, I cannot forestall the forces already in motion any more than that old rascal Canute, could hold back the tide…’
Several of the Navajo scouts sitting on the ponies around Rodrigo were the sons of men he had known three decades ago; most of the troopers jumping down from their mounts to start setting up camp for the night had never been born the last time he visited this land.
The English had arrived soon after the last war ended in the mid-1960s. They had driven the native peoples off the plateau, beyond the mountains to the west, ‘resettling’ them in barren mountain passes and valleys bereft of game, and when warriors had attempted to return to their ancestral grounds they had been rounded up, left to rot in prison camps hundreds of miles away, or simply hunted down and killed, their bones left to rot in the desert. Until recently, there had been a great military camp, covering tens of square miles about two days ride north of El Ojo del Diablo.
Rodrigo dismounted stiffly, took off his hat and swished it against his thigh to shake away the dust. A Navajo scout took the reins of his horse.
Some of his troopers – he had told his superiors that he had no need of a ‘bodyguard’ in the desert, knowing he was safe in the hands of his Navajo ‘brothers’ – were down on their haunches, scratching curiously at the ground.
“What happened here, sir?” One youngster asked, only a little timidly.
Rodrigo’s men knew him to be a fatherly figure who paid little more than lip service to spit and polish, whose real authority had nothing to do with his military rank.
These days, only a dwindling minority of Mexican officers commanded by fear alone; that was another mantra which had fallen into disrepute after the last lost war. The old ways had resulted in defeat after humiliating defeat, a new, model army had had to be created out of the ashes of the old, conscript ‘rabble’. All of Rodrigo’s men were volunteers. Literacy and a high school education at least up to the age of sixteen was mandatory for all inductees into the Army and its attached Air Force, although not, because Admirals were always the last to adopt modernity over tradition, in the Navy.
That said, even the Navy had begun to adopt the Kaiserliche Marine practice of inducting boy seaman – aged fourteen to sixteen – into what were in effect, military apprenticeships in seamanship, gunnery, engineering, electronics, logistics and all the other specialisations required to keep a modern navy at sea.
Perhaps, the most radical and beneficial of all the changes implemented in the last decade was that the Mexican Army was now built around a relatively small core of professionals, reinforced in time of war by a cadre of fully-trained reservists.
With the abandonment of military rule there had been no need to maintain a large standing army; now three-fourths of the combat strength of the Mexican Army was in its fully-trained, part-time ‘Territorial’ formations, each at any one time manned and kept ‘in being’ by a skeleton staff, ready to be fully activated at either one, three, six months’ notice, other than when the unit was required to muster for its annual thirty day training camp. In other words, once they had completed their one-hundred-and-twenty-day period of basic training, three-quarters of all trained soldiers spent up to eleven months of each year pursuing their civilian occupations other than when they were undergoing additional specialist education, or weapons or systems familiarisation.
Rodrigo had been surprised, not to say, somewhat taken aback to discover how much things had changed when he re-joined the active list last year. He had re-joined a new, different Army from the one he remembered from the early 1970s. From the modernity of the infantryman’s equipment to the flexibility of field tactics, and the remarkable level of personal initiative now demanded of even the most junior private soldier had astonished him; likewise, the professionalism and technical qualifications of the new officer corps had been a real culture shock. It was as if he had left a nineteenth century army and re-enlisted in a late twentieth century one that was, in many respects, indistinguishable from, say… the British Army.