Greg Torrance was immediately struck by the man’s presence: one of those rare men whose entrance really does change the atmosphere of any gathering, and to whom everybody instinctively looks to for guidance. The crowd between him and the two CAF men parted, and as the newcomer and his companions approached, they were greeted with respectful nods of acknowledgement.
The young pilot swallowed hard, and tried to retain his composure.
“That depends, Corporal. I’m not about to give you chaps a pep talk. The mere fact that most of you are here means that you didn’t just roll over and surrender as soon as the first Mexican rifleman walked towards you.” He glanced to Bill Fielding for moral support. “Flight Sergeant Fielding and I were the last chaps out. Bill managed to get our kite fixed while the Spanish were shelling our old field at Big Springs. It strikes me that we’re all in pretty much the same boat. We keep waiting for the top brass to organise a defensive line but it hasn’t happened yet. Well, I’m fed up with taking a beating and watching our chaps running away.”
Practically everybody was looking at the tall man in the corporal’s uniform.
Greg Torrance pointed at the map on the wall.
“This is as good a place as any in this sector. If our side hangs on to this bit of the northern Texas Territory then the Spanish will leave a massive open left flank if they carry on driving towards the Mississippi…”
The tall man was standing very nearly in front of the much younger aviator.
“The Spaniards will have to get across the Red River if they plan to invade the Louisiana Country between there and the Big Muddy, son,” the other man observed, merely stating the obvious and clearly at pains not to pick a fight with, or in any way do down the CAF man. “In the meantime, we’ve only got a hundred or so effectives here, and down at Trinity Crossing.”
This rather took the wind out of the sails of the younger man.
The one hundred-and-eighty miles of desert and prairie west of the Red River – to all intents, as formidable a barrier as the great Mississippi itself – was an entirely different proposition to the forests, swamps and bayous blocking the one hundred-and-seventy tortuous miles beyond the Red River to the Mississippi, and much of the ground to the south was impassable to wheeled, or even tracked vehicles.
Talk of Santa Anna driving all the way to New Orleans was, perhaps, a little premature; a litmus test of the panic in the air.
“At the moment, yes,” Greg Torrance agreed, nodding. “I would just remind you that there were only three hundred Spartans at that pass at Thermopylae, they held back a hundred thousand Persians. And besides, they didn’t even have an airfield.”
The Corporal sighed.
He glanced over his shoulder to the men cramming the room and to his companions, whom Torrance could now identify as a Hispanic-looking man in his fifties, a younger man who could have been his son, and a blue-eyed young woman – booted and dressed in riding gear like the others – and then back to Greg Torrance.
“We’ve got families hereabouts,” he explained. “Most of us have got Mexican kith and kin, and proud of it. We hear what those boys back East say about the Mexicans; but take it from me, they know squat. A lot of people in these parts don’t believe they’d be any worse off living under Il Presidente de Soto, they say old Hernando ain’t so bad…” He shrugged. “I met General Santa Anna a couple of times back in the day. He’s a man like you and I, son. He’s got a wife and kids, and he wants the best for them. Just like I do for my family. A hundred years ago this country was a part of the Empire of New Spain, all of us around here grow up speaking Spanish.”
The younger man felt his face burning.
For all that there was a strange absence of malice in the other man’s voice, almost sympathy, in fact, the scout pilot began to bristle with anger.
Bill Fielding watched, figuring that the older man was trying to rile Greg Torrance; not really questioning his military but his moral authority to claim leadership. He was mightily relieved when his friend refused to rise to the bait.
“You may be right,” Greg Torrance shrugged. “I’ve never lived under a Catholic theocracy. What’s your name, friend?”
The Corporal straightened.
He was six feet tall if he was an inch, his shoulders stooped unless he was making an effort to stand with his head held high. Stepping forward, he had the gait of a man who has spent his life on horseback, a stiff erectness of posture that oddly defined him in this rag-tag collection of fleeing CAF personnel and local militiamen.
“Washington,” the older man said gruffly. “George Nathaniel. I was Mayor of this County a few years back. I have a ranch up river. I was Colonel of the North Texas Brigade in the last war; I thought I was done with soldiering after that.”
Greg Torrance frowned.
“Aren’t you in the wrong uniform, sir?”
“I resigned my commission in sixty-seven,” George Nathaniel Washington cast his eyes down onto his battledress. “This was the only tunic in the4 stores in town that fitted me.”
George Washington…
Bill Fielding stared at the man.
That name had caused him and his family untold grief.
“Well, Colonel,” Greg Torrance sighed. “I was about to try to talk everybody into extending the runway, digging slit trenches and defending this field as something of a forward reconnaissance, patrol and sally point,” he explained, feeling a little foolish. “But that was when I was still under the mistaken impression that I was the senior officer present. Patently, that is not case.”
Torrance and beside him, Bill Fielding came to attention and saluted the other man.
Around the room, unbidden, almost in groaning existential relief that at last somebody had stepped forward, others began to do likewise.
George Washington stood like an island in the stream, oddly apart and for a moment, an onlooker might have suspected he was seriously contemplating refusing the command which was being thrust upon his shoulders.
In saying that he had ‘resigned’ his commission he had stretched the truth somewhat. In fact, he had requested to be assigned to the Reserve on the grounds that he could not afford to devote more than a month a year to military duties; after all, he had a family that depended on him and a ranch to run. Similarly, when he said he had been Mayor of Trinity Crossing a ‘few years back’, actually he had been Lieutenant Sheriff of the District of Northern Texas until a little less than a year ago, to all intents, the King’s representative for most of the several thousands of square miles of the Unincorporated Territory between the Trinity and the Red Rivers.
In both war and peace, duty and service had always weighed heavily on his now stooped shoulders.
George Washington had no fond memories of war, or of leading men in combat. He had been happy, content, in his element ranching the country of his youth before his head had been turned by the bright lights of the East, first at William Penn College in Philadelphia, then as a ‘Sword Student’ in England at Sandhurst, through baptisms of fire in India and Egypt, where his regiment had guarded the army of men digging that great ditch across the desert to link the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, before returning a decade later to the land of his birth where brutal attrition and defeat had elevated him from brevet battalion command to acting Brigadier, 1st Texas Mechanised Infantry in the last Border War. Afterwards, they had made him substantive Colonel, stuck a Military Cross on his chest and offered him a garrison post down on the Border.
Nobody had tried to stop him returning home, by then his twenty-two-year contract with the British Army was at an end, and he had earned the right to give his young family an idyllic home overlooking the valley of the west fork of the Trinity River. It had seemed like a good place to bring up his boys and he and his wife, Mary Dandridge, the Punjab-born daughter of an Indian Army officer, had been happy enough, even when the droughts of the last few years bit hard.