Chapter 20
Wednesday 3rd May
Trinity Crossing, Unincorporated District of Northern Texas
The storm had passed over, the last of the rain having fallen some forty-eight hours ago but the chalky ford across the river was going to be impassable for days, or more likely, weeks. Presently, the Trinity River was in spate and low-lying parts of the sprawling town along its banks were several feet deep in muddy water.
Fifty-seven-year-old George Nathaniel Washington had ridden to the airfield that morning with two of his gauchos, kids he had known most of their lives whom he regarded as kith and kin, from Rancho Mendoza on the grounds north of the east fork of the Trinity River. He did not think he needed bodyguards – his second-in-command, Flight Lieutenant Torrance seemed to have an irrational fear of ‘bad Indians’ and ‘Dominican assassins’ – because he knew this country like the back of his hand, this was his home and he was too old to start living in fear at his age.
Nevertheless, riding with young Tom and Henry, he could briefly, forget that he was a soldier again. Presciently, Mary, his wife, had warned him that if he ‘got involved’ this time around ‘they will only make you a general’; and, it was already looking like she was right. Bless her, Mary was usually right. He had known that sooner or later his friends in the Red River highlands would turn to him; it was simply that the arrival of that young tyro, Torrance had hastened the process.
He had left Rancho Mendoza in his old friend Pablo’s capable hands. For the while, Pablo’s boy, Julio, and his daughter Connie could make themselves useful at Trinity Crossing. Mary had told him not to worry about whatever the youngster got up to ‘now that nobody is watching them all the time’. She had always been more laissez faire about ‘what the kids got up to’ than he had. Not because she had been brought up in India where the ‘goings on’ within the expatriate community, not to mention its ‘dalliances and interactions’ with members of the local native gentry, were intrinsically scandalous, which they were in some places; but simply because Mary always chose to see the best in people.
That was a rare gift.
From what he could gather from the High Command in the Delta, everybody assumed that the Mexicans would move north and west from San Antonio, and in that event Trinity Crossing was the place to make a stand. He thought that was unlikely, not least because he doubted the Mexicans had the fighting manpower, or the logistics train to sustain two separate lines of advance.
And besides, the Mexicans were not the incompetent idiots those fools in the East painted them!
His old sparring partner General Felipe de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, the Chief of Staff of the Mexican Armed Forces, was not going to send his troops this far north. That would be too much of a gamble and Santa Anna was just not that kind of general.
It had astonished Washington that hardly anybody in New England remembered Santa Anna from the last war, or had troubled watch his inexorable rise to power in México with anything other than idle, passing interest. But then people on the East Coast had been sleep walking most of the last decade when it came to Nuevo Granada and the rapid modernisation of its political and military infrastructure.
Personally, Washington had guessed the Mexicans would wait a while longer; return to the negotiating table with its new army, its modern air force and a navy that was beginning to warrant the name, a democracy demanding its place in the world and a settlement of its centuries’ old territorial claims to land taken from it by force majeure by the British. But in a few years New England would have an air force of jets, the Empire could out-build any two or three other navies on the planet and sooner or later, the oil of Texas and offshore in the Gulf of Spain would persuade the government in London to properly fortify the border, and then, because the men in charge in México City were – contrary to the badinage filling the East Coast press -profoundly rational, they would know that their ever-shortening window of opportunity had closed.
So, Santa Anna had – probably with immense reluctance – concluded that a new war, right now, was the only way to guarantee a front row seat at the peace table, next year or the year after. The trouble was that the people in Philadelphia and London did not get it. They still believed they were dealing with a tin pot, banana republic run by a gang of fanatics. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the aftermath of a relatively bloodless revolution in the wake of the defeat in the last Border War, México had democratised, more or less in the same Parliamentary fashion as the Home Islands. Neither President Hernando de Soto nor Santa Anna were dictators or military strong men, and the current war was not some impulsive aberration, it was an expression of Mexican nationhood, the one thing that united most of the great, sprawling nation…
This war had been coming for years
This war had been wholly avoidable.
De Soto and Santa Anna were men London could have done business with had it not been for those idiots in the First Thirteen…
George Washington had to bite down on his anger.
He needed to think clearly.
Best case, worst case scenarios.
If the enemy came this far north and got across the river – both unlikely, in his humble opinion – then there was precious little to stop them marching a few miles to the north and following the railway all the way east to Caddoport on the Red River.
But George Washington did not think Santa Anna was that greedy. In his old foe’s place, he would be still be coming to terms with the outrageous success and lightning speed of advance of his forces. Those Mexicans fighting in the suburbs of San Antonio must have outrun their supply train, be living of the land and any loot they chanced upon. They would be exhausted, formations would have lost combat coherence, and sixty or seventy percent of their vehicles would have broken down by now. Their pack animals would be literally dying on the hoof. The safe, rational thing to do was to consolidate San Antonio as a logistical and transportation hub, fortify the town and then, when the troops were well rested, press on to the east, threatening the Red River line while amphibious operations were prepared to blockade the Delta. Another man might have allowed himself to get carried away with his good luck; but not Santa Anna…
No, the safe thing to do would be to consolidate San Antonio as a logistical and transportation hub, fortify the town and then, when his troops were well rested, press on to the east, threatening the Mississippi line and the Delta.
In the meantime, it did no harm to operate on the presumption that Trinity Crossing might one day soon be New England’s last redoubt in northern Texas, or perhaps, one day, become the logical staging point for a counter-offensive to retake San Antonio. If nothing else, it sharpened his men’s minds, kept them honest in the conduct of their duties.
From what George Washington had learned from Greg Torrance and his chief mechanic, Bill Fielding, the Spanish had bombed all the railheads to the south, and the retreating army had torn up the rails of all of those expensively built lines to nowhere in the south west as they retreated. Washington had watched those tracks being laid all over southern and western Texas, extended into the Sonoran deserts, and people said, blasted through the mountains. Those tracks were supposed to guarantee that reinforcements and supplies could be swiftly, efficiently delivered to the fighting men at the front in the event of war but there had never been enough rolling stock, or men guarding the borderlands; the reliance upon ‘bastion’ settlements and militiamen had been, to his mind, just plain dumb. Frankly, little better than an abdication of responsibility and now they were all paying the price for their neglect and negligence.