Every single one of those carefully, expensively built-up depots north of the demilitarized zone were now in Spanish hands, and the surviving colonial troops running ahead of the invaders, were heading due east.
The three riders had halted on a rise north of the town.
“The Spanish can read maps just like we can, boys,” George Washington observed wryly, gazing out across the partially flooded landscape of forest and grassland framed by the scrub and rock of the desert beyond the floodplains of the shallow valley bending away to the south for as far as the eye could behold.
God’s own country…
“They came at us all along the border,” he went on, the two youngsters, neither eighteen yet, listened respectfully. “They’ll halt a while, maybe around, or a little way beyond San Antonio and down on the coast. Maybe they’ll wait to link up with the force coming up from the south. If they do, they’ll meet up a long way south of here. Sometimes, armies get as disorganised advancing fast as an army in full retreat. They outrun their supplies, run out of ammunition. Sure, they captured our depots but we use different calibre rifle ammo, .303 against 7.92-millimetre metric, and artillery 3-inch imperial as opposed to 75-millimetre metric. Their land cruisers probably don’t use the same lubricants as ours. So, they’ll halt, reconsolidate, regroup awhile before they come on again. If we’re lucky we’ll get a couple of weeks, more likely a month or two, to get our act together.”
As of yesterday evening, courtesy of Flight Sergeant Bill Fielding and a couple of self-confessed ‘radio hacks’ the latter had identified, several wireless sets were now in full working order, enabling him to make contact with Western Command in New Orleans.
Those idiots had no idea what was going on.
Not that this surprised him; given that the man who had presided over the preparation for and the actual, wholly predictable shambles west of the Red River in the last few weeks, was ‘Chinese’ Forsyth, who, in the way of these things was at the tail end of a highly self-publicised but otherwise average career, being rotated, in unhurried stages back to the Old Country before he was finally put out to pasture.
By repute, it was said Lieutenant General Sir Roger Forsyth was – despite having earned the sobriquet ‘Chinese’ ruthlessly putting down rebellions around the British Concession of Shanghai in the 1950s – a gentle, bookish soul who had spent most of his twenty years or so in Asia learning occidental languages and patronising archaeological, anthropological and botanical expeditions, several of which he had led, apparently with no little distinction.
Well, he had plenty of new ruins to peruse now!
Washington had gleaned precious little satisfaction from his thirty-minute conversation over a swooping, noisy scrambler link to Forsyth’s headquarters in the Delta.
The man had talked airily about trading territory for time.
He had also ordered that all livestock was to be destroyed ahead of the approaching Spanish ‘horde’.
Scorched earth…
Blowing up oil well heads… denying the enemy the fuel to continue the war!
Washington had no intention of participating in that kind of crime. He had, as tactfully as possible, attempted to put Forsyth right.
This was his country the other man was glibly talking about laying waste; and potentially, his cattle and other Texan and border-landers’ livelihoods. Forsyth needed the support of every Texan and ordering them to wreck their country was not going to cut the mustard.
Worryingly, the C-in-C was perfectly happy, ‘reconciled’ was his exact word, to allow the Spanish ‘in their own good time’ to close up to the margins of the Delta and ‘if they want, up to the western bank of the Mississippi’, which was just plain crazy.
It also illustrated how poorly the C-in-C understood the ground for which he was responsible. It angered – but did not surprise – Washington that a man so ignorant was calling the tune. It riled him even more that he was having to argue with the idiot within his, uninformed terms of reference.
‘You can’t do that, sir,’ George Washington had said in exasperation. ‘If they take New Orleans the river will become a highway into the interior…’
‘Don’t talk rot, man!’
Washington had tried to point out to the idiot that unless Santa Anna was advancing with an ‘engineering cohort’ equipped to ford a major continental river system, there was precisely no prospect of the Mexicans crossing the Red River; so, how on earth the invaders were going to ‘close up to the Mississippi’ was a mystery to him.
However, this line of reasoning also fell on deaf ears.
It seemed that Forsyth was about to fly into the San Antonio ‘enclave’. He felt a flying visit would stiffen the resolve of the garrison; something of an oxymoron if Greg Torrance was to be believed. San Antonio was where everybody, soldier or civilian was fleeing towards now that the Spanish had landed on the coast at Galveston Island.
The chaos of the sprawling conurbation – before the war a boom town city of well over a hundred thousand souls, oil men, ranchers, chancers and shysters of every description – which was surrounded by industrial sites and small hamlets on the prairie, now choked with survivors, retreating troops and refugees would, inevitably, suck in Mexican troops and block the advance of the invaders for several days, possibly weeks regardless of whether the defenders put up a fight.
Unfortunately, Forsyth was obviously one of those senior officers honestly believed that men like him who had survived the trial by fire of a public school-education in the Old Country, could achieve anything they set their minds to!
Washington’s attempts to discover if there was anybody co-ordinating the operations of the Army south and west of San Antonio, or even if it still existed, the CAF and the Royal Navy in the Gulf of Spain, had also drawn scorn.
That ‘was not the concern of a middle-ranking field officer’, he was informed.
Washington had tried to be diplomatic.
‘I propose to send out mounted scouts to establish the lines of advance of enemy forces in my sector, sir,’ Washington had reported, realising that it was pointless having an argument with a man who had no idea whatsoever what was really going on anywhere between San Antonio and Alta California. ‘I urgently need aviation spirit for the aircraft under my command…’
That apparently, was a matter he needed to take up with the Quartermaster of the Colonial Air Force.
Whereupon, Forsyth had delivered a pep talk and hung up with the thought that, apparently, all would be well because ‘the ground is in our favour!’
Which was nonsense because all the things which had gone wrong before, during and after the last Border War were repeating, except on an exponentially more disastrous scale. And this time there was an idiot in command who seemed to think ceding hundreds of miles of territory east of the Delta and allowing the enemy to over-extend his lines of communication was the answer to everything!
In the last war New Englanders had been able to count on at least the tacit support of the native peoples of the region; in the last few years the ‘free land’ settlement policy planting alien communities, many of which had virtually popped up overnight, in the middle of the ancestral lands of the ancient tribal populations, had meant that this time around if the tribes co-operated with anybody, it was going to be with the Spanish.
Washington had left Greg Torrance trying to contact somebody, somewhere capable of trucking him enough high-octane petrol to get his airworthy aircraft into the air. His Goshawk was going to need a ‘little tender loving care’ before it flew again but he was optimistic that the pair of intact Fleabags would come in useful for ‘field observation’ if only he could get hold of some petrol!