Basically, as German industrial society had become more populous and more complex, it had become increasingly impossible for one man, regardless of the competence of his advisors, to rule.
Inevitably, powers and duties had flowed down to the Staaten and the Reichstag had become the body with the legal requirement, and right, to oversee and supervise those ‘delegated’ Imperial roles and functions.
Modern empires and nations required a rule of law and systemic derogation of responsibilities at practically every level to operate as coherent entities, and for all its industrial muscle and Imperial ambition, the German Empire was beginning to creak at the seams. Every important decision joined an ever-lengthening queue because when all was said and done, nothing really important happened unless the Kaiser blessed it with his personal imprimatur.
Which is why the Admirals of the Kaiserliche Marine have got away with hanging onto all their battleships when they ought to have been following our example, and building a fleet of bloody great big aircraft carriers!
Or at least, that was what the King of England thought!
The sclerotic Imperial regime in Berlin could not afford to have a demented old man in charge; unfortunately, that was exactly it had had the last couple of years.
Worse, the Old Kaiser and his heir had fallen out many years ago, back in the days when Wilhelm was just another ‘spare’ son, like George. By the time Wilhelm eventually became Crown Prince three years ago, he was already too catastrophically estranged from his father for there ever to be, notwithstanding the Kaiser’s mental and physical decline, to be fully rehabilitated into the Royal Household. Therefore, in this time of crisis there were in effect, two opposing Royal Courts in Berlin.
Now, it seemed the Kaiser’s courtiers and ministers had trumped Wilhelm’s coterie of ambitious younger men and would-be players, waiting impatiently for the fall of the ancient regime.
In days or weeks Wilhelm would inherit a war state confronted by a British Empire Hell bent on rearmament with a Navy that had stolen an unimaginably huge technological march – only partly on account of its vast investment in the Ulysses class fleet carriers – on the Kaiserliche Marine.
All things considered, it was hardly to be wondered at that Crown Prince Wilhelm, putative heir to the Kingdom of Prussia and likely, to the Empire of the Germanies, was in a somewhat ill-humour this morning.
The King understood, with a pain that was as excruciatingly moral as much as physical, that his cousin would be even angrier, incandescent if and when he ever picked up his lower jaw from the floor, if and when, as sooner or later he surely must, he learned exactly how far his beloved Kaiserliche Marine had slipped behind the technological curve.
In a very real sense, the Ulysses class ships were only the tip of a horribly dangerous iceberg. In his conversations with his Prime Minister he had broached. His ministers had been adamant that the greatest secret of the Empire would remain just that, preferably for as long as possible.
George had bowed to this advice.
He was King-Emperor but most of all, he was his people’s servant and in this, as in all great matters of state, the People spoke to him through the voices of his ministers.
He knew that such sophistry was, and would always be, completely lost on his nephew.
“If necessary,” his Prime Minister, Sir Hector Hamilton had averred, “I shall ensure that Project Poseidon is guarded by a bodyguard of lies, sir.”
The King had asked his friend – for the two men had known each other since their youth, and worked assiduously together in recent years – if the price of winning a ‘quick victory’, and of ‘minimising the cost in lives and human misery of the coming War in the Indies’ was the revelation of the existence of the project, ‘are you prepared to pay it, Hector?’
‘I trust that,’ his Prime Minister had replied, ‘that it does not come to that, sir.’
The King sighed.
“This is a bad season,” he observed thoughtfully.
“Tell me that our countries will not be at war in a few hours’ time, Bertie,” the Crown Prince asked bluntly.
“War with the Reich is not My Government’s intention, Willy.”
“Nor will it be My Government’s policy, either,” his German cousin retorted.
Problematically, neither man cared to guess – or was in any position to know – what was in the mind of the Kaiser, or the minds of those around him.
Chapter 13
Sunday 9th April
Little Inagua Island, West Indies
“That’s torn it!” Surgeon Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln, RNAS, muttered to himself as he watched the first boat, rowed by eight oarsmen, slowly move away from the antique cruiser moored some three hundred yards off shore.
He was thinking straight at last, remembering things he half-suspected he had forgotten over the course of the last couple of days.
His head hardly ached and he was feeling a little stronger, although no less sore.
Most important, he was thinking straight again!
Remembering things, mostly in the order they happened!
And he was increasingly confident that he was making good, sensible decisions.
I must have been concussed much more badly than I realised at the time…
He had moved Ted Forest, half-carrying, supporting his friend as he hopped, at a snail’s pace some four hundred yards back from the beach to the shelter of a low, undergrowth-covered hillock, where, coincidentally there was a nearby relatively clean, clear rain pool. Or leastways, what Abe took to be a rain pool, having encountered – at an elevation of perhaps a dozen or so feet above the beach – a muddy area which he suspected might, actually conceal a seasonal fresh water spring. Had events not been so pressing he might have explored farther. Unfortunately, as it was, he needed to watch the crash site.
During the night he had crept back to it several times, found Ted’s discarded Webley revolver, scrabbled around the wreck searching for any remaining pieces of the pilot’s smashed medical box, finding a second box of matches, and to his exasperation at having missed it earlier, discovered a partially crushed rations box – the size of a biscuit tin – wedged beneath the smashed wireless set and the ground, both having obviously broken through the bottom of the fuselage when the Sea Fox crashed. He had also ‘re-discovered’, the two-thirds buried twenty-five-pound high explosive bomb – that he had convinced himself he had imagined falling over that first day on the island – which must have hung-up on the attack on the Karlsruhe and broken free of the aircraft during the crash.
Periodically he had flattened himself on the ground as one or other of the searchlights of the two cruisers panned along the beach and lingered, each time, on the wreck.
With daybreak Abe had discarded his filthy white shirt, gone bare-chested, knowing his reddened, tanning torso was more likely to fade into the background of brown-green vegetation than anything pure white. With the sand adhering to his sweat-grimed skin he hoped he was invisible each time he flattened against the ground.
Nothing astonished Abe quite so much as how unobservant he had been the last couple of days. He had obviously been operating on muscle memory, hardly thinking, just acting. Loss of blood, shock, or perhaps, just the lingering effects of a nasty bump on the head – he still had a nice lump and bruise, according to Ted on his forehead, more or less dead centre, and a ‘real shiner’ of a black eye on his left wing – had combined to make him, at times, act like a complete idiot.