Two Hundred Lost Years Read online

  James Philip

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  TWO HUNDRED LOST YEARS

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  The New England Series – Book 2

  Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2018.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover concept by James Philip

  Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design

  THE NEW ENGLAND SERIES

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  BOOK 1: EMPIRE DAY

  BOOK 2: TWO HUNDRED LOST YEARS

  BOOK 3: TRAVELS THROUGH THE WIND

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Prologue

  ACT I – The Case for the Prosecution

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  ACT II – The Case for the Defence

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  ACT III – World’s End

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Author’s Endnote

  Other Books by James Philip

  TWO HUNDRED LOST YEARS

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  The New England Series – Book 2

  Chapter 1

  Prologue

  Within Foreign and Colonial Office – FCO - circles and in the recesses of various prestigious houses of academe it had long been postulated – mostly confidentially, heaven forfend that the secretive cerebral machinations of the ruling class should be widely broadcast - that the ‘Great Settlement’ of the Treaty of Paris in 1866 which had governed the affairs of empires for over a century was showing unmistakable signs of age and the concomitant wear and tear to be expected of such a venerable and some said, antique, ‘construct’.

  It was definitely not the sort of thing anybody with ambitions of a career in national administration or of say, of one day obtaining an Oxford or Cambridge Chancellorship tended to say in public. In fact, the one thing that everybody in the FCO agreed about was that all things considered it was probably best to keep not just the man on the street but practically every other department of state ‘out of the loop’ in its deliberations. So, while successive Foreign Secretaries looked on as relative Imperial positions and the inevitable fracture lines in the geriatric ‘citadel of the Paris concords’ began to widen, within the FCO the view prevailed that it was one thing for British Governments of the second half of the twentieth century to suspect that a diplomatic, possibly a geopolitical earthquake of likely catastrophic destructive potential was bound to happen one day; it was another entirely to risk giving the impression that it might easily happen one day soon.

  Ironically, it had always been assumed that the problem would not necessarily be brought to a head by one of the ‘great powers’ – Britain, Germany and (arguably still by dint of its immense geographic ‘reach’) Spain – kicking over the table. The ‘Paris Framework’ suited the great powers, insofar as they went; basically, the underlying assumption was that they had too much to lose by walking away from the 1866 Treaty. No, most foreign policy savants looked warily to the second rank powers, Portugal, Russia and Japan – although by the 1970s this latter undoubtedly punched well above its weight in the Western Pacific military sphere and increasingly in world industrial stakes - and the less than perfectly united, somewhat dysfunctional rumps of the historic Chinese, Ottoman and Hungarian-Balkan ‘fiefdoms’, in search of the fires that might ignite a new global conflict.

  In Paris, the capital of the once disarmed, still severely diminished French Republic, the parties to the settlement of 1866 still met amid regal fanfares and grandiloquent ceremonial in the Place de Concord, the so-called Palace of the Nations. The beautiful city, completely rebuilt and now the undisputed hub of European cultural expression in architecture, the visual arts, theatre and music, and the booming centre of the global film industry had become both the playground of the world’s diplomats and spies, and the seductively convivial, welcoming, wealthy crossroads of the continent.

  The fading stigma of a terrible war lost, the humiliation of near total defeat and the ‘rape’ of its colonies, was a fading national stain upon which most Parisiennes rarely dwelt. The century of peace without need to expend endless treasure on its army, navy and the upkeep of its network of overseas ‘departments’ had enabled French men and women to become the wealthiest, almost certainly the best-educated citizens of Europe with a standard of living estimated to be – in terms of gross domestic product per capita – equivalent to that of citizens of the First Thirteen in New England and between twenty and thirty percent better than that enjoyed by their British, German or Scandinavian contemporaries. Likewise, pure science and academic research had flourished in French universities in a country whose land borders with her mighty German and Spanish neighbours were guaranteed ‘in perpetuity’ by troops drawn from the British Isles, Australasia, New England, India, South Africa and by design, symbolically from every other corner of the Empire, her coasts by the Royal Navy and latterly in this modern age, her skies by the aircraft of the Royal Air Force.

  Although now and then it became the subject of heated debate in the British press and in the House of Commons nobody seriously cavilled at the magnitude of the ‘burden’ the Empire had assumed in order to end the Great War. No matter how onerous the open-ended commitment to maintain a standing army of eight divisions – the majority based along the Rhine or in ‘High Germany’, the lowlands of Holland and Belgium covering ‘theoretical’ German aggression, and in Gascony, guarding against what was regarded as a purely ‘notional’ Spanish threat – some one hundred and forty thousand men in all, the stationing at any one time of a dozen squadrons of scout and bomber warplanes on French soil, and of having to base small naval flotillas at Brest, La Rochelle, Marseilles, Toulon, and at Ajaccio in Corsica, successive administrations in Whitehall still regarded the cost as money well-spent, whatever the man on the street in England sometimes told the pollsters.

  Those eight divisions were the skeleton upon which a thirty-five division-strong Imperial Army might be rapidly built up if the diplomatic situation in Western Europe ever threatened to ‘turn nasty’. Remarkably, this had remained an article of faith shared by all the major British political parties for over a century. The war of 1857-1865, the ‘Great War’ had literally touched every corner of the World and cost, conservatively as many as two hundred million lives: notwithstanding that the actual fighting was now beyond direct human remembrance the scars remained, deep and livid and it was ingrained in the psyche’s of the political classes of the English-speaking ‘Commonwealth’ that it was worth paying practically any price to avoid having to revisit those old nightmares.

  In any event, while British Governments had viewed the machinations of the German-Scandinavian ‘Grand Alliance’ of former years – the four Nordic nations: Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland were never all within the fold at the same time and generally kept the Germans at arm’s length other than when this or that Tsar attempted to prop up his ‘strong-man’ image by throwing his weight around in the Baltic or the
Arctic – during the third quarter of the twentieth century with relative equanimity. Elsewhere the Fleet had carried on watching over the Spanish, the Hungarians and the Turks in the Mediterranean, with its countless gunboats ever-ready to enforce Whitehall’s muscular diplomacy anywhere around the globe, and all had seemed blissfully serene.

  The Peace of Paris had been at first an armistice, then a conference, and later a ‘process’ under which mutual security became – by the end of the 1860s - the avowed objective of all the signatories. Nobody seriously questioned it success: there had been no second world war, no futile general conflagration and imperial spats and fallings out had generally been mitigated down the years with the shedding of mercifully little blood.

  By the 1970s Paris was the luxurious meeting place of the nations, and Versailles the glittering symbol of an unprecedented global entente.

  How could it be otherwise?

  Surely, the enduring lesson of the Great War had been that regardless who allied with whom, the British Empire would always prevail. Ultimately, the Royal Navy ruled the ocean waves and with the manpower, natural resources and seemingly unlimited industrial capacity of the imperium – for example, a dozen of the bigger steel mills of Ohio and Pennsylvania alone out-produced the whole of the rest of the World – any other two or three, or four ‘powers’ could not hope to challenge the status quo of the ‘Settlement of Paris’.

  Or that, at least, was the theory.

  In the century or so since the Great War the World had changed in ways not wholly appreciated or, it seems now, poorly understood by the ‘great men’ of the middle years of the twentieth century. In retrospect it ought to have been recognised that one thing above all had changed. Perhaps, because that ‘something’ had never been a ‘game changer’ in Whitehall, its mandarins - this author included - failed to truly understand the savagery of the rip tides beginning to warp the canvas of global affairs until it was too late.

  In the nineteenth century the World had been coal-fired.

  In the twentieth century oil was king; the one commodity a great power must have.

  The British Empire had never wanted for oil; it had been awash with the nasty, viscous, smelly stuff for over sixty years because the Empire controlled the oil of Persia and the Arabian Peninsula, the Royal Navy safeguarded the ports where the pipelines from the oilfields met the sea and the ‘pipeline’ of ever-bigger tankers transporting the precious black gold around the globe.

  Whereas, Germany only had its small Transylvanian oilfields located in its troublesome Romanian-Carpathian provinces, Russia its under-developed wells around the Caspian and a hope, someday, of exploiting the reserves known to lie under Alaska. Everybody else was dependent on British largesse because most of the other major known oil reserves lay buried in the ground in California, Texas, the Gulf of Spain and Latin America, and beneath the war-torn Muslim kingdoms of the East Indies, all vast disputed or chaotic territories in which the unimaginably prodigious oil and other natural bounties they ‘might’ harbour were as good as locked underground, unobtainable, useless.

  In a World that was now driven – literally - by oil this was a recipe for disaster and in many ways, the miracle was that the explosion was, for so long, delayed.

  While successive British Governments had ‘taken their eyes off the ball’ the regimes in Berlin, Madrid, Moscow and Tokyo and a score of other countries had not. What Whitehall strategists regarded as the maintenance of a ‘constructive tension’ among its imperial rivals over the security of global oil supplies; Germany, Spain and Japan regarded as a punitive British sanctions policy unjustly, outrageously impinging upon their intrinsic national rights and ambitions.

  However, British diplomats could live with that in the councils of the Treaty of Paris secure in the knowledge that approximately a quarter of the globe was painted imperial pink, that the German Fleet was forever bottled up in the Baltic and the North Sea and that the Empire remained the dominant ‘superpower’ of the age in economic and military terms.

  And as for the ‘burden’ of guaranteeing the sanctity of French territory well, the tariffs the other ‘great powers’ paid to the British Exchequer in exchange for their dole of Arabian oil more than covered that, trifling expense!

  Essentially, might was right.

  In hindsight it was not so much a question of who would move first to undermine what they perceived as the British ‘monopoly’ – some historians later called it ‘the stranglehold’ – of the globe’s oil supplies, but when.

  Historians had spent a century trying to unravel the lessons of the Great War without ever really understanding how it had happened in the first place. Sometimes, there are no lessons to be learned from history.

  Sometimes, one must simply remember…

  The Great War of the mid-nineteenth century had begun as a misunderstanding over Schleswig-Holstein between the German – Prussian dominated - Reich and a self-beguiled Danish polity desperate to cling to a long-lost vision of its own nationhood. Predictably, Germanic military efficiency and weight of numbers crushed the gallant Danes within weeks; and that, ought, by rights to have been, that. Yet within a year that ‘ridiculous little war’ – in the words of one British Prime Minister - between ludicrously mismatched foes had as if by osmosis drawn in the whole of Scandinavia, France, Spain, Portugal, the old Austro-Hungarian behemoth, the Russians and by threatening to set the Mediterranean alight and sever so many of Britain’s imperial trade routes finally drawn the Empire into the war supporting, as it had since the time of Marlborough, the weakest parties. After that the Japanese, the Chinese and the Russians had fought their own terrible conflict in the Far East, rebellion and revolution had swept through Latin America, New Spain had attempted to invade the southern colonies and territories of New England and Africa had been embroiled in proxy wars without number for a decade.

  And all because of Schleswig-Holstein…

  Goodness, there was a lesson to be learned; a lesson we ought to have remembered. Instead, we remembered only the lesson of how that dreadful conflagration had eventually been brought to what, in English eyes, was a middlingly satisfactory conclusion.

  Thus, very nearly a hundred and twenty years later the great powers began again to sleep walk towards catastrophe with the careless insouciance of men who honestly believe that the light at the end of the tunnel is something other than an express train travelling towards them at a hundred miles an hour!

  In any event, it is now clear that this ineluctable process probably commenced on Empire Day 1976. Insofar, as it might be said that the crushing of the American Rebellion of 1776 marked one waypoint in Imperial historiography; then time may prove that 4th July 1976, was a second, possibly even more momentous day in the story of the British Empire.

  Oh, that we might have known what we know now seven years ago…

  Sir George Horace Walpole

  [Extract from ‘A History of New England, Volume VI: 1957-1982’ printed in July 1983].

  A.D. 1977

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  ACT I – The Case for the Prosecution

  Chapter 2

  Friday 24th June

  Fort Crailo Prison, Rensselaer, Crown Colony of New York

  Things were not looking good. Upon that at least, everybody could agree. The other thing that everybody seemed to agree about was that when, eventually, I had my day in court it was likely to be a short, bitter-sweet experience and that the main topic of discussion would almost entirely concern the manner of my subsequent execution.

  The only redeeming aspect of the whole sorry affair was that the English, being the English, regarded it as a tad unsporting to kick a man when he was down. Hence, my incarceration at Fort Crailo, once in long ago times before Rensselaer became a heavily industrialised suburb of the colonial capital, a red-brick fortified manor house on the scenic east bank of the Hudson River but now in more recent times the middlingly comfortable, very secure place where the authorities in New York customarily locke
d away ‘felonious persons of otherwise good standing’ – that is, individuals who were, ostensibly, a cut above the normal ne’er-do-well criminal classes customarily frequenting the colony’s penal establishments – so as to avoid unseemly ‘embarrassments’ to the ‘old families’ of the Commonwealth of New England.

  It was the sort of thing which had been largely abandoned back in the Old Country. However, many of the First Thirteen remained in such matters, islands of tradition.

  Ironically, traditionally, ‘good standing’ usually inferred ‘great wealth’ or an extant significant filial relationship with some colonial bigwig or a blue-blooded family back in the Old Country. Pragmatically, one thing the ruling elite of the First Thirteen had never been very keen to promote was avoidable feuds within their own ranks, or to risk stirring up ‘counter-productive’ enmities with the City of London; both of which were very bad for business. So, most of the East Coast ‘old’ colonies had places like Fort Crailo where problematic persons might be safely, and relatively convivially ‘parked’ pending the typically sclerotic deliberation of the judiciary.

  Not that I was exactly getting treated with kid gloves. Suspected enemies of the Commonwealth of New England were not extended the ‘hotel’ liberties of the establishment’s customary clientele. I was locked in my first-floor cell – an airy, spacious albeit bare-walled room with a westerly aspect offering a view across the Hudson River into the heart of prosperous Albany – twenty-three-and-a-half hours a day. Whereas, many of the other guests prior to last year’s ‘Empire Day Atrocities’, might have had free-range of the building and the grounds, I and my fellow ‘conspirators’ had no right of association with each other, or with anybody in fact, other than our guards and ever so occasionally, with our legal advisors.