We saw in my Aug. 14 commentary that Prussia’s military leaders extended the frontiers they had had to accept in 1815, after the Napoleonic Wars. In doing so, they demonstrated the dictum of their compatriot General Karl von Clausewitz from that period that “war is the continuation of Politik by other means.” After provoking short wars with some neighbours, they gained territory from them and in 1871 united the German states under Prussian leadership within a new German Empire.

 

Spain, however, weakened economically and militarily by its own struggle against Napoleon (1807-14), had by then lost all its American empire to local revolutions, except Cuba and Puerto Rico. Cuba’s long fight for independence was encouraged by growing economic ties with the United States, which declared war on Spain in 1898, following the mysterious sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbour. Spain capitulated after ten weeks of fighting on land in Cuba and to a lesser extent in Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the Pacific, where the US Navy defeated the Spanish fleet.

Puerto Rico and Guam (in the Pacific) were ceded to the US, Cuba became a US protectorate, and the US bought the Philippines for $20 million. The US had encouraged the Filipinos to revolt against Spain, but then suppressed their republic in a brutal guerrilla war, 1899-1901. Soldiers from the north and south of the US had bonded in their first conflict since the Civil War. The US had also become a world power with its own colonial empire.

The UK fought the second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa in 1899-1902 against descendants of mainly Dutch settlers, armed by Germany, to control the Rand goldfields. The British forced civilians into concentration camps devised to prevent them assisting the Boer guerrillas. A veteran cavalry officer described his experiences in that conflict to me more than 50 years later.

Ancestors

My great-grandfather’s five sons (known in the family by their baptismal initials) migrated from Germany to London in the late 1800s, to join the cable telegraph industry that had transformed international communications. POL (Paul Oskar Ludwig — previously inadvertently given as Leopold), the most successful one, travelled all over Europe (eventually for the US Direct Cable Company). Naturalised British in 1879, he rejoiced in his “European Health and Pleasure Resorts” (1899) that he had not needed a passport, except for Russia. In February 1899, he and Felten and Guilleaume, a German cable manufacturer, established the DAT (German-Atlantic Telegraph Company) headquartered in Cologne, Germany, to where he moved his family’s home.

Submarine cables

Then the DAT and Felten and Guilleaume co-founded the NSW (North German Sea-cable Works), which manufactured and laid two submarine cables from Emden, Germany to Coney Island, New York via Horta, in the Azores. It is still a leader in submarine cable technology today.

The German government awarded DAT grants for connecting the first German-owned cables to the US. GAH (Gustav Adolph Herman Moll, my grandfather) took his family to Emden, after POL appointed him the superintendent of the DAT’s Emden station. My father had been born in London in June 1899 and baptised Oscar Paul Moll, after POL’s eldest son, recently deceased in Brazil on a British merchant ship.

Both Queen Victoria and her eldest daughter, the Dowager Empress of Germany, died in 1901. Victoria had always balanced her affection for both France and Germany, but her eldest son, now King Edward VII, was married to a popular Danish princess, who detested what Germany had done to her country. Britain signed the “Entente-Cordiale” with France in 1904, to settle territorial disputes between them and co-operate against Germany’s rising militarism. It was extended to Russia in 1907.

Danish West Indies

The US made several attempts to revive negotiations to buy the Danish West Indies driven by fears of German imperialism and the islands’ strategic importance, but Denmark postponed them out of respect for Spain. A new treaty to buy the entire DWI for only $5 million was drawn up in Washington and approved by the Senate in 1902. The elected lower house of the Danish Parliament passed it easily, but the upper house of landed aristocracy defeated it on a tied vote. The majority shared a sense of humiliation over their treatment by both Germany and the US and were still disinclined to lose the Danish colonies. The islanders were not consulted that time, but after the rejection of the previous treaty, public opinion in the DWI had swung against the sale.

Divided loyalties

Becoming best known as the managing director of the DAT forced POL into somewhat ambivalent loyalties towards the lands of his birth and adoption. A stained glass window in an Azorean council office (formerly the DAT’s local boardroom) is dedicated to the Kaiser. However, his surviving son Thomas enlisted as an officer in a British peacetime volunteer force formed in 1907 in response to German sabre-rattling. Meanwhile, his sister Victoria married the son of one of POL’s German colleagues and set up house in Cologne.

When the Kaiser came to Kiel in September 1911 to review his massive fleet of new warships, GAH was introduced to him as a “distinguished Englishman” (a family joke — he was still a German citizen). My father’s ambition was to study medicine at Heidelberg University, but he faced increasing anti-British hostility at his Emden high school. GAH resigned from the DAT and took his family back to England in 1912. On Oct. 6, 1913 he was naturalised British, but his solid record as a senior manager of a successful German start-up for 12 years was of dubious value in England then. At 52, with a teenage family to support, he faced an uncertain future.

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