Singapur, Malaysia, Deutsch-Ostasien

A decade. Ten years spent in Singapur; ten years spent in Ostasien; ten years spent serving the Kaiserreich; ten years spent burning villages and subduing rebels; ten years spent cavorting with Oriental Sultans and Kings.

Ten years.

In his restless dreams he still saw them: men drowning in the freezing waters of the Central Pacific in twilight hours of late Spring. He could hear their voices, hoarse, just barely hidden beneath the swirling waters that resulted from the Spring storms.

Hellmuth von Mucke was haunted. Haunted by men he had killed, by men he could not save, by villagers left destitute after their homes were burned by his men on his orders. The image of smoke rising above Canton, buildings razed to rubble by the pounding of German guns and streets made bloody by German men with German steel. He had stood on the deck of his ship and issued the orders that turned a city of ten thousand years to a city of ash.

He recalled how von Falkenhausen had put it: “Necessary. Cruel. A fate deserving of socialists and orientals.”

Some part of Großadmiral-Gouverneur Hellmuth von Mucke could not agree with his long-time companion. When he returned to Singapur, following a sidetrack through Indochina to oversee Waldeck-und-Pyrmont’s counterinsurgency campaign, he spent many days hiding in his office, trying to draft a letter to the Kolonialamt to explain that such violence, while perhaps effective in Africa, would not be advisable in Ostasia. When he tried to explain in detail, to provide some evidence or precedent, he could not find one.

Von Mucke gave a heavy sigh. He had spent a decade is Ostasia, and six of those years had been spent in Singapur. When Tirpitz had ordered the Ostasiatische Station move to the city, von Mucke had been placed in the Istana-the mansion of the former British governers. It was a massive complex, a mansion of three floors, two wings, 106 acres, too many rooms to count, a villa, a lodge, a garden, and a golf course. It was all too much, by von Mucke’s estimation. A man of responsibility should live comfortably, not opulently. He had grown comfortable in the cramped officers cabins of the many ships he’d spent time in.

Last October he’d begun to write his memoirs. It had been suggested to him the last time he was in Berlin, now six years ago, by von Tirpitz. The writing itself was rather poor and von Mucke admitted to it. He wrote reports, not stories. In recalling his life, he had found little to remark upon: a youth spent idolization a soldier father, an early adulthood spent in the service of the navy, and his twilight years spent navigating the mire of a colony built of 3 separate administrations each of which was composed of innumerable subdivisions organized in widely varying ways and all of which leant to a general nightmare of administration.

Paul Koenig, the Zivilkommisar and a man of good character by von Mucke’s estimation, decried the Administration as a, “Father overseeing a squabbling house of hens and whores.”

Yet here it stood. Functioning, if barely, giving to the Reich what it desired and maintaining, if barely, peace and stability. Bar some extreme and sudden downturn, Koenig and the rest of the Kommission had done well to secure a strange sort of balance between the former administrations, the German administration, and the client kings.

von Mucke leaned back in his chair and pushed the reports away. Hundreds of pages of reports on rice production, constructions, A.O.G. reports from Tsingtau, and god-knows-what-else. Somewhere else, buried in the recesses of his desk, was a letter. Written, edited, and precisely prepared.

A letter of resignation.

Maybe next year.