Special Duty Officer
“You mean to raise funds by selling stamps?”
Waldemar’s superiors received the idea with open skepticism. Would it actually make money? Doubt nagged at them, but they signed off all the same—he was free to sell under the Navy’s name.
“Right, then. Let’s print them by the ton.”
Waldemar set the presses roaring. And we’ll need some publicity, he thought, turning over ways to move the flood of stamps already rolling off the machines.
Advertise in the papers? It would work in the short run, but he disliked the idea. Buying column space was no great burden; the problem was what it would reveal about the state of his purse. Buying the stamps with his own money was no better. He might do it once—he could not keep underwriting the scheme forever.
After long thought, he steeled himself and reached for the nuclear option.
“His Highness Waldemar refused a posting to a surface ship so he wouldn’t be parted from his fiancée—and now he’s making stamps for the Navy.”
“His Highness is devoted beyond belief. To turn down an honorable career for such petty work…”
The rumor Waldemar seeded through John Connor traveled from local salons into high society itself. Noblewomen were already hungry for news of Waldemar and Alix; society always had an appetite for that sort of gossip.
“How lovely. I knew he would be just that sort of man.”
“But what exactly are these stamps His Highness is making?”
Before long, a few of them began inquiring after the stamps themselves.
“Stamps? Ah—yes, we do have those.”
The Navy was baffled that people were turning up for stamps that had never been advertised. Customers ordered them by the hundred as souvenirs. At first most bought out of curiosity about this peculiar prince’s project, or because they sensed collectible value in Germany’s first naval stamps.
Within a short time the picture changed completely.
“When I slip one of His Highness Waldemar’s stamps into my husband’s wallet, I feel strangely at ease.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I believe a stamp from a true romantic like His Highness will work a good influence on him.”
In an age still thick with superstition and half-mystical charms, that was reason enough. Noblewomen began buying Waldemar’s stamps as talismans and pressing them on husbands and lovers. The odd habit caught fire until, among those who had pledged their hearts, love itself required the delivery of a naval stamp.
“You came with flowers and no stamp in your wallet? I am so disappointed in you!”
Absurd as it was, the naval stamp had transformed from an instrument of war into a token of love—and it was selling across German society as if it had grown wings.
Waldemar had never imagined it would go this far. He had only meant to ride the interest of women long enough to put the stamps on the map. The turn of events left him faintly queasy, but he was not about to refuse the joy of a vast profit.
What had become a full-blown fashion recorded a net return of ten million marks in short order.
Ten million. Against Waldemar’s total fortune it was modest; by any objective measure it was enough to buy a solid company outright. And the returns were still climbing. A year of sales might well fund a dreadnought-class battleship.
A dreadnought? The thought made him dizzy. He could only hope the Navy would not go mad at the sight of the money.
When Waldemar reported the stamp revenue with scrupulous honesty, the naval high command nearly came out of its chairs.
“In that short a time—how much did you say you made? Say it again!”
“Ten million marks.”
Everyone swallowed hard. In 1885 the German Navy’s annual budget stood at roughly eighty-five million marks. In other words, Waldemar had, in a blink, brought in more than a tenth of the service’s yearly appropriation.
They looked at him with new eyes. They said he was a boy so besotted he’d given up society for a girl—but his talent for making money is no ordinary thing.
Until then the Navy had planned to let Waldemar amuse himself a while and then ship him off to a surface vessel. That plan was dead. Forget surface ships. The prince was born to support the Navy.
In recognition of his service, they commissioned him at once as a sub-lieutenant. The commission, of course, was not the ordinary sort. Waldemar entered through a different door—as a special duty officer.
Special duty officers had originally been created to give technical specialists—ordnance, medical, band, and the like—officer rank and officer responsibilities. In the Navy it had become customary to promote warrant officers and petty officers of proven practical skill into those specialist billets. Waldemar, who had no surface-ship experience whatever, had never even been eligible to apply.
The fortune he had raised changed every calculation. Even a Navy that prized technical competence could not leave a prince who had produced more than a tenth of its budget overnight among the ordinary cadets. For that reason they appointed him a special duty officer in a wholly novel specialty: finance.
“I’ve been commissioned as a special duty officer?”
Waldemar could scarcely hide his surprise. The administrative track he had expected would still have bound him tightly into the military hierarchy. A finance-specialty special duty officer was another matter entirely. He was the first of his kind; even his superiors were unsure how to handle him. After some deliberation they sent word that he need only run the stamp enterprise at his own discretion and keep delivering money.
So from now on I can live half like a civilian? From Waldemar’s point of view, that was no bad outcome.
He told Alix first. If he hid the truth and it came out later, there would be hell to pay—so he volunteered the report himself. Alix could not conceal her delight and answered at once.
Does that mean I may see Your Highness as I please?
— Alix
In her letter she pressed hard for a return to the days when they had seen each other so often.
“Not too often.”
Waldemar used his naval status as a shield and reined her in. After several rounds of wrangling, Alix promised to visit only once every two months. Even that was far too frequent—but she would yield no further.
Having soothed her, Waldemar turned to the shape of his life ahead. Should he now be a proper special duty officer of the finance specialty and keep expanding the take? The question gave him a headache. Even the money the stamps were already bringing in felt uncomfortably large. If the naval staff began pouring it into the fleet, friction with Britain might follow.
No—perhaps that’s premature.
He considered the German Navy as it stood. Compared with the age of Wilhelm II, its strength was almost pitiful. On paper it ranked fifth in Europe after Britain, France, Russia, and Italy; measured by fleet tonnage the gap was immense.
The German Navy’s total displacement was only about seventy thousand tons—far behind the roughly seven hundred thousand, four hundred fifty thousand, two hundred fifty thousand, and one hundred eighty thousand attributed to Britain, France, Russia, and Italy. Even Spain, a third-rate power on its last legs, still fielded more than sixty thousand tons.
A force this modest could fatten a little without setting London’s nerves on edge. And Germany has expanded its colonies somewhat—there’s justification enough for growth.
Waldemar resolved to keep printing stamps diligently and to abandon toy production. Going further would serve neither Germany nor the Navy.
He steered the stamp enterprise smoothly onward. In the course of directing it he found frequent occasion to speak with the upper echelons of the Navy—possible not because of his rank, which was low, but because of the money he controlled. In those contacts he discovered a problem.
These people don’t understand economics at all.
That was true even of a Navy thick with the sons of commercial nobility and capitalists. Of the Army—the fortress of conservative Junkers—there was no need to speak. Waldemar believed that any force serious about modern war needed at least a minimal grasp of economics. If they’d had that much common sense, they would have carpeted the sea with U-boats instead of printing dreadnoughts.
He could not ignore a corps of officers commanding without economic literacy. To address it, he sent the Navy a long anonymous treatise packed with the analyses twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars had made of war from an economic standpoint.
Before long the paper caused a considerable stir within the service.
“That line about modern war never ending so long as the industrial chains and trade that supply wealth and matériel remain unbroken—that one especially lands.”
People wondered who had written it; the author never showed himself. Captain Alfred von Tirpitz, who would one day be called the father of the German High Seas Fleet, read the treatise several times and sank into deep thought.
To hold bargaining power against a superior enemy, we must be able to destroy or disrupt their commerce. For that premise to hold, the German Navy must aim to possess ships of high speed and long range.
From that day’s meditation Tirpitz began to crystallize his own ideas for the German Navy.
Waldemar did not know how deeply his paper had affected them, but their reaction told him it had done some good. The ideal would have been for the service to teach economics to its officers; the conservative German military was vanishingly unlikely to go that far. Still, that officers had begun to recognize the importance of the economy was an encouraging change.
Well—if they only come to understand how frightening war is, that will be enough.
The thought reminded him that Alix, too, ought to study economics. An fiancée who would share in the management of his empire had no business remaining ignorant of it.
So how am I going to write that letter to Alix?
Waldemar sat brooding over a problem that looked harder than the treatise itself.