Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History by Peter G. Tsouras Page A

1863
    The lieutenant saluted. “Colonel Sharpe?” he asked the officer who had just stepped off the train car. George H. Sharpe was on the short side of medium height, round shouldered, and with a walrus mustache, a plain, even homely looking thirty-five-year-old man and not a very martial figure by any means. He was a man you could easily miss—until he spoke, that is.
    “Lieutenant, I am Colonel Sharpe.” The young man was taken aback at the transformation. Sharpe’s face had brightened with a disarming smile and his blue-gray eyes sparkled with good humor.
    “I am to take you to the White House, sir, by direction of the Secretary of War.”
    Sharpe reflected that life was getting more and more interesting as the carriage clattered down Pennsylvania Avenue. He had been summoned by the iron-willed Secretary to Washington with no explanation from his staff position at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac at Brandy Station in Virginia, the furthest point of the Army’s advance after Gettysburg. He had met the formidable Edwin McMasters Stanton before. His duties had taken him to Washington repeatedly before Gettysburg, and he had briefed Stanton any number of times. He knew that the Secretary of War was a force of nature, single-minded will personified. Stanton had come to national prominence shortly before the war when he had defended Dan Sickles for shooting his wife’s lover dead right outside the White House and won the case by advancing theinsanity defense for the first time in American legal history. Because of those briefings, Stanton had acquired a taste for what Sharpe had to say.
    Sharpe, a slope-shouldered man from Kingston, New York, was unique in any number of ways. He was a Hudson Valley aristocrat, sophisticated and cosmopolitan. He was one of the best-educated men in the country, with degrees from Rutgers and Yale Law School. He had been the chargé at the Vienna legation and was something of a linguist, fluent in Latin and French. His mousy exterior gave no indication that he liked to have good time. A connoisseur of fine food and wine, he was not above staggering back from the Irish Brigade’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration tight as a tick. He also had a mind as sharp as an obsidian razor.
    When Joseph Hooker had blown into the command of the Army like a cleansing wind, Sharpe had been his inspired choice for something new. Hooker had been that transformational man who had leapt out of an old paradigm into the new. With a taste for the value of military intelligence, he had experimented with various collection means as a division and corps commander. When he became Army commander, he did something unique. Heretofore, commanding generals had been their own intelligence officers, a role that had worked for great commanders like Washington when armies were small. Hooker saw that the scale and complexity of modern war had made it impossible for any single man to both command an army and control its intelligence operation as well.
    For the latter task he chose Sharpe. At Fredericksburg, he had seen Sharpe decisively sort out a muddle on the field. A regiment of French immigrants had milled about in confusion, unable to understand the order of their non-French-speaking colonel. Sharpe rode over from his own 120th New York (NY) Volunteers, gave the orders in parade ground–loud perfect French, and the regiment moved smartly into line. Hooker had called Sharpe in for an interview and showed him a French book on how to create a secret service. He asked if he could translate it and how fast. Sharpe replied, “As fast as I can read it.” When he did, the job was his.
    Sharpe had taken this new ball and run with it. He created a fully functioning intelligence operation—the Bureau of Military Information (BMI)—practically from scratch. He assembled a contingent of hardy and clever scouts, developed a spy network, and established interrogation, document exploitation, and order-of-battle operations.