There are limits to how far one can go.
A further missive from the Head of History in Exile explaining how far he expects the sixth form pupils to have progressed in their studies and giving further instructions on how to proceed.
We are venturing further and further into the murky wastes of ninetenth century history and following the colourful career of Bismarck as he cheerfully uses any passing international incident to further the Imperial Ambitions of Prussia.
I have been, I like to think, an informed spectator encouraging the pupils to plunge ever futher into the dark political waters of pre-War chicanery as Germany gets ever nearer to Unification. But as we get nearer to the twentieth century the treaties get ever more tortuous with impossibly intricate 'what-ifs' as essential components in understanding what follows.
Even these arcane mysteries I was prepared to struggle through but at last we have hit the Balkans!
I still have the academic scars from trying to follow the story of The Italian Wars which are the historical equivalent of the Keystone Cops with a healthy dash of French farce. It took a long time to recover from that testing experience and even the fact that drawing the map of Italy was relatively simple did not compensate for the insane complexity of the power struggles that one had to remember.
The Balkans are bound to be as bad - only more so. At least whatever Italy was pretending to be at any particular moment (it being as we all know nothing more than a "geographical expression" from The Quote) at least it had a clear boarder along most of the length of the collection of cities, countries and states that made it up. But the Balkans are an absolute Moveable Feast to which everyone is invited! 'Sense and the Balkans' is the title of the least likely book ever to be written. The Balkans were, are and will be a disaster.
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