riffs

Germanic Goths and Romans. Romans and the Celts. Viking invasions. The Crusades. The Hundred Years’ War, taking territory, losing it, retaking it, longbows and crossbows, interrupted by the Black Death, the Battle of Agincourt, the War of the Roses, the House of Tudor. The Thirty Years War, eight million dead, to restore the balance of power. The Bourbons and the Hapsburgs, then the Seven Years’ War. Then Napoleon — Austerlitz, exile, return, Moscow burnt to the ground to prevent him from resupplying — an entire continent uniting to defeat one man’s tactical ability.

Then, of course, World War I. Trenches. Walking into machine gun fire. Chlorine and Mustard. Coughing up blood. 20 million dead. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

And then the Germans again: Kristallnacht, Anschluss, Molotov-Ribbentrop, Poland, Panzer divisions in the Ardennes, Dunkirk, the fall of Paris, spheres of influence, secret treaties, Rommel in the desert (and all the while, synthetic rubber factories, gas chambers, a sonderkommando pulling gold teeth out of his wife’s mouth, digging his child out of a mass grave, the ground crackling with bubbles of liquefied human remains), encirclements, the Eastern Front, Kursk, encirclements, urban warfare, encirclements, encirclements, encirclements and then the tide turning, the Invasion of Normandy, the liberation of Auschwitz, the fall of Berlin.

And then it all stopped. Free movement. Peace. The Customs Union. The Common Market.

History almost ended. And then—seemingly out of nowhere, unless, of course, you know anything about history—it looks like it has started up again. There is once again an Eastern Front.