'The Skull Beneath The Skin: The Nearness of Death in History' by Not A L Berridge

My husband has a cold. The house reeks of eucalyptus, the bins are full of tissues, and the air is loud with complaint. My sympathy of Day One has eroded into the irritation of Day Four, and it’s only a matter of time before I say, ‘Well, you’re not actually dying, are you?’ 

But of course that’s a modern luxury, and a hundred years ago I wouldn’t have dared say it. A ‘chill’ can lead to bronchitis, pleurisy, or pneumonia, and in the days before antibiotics these were often fatal. It might even be the precursor to influenza – and the pandemic of 1918-1920 killed between 3-5% of the entire world’s population. A mere cough could be the first sign of ‘consumption’, ‘phthisis’, ‘scrofula’, ‘Pott's disease’, or the ‘White Plague’ – the global killer we’ve now learned to call ‘tuberculosis’. Everyone knows that if a character in a historical drama is seen to cough, then the next scene is going to be a funeral.

'At Rest': The death of Little Nell in 'The Old Curiosity Shop' by George Cattermole

We still fear some of these things. TB is making a comeback, pandemics are always good for newspaper sales, and we are once again being advised to take precautions our grandparents took for granted. Yet the fact we need to be told to cover our mouths when we cough shows the astonishing degree of our modern complacency. The miracles of modern medicine have stripped away so many of our natural fears that we’ve come to see science as a shield against death itself.

But when we write historical fiction that shield has to be the first thing to go. There’s obviously huge variation in place and period, but awareness of sickness and mortality colours every one of them, and our characters can’t but share in it. How can they do otherwise when they’re seeing it every day?

'The Beggars' by Brueghal the Elder

And really they would be. There’ve been sick beggars on the streets since before even Roman times, and as late as the 17th century it was impossible to walk the length of the Champs Elysée and remain ignorant of the reality of blindness, paralysis, lameness, dropsy, or even disfiguring cancers. Nor was visible sickness restricted to the poor. Smallpox struck kings as well as paupers, and even Elizabeth I bore the scars of it on her face and hands as evidence that she had faced death and survived. Almost equally prevalent (especially in mainland Europe) were the terrible signs of syphilis, on which many medieval church gargoyles are deliberately modelled to show the deadly wages of sin.

Smallpox victim 1911 Illinois                 Bust of tertiary syphilis

But syphilis didn’t end in medieval times, and neither did most of these other horrors. Fast forward to the civilization of Victorian England and we can laugh at the grotesque minor characters populating Dickens’ novels – but the truth is that he was largely describing what he saw. Some deformities were caused by accidents or war wounds – eye-patches, wooden legs, and hooks for hands – but many others are immediately recognizable to doctors as the result of childhood illness or malnutrition. 

'The Internal Economy of Dotheboys Hall' from 'Nicholas Nickleby' by Phiz

Goitres were a consequence of iodine deficiency, ‘hunchback’ is kyphosis, often caused by poor childhood nutrition, bandy legs were a sign of rickets, while ‘cripples’ with atrophied limbs were probably victims of polio. Many of these conditions are still with us in the poorer countries, and when we look at those heartbreaking photographs of children with cleft lips and palates it’s hard to believe that not very long ago we’d have seen these in London too.

 

 

 All these things are an essential part of the ‘historical world’, and we often have enormous fun writing them. With In the Name of the King I was delighted to find the real character of Fontrailles was genuinely a ‘hunchback’, and only wish I’d had the space to develop the ways in which that affected his personality. I also took a hideously writerly pleasure in basing my fictional Comte de Vallon on a real-life syphilitic nobleman whose return to society was eased by Louis XIV requesting his courtiers ‘not to notice his having no nose.’ Anything out of the ordinary is grist to a novelist’s mill, and I was going to grind it all I could.

But sometimes it’s in the 'ordinary' that the real gold is buried. We can write historical novels where nobody gets ill at all, and yet the characters will still have been shaped by a world in which these things happen. Their perception of cruelty will be different, their ideas of fairness, even their concept of religion, and they will be constantly aware of their own mortality. Dreadful as they were, the hunchbacks and crooked legs were tokens of those who had survived, and served as a terrible reminder of the many who did not.

People could and did die of the most minor things, and the fact they were so imperfectly understood only added to the sense of a random destiny that could strike at any time. This 1665 Bill of Mortality raises far more questions than it answers, and while ‘sore legge’ might be tetanus, for instance, what are we to make of medical causes of death listed as ‘Bedridden’, ‘Suddenly’, or even ‘Grief’? Yet the one that brings home to me most powerfully the reality of the pre-antibiotic world is described in that ominously single word – ‘Teeth’.

And of course we have to show this awareness in our writing. We can’t have characters say modestly ‘It’s just a scratch’ when everyone would have known that a scratch could kill. We can’t even give them a quick bout of toothache and then forget about it. Ridiculous as it is, we even have to let most of our characters believe it’s possible to die of a broken heart.

But the risk that would have affected most people sooner or later is that of pregnancy, and we can’t ever take that lightly. Even today we know of the risks of miscarriage, and many couples won’t officially announce a pregnancy until the first three months are safely passed – but in the case of Louis XIV’s brother Philippe, the Queen was never acknowledged to have even been pregnant until the child was born and had stayed alive a full calendar month.

Madame de Sevigne by Lefebvre

The risk to the mother was almost as great, as we see in that figure of 23 childbed deaths in a week. In 1671 the famous French letter-writer Madame de Sévigné began a letter to her married daughter in this rather cryptic fashion:

 

'Today is the sixth of March. I beg you to tell me how you are. If you are well, you are ill, but if you are ill, then you are well. I hope, my child that you are ill, so that you will be in good health for at least some time to come.’

The mystery is clear once we realize the daughter was due to menstruate, and what her mother feared more than anything was another pregnancy.

But what I actually find most fascinating about that letter is the way phrases we now use as mere formulae had real meaning in the past. ‘Tell me how you are’ is not the standard ‘How are you?’ with which we greet each other today, usually hoping we won’t be told the answer. Those of us over a certain age still tend to begin letters with the polite ‘I hope you’re well’, but this has already come to signify a broader enquiry in which health plays little part.

1864 Civil War letter with standard opening

It was different in the 19th century. I included a letter in Into the Valley of Death which began with the then-standard phrase ‘I hope this finds you well as it leaves me’, but it wasn’t until a reader asked me about it that I began to see its real significance. Outside London, a letter could take days to reach the recipient, and the writer’s awareness of time reveals a very real concern for the risk of ill-health. The most they’ll commit to is ‘I’m well at the time of writing’, because they know perfectly well that in a week or so they may not be. This seems strange in a time when even the most deadly disease usually gives the sufferer at least a few more months of life – but in 1854 a man who wrote ‘I am well’ on Monday could be dead by Friday. It’s true the phrase is a standard one and would often have been used without conscious thought, but behind it is a mindset that knows the sword of Damocles can fall at any minute.

And this one phrase exemplifies two of the things I love most about writing historical fiction. The first is the everyday reality of a bygone world, which can give us not only great texture but also the kind of plot development unthinkable in a contemporary work. 

 My favourite example is in Pride and Prejudice, where Jane Bennet walks in the rain to a dinner with two desirable bachelors, and quickly develops a cold which makes her return impossible. The house is only three miles away from her own home, but she is of course too ill to be moved, and in such a condition that requires her equally marriageable sister Lizzy to come and attend her.

This is brilliant. True, if Jane’s cold had been anything like my husband’s then her hosts would have bundled her out of the house in two minutes flat, but if we assume the phlegmier stages were passed invisibly in the bedroom, then the plot mechanics are perfect – and I challenge anyone to devise a contemporary narrative which would achieve such a result.

But, as usual with Austen, there’s far more going on here than plot. Jane’s mother deliberately sent her daughter out in the rain in the hope of engineering this very situation, and Mr Bennet is only half-joking when he hopes she’ll find it a comfort if her daughter dies following her orders. Austen is of course writing about her own time, but she uses those perceptions to create both story and character unique to that age, and I'd love to be able to emulate her.

But the second aspect I love is the Sword of Damocles itself, and the way in which awareness of death gives an extraordinary intensity to life. Our own lives are too safe to imagine it easily, but I’ve found the most useful comparison is to wartime. When living through war we’re all at once back in a time when life is cheap, death can strike without warning, and the only moment there might ever be is now. We might normally find incomprehensible the religious fervour of bygone ages, but even an atheist prays when the house they’re sitting in is being bombed. We might laugh at the superstition of the past, but from verbal rituals to ‘lucky socks’, you’ll find no people more superstitious than soldiers in even a modern war.

Everything is more concentrated and intense. The friendship forged between men who face death together is far deeper than that between those who use the same coffee machine, and when time is short, then love and passion soar as never before. And people take risks. Mad, exhilarating, even heroic risks – because there is so little to lose. Live through war, and we begin to understand some of the heroic lunacy of even sixteenth century peacetime, when men and women risked their lives for power, for politics, for religion, and for love.

It's no coincidence that the most passionate romances are often set in war

I write war in my novels anyway, but I’d still want to study it for the insight it can give us into the past. War is a magic door that can take me right back in time, to a world where death lurks round every corner - and where there are far worse things to deal with than my husband’s cold. 

***

Well, OK, I am A L Berridge really, just filling in a gap in the schedule. And I hope you noticed I didn't mention Crimea even once...

'Last Look - The Truth about Crimea' by A L Berridge

Admit it, you’re sick to death of Crimea. Writing a series set in one war has made me rather single-minded, and looking back over my time at the History Girls I seem to have written about little else. But as this will be my final post here I hope you’ll let me take just one last look at it, and tell the story no-one else in the West seems to want to tell.

They really don't. When the official narrative is that ‘Russia has stolen Crimea’, no-one wants to hear about Crimeans except as Ukraine’s ‘property’ and a pawn in the Great Game. What they forget is that Crimeans are also people, and sometimes ordinary people can change the world. In the last week of February 2014 some of them did just that, and just this once I'd like it to be recognized.

All right, February is hardly history, but I think the story fits here because of what it reveals about the historical process itself. To me it was a unique one, because I know the place, I know the people, and I was aware of what was happening before it was history. Usually I start with the official narrative and work backwards to the primary sources, but this time I’ve watched events unfolding through the eyes of the people actually living them – and been astounded to see the entirely different narrative now hailed as ‘official history’. It’s made me start to wonder how much official history we can believe in at all.

We certainly can’t rely on contemporary media. It was almost fun at first, being ‘in the know’, watching with smug superiority as a Western reporter scrambled round mispronouncing everything and screaming ‘BREAKING NEWS! A Russian frigate is approaching Sevastopol Harbour!’ The poor man obviously didn’t know there’s always a Russian frigate patrolling the harbour entrance to protect the base of the Black Sea Fleet – and sometimes a great deal more. This is a photo from my last visit there, and I hate to think what he’d have said if he’d seen this:

But it didn’t stay funny for long. The tensions were real, of course, and the forces of the Black Sea Fleet did indeed intervene to ensure the referendum went ahead, but the tone of the reportage gave everything an increasingly unfair and sinister twist. The presence of the naval base has always meant a constant stream of military traffic between Russia and Crimea, but suddenly every truck with Russian number plates was ‘proof of invasion’. Conscription in Ukraine had only ended four months ago, Crimea was obviously full of people with military experience, but still reporters wrote excitedly that the ‘little green men’ were obviously professionally trained and the Russian Army itself was invading. 

'Russian' soldiers in Crimea

I knew then what the narrative was going to be, and am not ashamed to say I felt sick. I knew this was a genuine popular uprising, my friends had been talking about it for weeks, but I also knew no-one would ever believe it. 

I switched off the news and went back to work. I’m a historian, I steer clear of ‘current affairs’ for fear of being ‘political’, and it seemed best to keep my head well down.  But even history wasn’t safe. As I already mentioned here, Facebook, Twitter, political and even historical forums were seething with ‘revised’ history which whitewashed Russians out of Crimea’s past, and if I attempted to point out the fallacies I was invariably rewarded with a response like ‘What’s the weather like in Moscow?’ or more simply ‘F*ck off, Putin-bot.’ Even historical knowledge had become suddenly dangerous if it clashed with the official narrative on Crimea.

But history is crucial to all this, and without it we can’t begin to understand why the Russians of Crimea did what they did.  I don’t want to be political, and can’t even say I agree with all of it, but here (just for once) is the story as it looks from their point of view.

It starts as a military one. I’ve already written about the Russian ancestors in Crimea before the Khanate, but when Catherine the Great conquered the peninsula in 1783 it quickly became the heartland of Russian military power. The vital warm water port of Sevastopol became home to the Black Sea Fleet, and the town itself was built to service it. 

This was the place the British, French and Turkish came to conquer in 1854 – and the incredible resistance they encountered forms the centrepiece of the Crimean War. My novels deal mainly with soldiers and battles, but the British were even more awed by the women and children who worked with their own hands to build up by night what the Allied guns destroyed by day. Tolstoy’s beautiful ‘Sevastopol Sketches’ gives a unique picture of the courage of ordinary Russians going about their daily business while the guns fired relentlessly overhead. For me his most unforgettable image is of the pavements shattered by British artillery – and two little girls playing hopscotch over the cracks.

They fought to the end. Only when the French took the ‘Malakoff bastion’ did the civilians finally retreat over a pontoon bridge to the safety of the ‘Severnaya’, but even that was an astonishingly brave operation, performed at night in such disciplined silence that not even the British at their gates knew it was going on. After eleven long months, the Siege of Sevastopol of 1854-5 has to be one of the most gallant defences history has ever known, and no-one demurred when the peace settlement of a few months later returned the town to the people who’d fought for it for so long.

Detail from 'Last Look' by Franz Roubaud - The Evacuation of Sevastopol

That’s surely enough military glory for anyone – but in WWII Crimea had to do it all over again. I must stress that not all Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars collaborated with the Nazis, but the fact remains that the only significant resistance to Germany’s invasion of 1941-4 was made by the Russian people of Crimea. The role of Kerch is often ignored, but the resistance held out for months in the obscurity of the catacombs until they were betrayed by locals and murdered underground by poison gas.

Russian soldiers and civilians in the Kerch catacombs

But predictably the brunt was borne by Sevastopol, as they endured their second great Siege. For more than nine long months they held out, suffering sickness and starvation as well as bombardment, and in tying up Germany’s 11th Army for so long they played their part on saving Stalingrad too. Civilian casualties were appalling, and historian Sergey Kiselev claims that no fewer than one in ten of the Red Army’s losses in WWII fell in Crimea.

Memorial of the Eternal Flame in Sevastopol

This matters, even today. Britain hasn’t been invaded for centuries and it’s hard for us to understand, but when a people fight this hard to protect their home, then their sacrifice gives the place a kind of sanctity nothing can erase.

And the people of Sevastopol have a right greater even than that. When Stalin ordered it rebuilt in 1948 he made it a condition that those who’d fled the siege could only return if they gave their own labour for free. So they did. Lawyers, bankers, and accountants took off their ties, rolled up their sleeves, and turned to brick-laying, women cooked, cleaned, carried, and did administrative work, while some even worked cheerfully alongside the men. The beautiful city of Sevastopol that we know today was mostly built by its own people – and what possible right of ownership can be greater than that?

The sense of this is almost palpable even today. On my first visit my guide eagerly dragged me across the Catherina Square to inspect the wall of an administrative building which her grandfather had built himself. But she was proud of the whole city, and it was impossible not to notice how immaculately clean it was kept, how free of litter and graffiti. Child of the Cold War that I am, I assumed this was the same kind slavish obedience to totalitarian states that enabled Mussolini to make ‘the trains run on time’, but my guide (and now good friend) saw it differently. ‘It’s our city,’ she said, puzzled by my lack of understanding. ‘Would you write rude words on the walls of your home?’

Except, of course, that it wasn’t ‘their’ city any more, and the closer I grew to these people the more I began to understand their frustrated yearning for recognition. No-one asked their opinion when in 1954 Khruschev gifted the whole of Crimea to Ukraine, and the old man I asked about it had tears in his eyes as he described what it felt like. ‘Like a sack of wheat,’ he said, blowing his nose noisily. ‘They gave us away like a sack of wheat.’

Maybe it didn’t matter much back in the days of the USSR when the distinctions were more administrative than actual, but when the Soviet Union collapsed and Crimea was suddenly in danger of finding itself in a completely separate country then it mattered very much indeed. Russia finally recognized that, and in 1991 it gave Crimea the chance to vote themselves the status of an autonomous republic which would be independent of Ukraine. Crimeans voted in favour by an overwhelming 94%, and Russia was confident it had given the peninsula all the protection it needed.

So it had – if Ukraine had only respected it. Crimea obviously had its own doubts, and in 1992 sought to clarify its position by announcing full self-government with its own constitution, but Ukraine denounced the movement as part of an ‘imperial disease’ and responded by creating a ‘Ukrainian presidential representative in Crimea’ – a back-door way of asserting sovereignty. Tension mounted on both sides, but only when Russia had safely signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 did Ukraine take the radical (and illegal) step of abolishing Crimea’s own presidency and tearing up its constitution. From this point on, Crimea was ipso facto part of the new Ukraine, whether it liked it or not.

It’s hard to imagine how that felt. It was at least good news for Crimean Tatars, and those who had been unfairly deported by Stalin after WWII were finally allowed to return, but the Russian people of Crimea were cut off from their history, their heritage and nationality, and suddenly became a minority in a land that basically hated them. The hatred would be understandable if it were directed against Stalin or the old USSR, but it was aimed at living people whose only crime was to be born of at least one Russian parent. 

There were economic hardships too. As a Westerner fully aware of the oppressions of the old USSR I’d always imagined independence would be a wonderful thing – but it was only when I went to Crimea that I realized the price that had to be paid for it. Ukraine had kept the worst aspects of the old system (the corruption that saw the rise of the oligarchs) but had quietly shuffled off the good bit – the complete social security that kept a loyal citizen safe for life. Pensions were halved. The free healthcare for which Russians had paid taxes all their lives was suddenly only available to those willing and able to pay bribes. I felt shockingly uncomfortable talking to people whose relatives had died or were dying for the lack of medicine or simple operations we in Britain take for granted.

All Ukraine was suffering, of course, but the predominantly Russian areas of south and east did seem to be hit the hardest. Even a soldier from Ukraine’s own ATO had to confess in a recent interview that he’d never seen poverty on the level he saw in the Donbass, and I can testify myself to what it was like in Crimea. I remember the flavoured water that passed for soup in some of the ‘restaurants’, and how I waited ten minutes for my guide to haggle for her husband’s supper – which turned out to be a single cabbage. It was never anything like as bad as Africa, but seemed all the worse for existing in a magnificent European city with university-educated people just like those I’d meet at home.

 

But as history has shown us in Nazi Germany, economic hardships can lead to a rise in nationalism and the need for easy scapegoats. In came Svoboda and the Right Sector, and by 2010 Ukrainian MP Irina Farion was already telling 5-year old schoolchildren that if they wanted to use their Russian names they would need to pack their bags and move to Russia. I heard all about this and the Nazi taunts of ‘Moskals!’ ‘Vatniks!’ on my first visit to Crimea, and it was already clear that something was going to have to break.

But worse even than this was Ukraine’s creeping desire to smear Russia’s past military heroism, to elevate Stepan Bandera to hero status, and thus make traitors of the gallant men and women of Crimea who gave their lives fighting Nazism. This would be appalling anywhere – but in Crimea it’s unbearable. Crimea, where Russian guide Irina Niverova recently explained to the National Post that “Every stone and every tree… is covered with the blood of brave Russians, and that is what is in our hearts.”

'In Our Hearts' Sevastopol May 9th - children march with pictures of their ancestors

In their hearts and everywhere on their land. Crimean war graves are beautifully kept, their memorials immaculate and flower-strewn, and May 9th celebrates a history of military heroism which is second to none. How could a people like this allow their past sacrifices to be whitewashed away? How could they see the memory of their dead brothers, fathers, grandfathers spat on by the very people they died to protect? And make no mistake about this – that’s what’s happening. I already posted this video from Lviv in 2011 where Russian veterans have the St George ribbons ripped from their chests as they go to lay flowers on their comrade’s graves.

Then came Maidan.

For Crimea, Maidan was an outrage. Yanukovich may well have been as corrupt as his predecessors, but he was the first to improve Ukraine’s economic state, he at least acknowledged the voices of the regions, and he was the legitimately elected President for whom Crimea had overwhelmingly voted. How would we feel in Britain if the losing side of a General Election set London on fire and overthrew our chosen government by force? How would we feel if we saw American politicians encouraging this, and heard leaked telephone calls in which foreign powers decided what our own government should be?

Crimea felt all this, and more.  I have no idea when the first activists made contact with Russia, and none of my friends were ever involved at this level, but everyone knew they had to do something. The West wouldn’t help. It talked a lot about human rights, but every Russian in Crimea knew what The Telegraph has only just admitted – that some Maidan protestors were being funded not only by the US, but also the EU. Russia mightn’t help either, and she’d never officially taken Transnistria under her protection. In January this year Russian Crimeans knew that somehow they'd have to help themselves.

The timeline of how they did it is a matter of public record, but it begins on February 23rd, and no single western outlet has explained what it was that lit the fuse.

It was this. The ‘Khersun Pogrom’. On 20th February Russian Crimeans made their own protest at Maidan, and ‘The Kherson Pogrom’ is the phrase used to describe the events of their homecoming. The western media blackout on it has been absolute, but for the first time there’s a video available with English subtitles to tell us what happened on the night of February 20th 2014. Please ignore the political slogans framed round the narrative, but the primary source material both eyewitness interviews and original gloating footage shot by the perpetrators themselves.

The Right Sector. They attacked the homecoming convoy, burnt the buses, then beat, stripped, and humiliated the people. They almost certainly did worse than that, but all we can say with certainty is that seven of the Crimeans on those buses have never been seen again. When the survivors were finally released the Right Sector thugs taunted them with the threat that they would soon be coming to Crimea itself – and then they would ‘do worse’.

Nor were these empty threats. By 23rd February Yanukovich had been driven out and the new (unelected) government was already making their intentions clear. The raft of new bills included laws to make Holocaust denial legal, to ban Communist Party activity, to make a member of Svoboda the new Prosecutor General, and to deny the rights of minorities (including Russians) to use their own native languages.

Crimea acted. They rallied in their tens of thousands in Simferopol and swore to form their own independent administration, but still no-one quite dared to take it further. Protests were all right, no worse than Maidan had done, but nothing was yet irrevocable. 

Until 27th February when Channel 5 broadcast a leaked conversation between the leaders of Ukraine’s two Neo-Nazi organizations – People’s Deputy Oleh Tyahnybok of Svoboda, and Dmytro Yarosh of the Right Sector.

With apologies for the poor Google translation, here’s a sample of their conversation:

It’s not just idle talk. These are men with significant power in the new regime, and they are talking of Crimea as an immediate target for a punitive operation.

What could Crimeans do? What would you do? History has shown us all too tragically what happened to the Jews of Nazi Germany who sat obediently at home waiting for the axe to fall, and Crimeans weren’t about to make the same mistake. They turned off their televisions, dug out old uniforms from their conscription days, and went out to take the airport while they called on Russia for help.

I don’t want to be naïve, and certainly don’t believe Putin had been sitting idle all this time, but the fact remains that it was Crimeans who made the first move, and Russia’s ‘intervention’ would have had small chance of success without them. No-one can say exactly when Russian troops left their base in Sevastopol, but of the men who initially guarded the borders from Kyiv intervention, some were veterans, some existing members of Ukraine’s own army, some were Berkut – and a great many were ordinary civilians. I even know two of them. I can’t give their names for obvious reasons, but one was a historical re-enactor who went out in his Red Army uniform with a replica gun, and the other was his wife.

The western media wasn’t having it, and every day we heard more screams of ‘Russian troops in Crimea!’ One of my friends sent me a tiny video of  Sevastopol women bringing food and cigarettes to their men on the ‘front line’, but it didn’t look very convincing so I’m afraid I didn’t publicize it.

I wish I had now, because there’s actually something endearingly amateur about it that sets the tone for the whole affair. This was not the slick Kremlin operation the mainstream media would like us to think, but a case of ordinary people showing extraordinary courage in order to save their land.

And they did it. Yes, Russia intervened, Russia allowed the Black Sea Fleet to secure the borders, and Russia finally accepted Crimea into the Federation, but none of that should blind us to the people who really made it happen. History isn’t only about kings and queens and governments, but sometimes it’s made by ordinary people too.

That's all I wanted to show here. In my own novels the Russians of Sevastopol have to be the 'villains', but perhaps that's why I felt I had to do this one last post before I leave. The media ignores them, history will almost certainly ignore them, but even if it's only here in this one blog, I did just want the voices of the Russians of Crimea to be heard.

***

A.L. Berridge's dreadfully neglected website is still here, and one day she'll get round to updating it.

Meanwhile a huge thank you to everyone here at the History Girls for letting me bore all for so long. I've loved being part of it, and hope you'll let me sneak back in for comments.

And just think - you may never need to hear the word Crimea AGAIN!!