Chapter 3
Empire Year 5811
Earth Year 2022 CE
Near Gorizia, Italy, on the Slovenian border
“Only my fiancée,” Eve complained cheerfully, lifting her well-stocked backpack onto her shoulders, “would choose to do his doctoral thesis in European history on the worst general of the first world war. Why not Napoleon?” she asked the air rhetorically. “Why not Bismarck? Or Wellington?
“But no,” she said, warming to the subject. “He has to drag me all over northern Italy while we research the many failures of Luigi f*****g Cadorna.”
“There are approximately one bazillion theses on Bonaparte,” her boyfriend grinned at her, as he joined her at the door of the hostel. “And almost as many on Wellington and Frederick the Great and the rest of that lot. What can I say about them that’s new and rel
